Guild Wars 2

SpreadCheese.5208:

Pushes Arius away from the mic Settle down there… kills don’t mean more action. It just means the other servers sucks.

Everything you said about having people at certain time zones is the same for most servers.

As I mentioned above, DH would be my choice for t4 so you can loosen those panties there. T3 DB and t2 TC.

I was trying to help the person out on picking a server. In your case you showed you were offended and bothered by people being helpful here.

It doesn’t mean that sure, it’s just evidence for that proposition. I said more kills/deaths, as in I count the total of overall kills/deaths. I’d agree with you if I were counting just kills, but I’m not. While I agree it’s not proof, again, it’s some evidence. At least I’m trying to back up my claims with evidence instead of just making claims then lol.

The fact of the matter is if OP thought SoS was dead, chances are he’ll think any server below t2 is dead and he’s basically screwed. But everyone here saying, objectively, it’s the truth that no server that’s medium ISN’T dead, is just false. You all are stereotyping and damaging a load of servers in the process. It’s damaging and the facts are just not there to support your claims.

I don’t doubt your intentions, but even so, saying our tiers are just straight up dead is damaging even if you give recommendations within that tier. That’s like saying “well this restaurant here is completely terrible, but if you HAVE to eat there eat this item”. Do you think you’ve helped the restaurant or hurt it?

Re-read what you said. You said, and I quote, “medium pop has no WvW”. You expect me to be all cool with that statement and just say “well he DID recommend Dh, therefore all his other statements are reasonable/well reasoned and not deserving of being thoroughly debunked”?

Again, supply at least some evidence for your assertions. What is the evidence that medium pop has no WvW?

Y’all are just wrong lol. T5 beat T3 in overall kills/deaths 2 weeks in a row, t3 isn’t much bigger than tier 4/5. The only reason we’re not beating them this week is because Db is way bigger than the other t3 servers. Check WvW intel, Dh has as many kills/deaths as Mag or SBI.

NSP and Dh are the largest non t3 servers. Dh is the largest ‘medium’ server at the moment. We have active coverage in every zone except OCX which is ded for us.

Dh has guilds that run in every timeslot except OCX just for the record, so saying “it’s ded except when guilds get on” is basically saying “it’s alive always” for us lol. SotD runs 10-20 in SEA with many pugs, SunB and FEAR often run in EU and we can field pug zergs upwards of 40 people in that time slot even if neither run. We have many guilds that raid NA at 15+, and then a guild that raids PST-early OCX at 15+.

We’re a good community and welcoming of all types of guilds, feel free to pm me in game OP if you want an honest look at our strengths and weaknesses (I’m interested in building a lasting community, not bringing over people who wouldn’t like our server, so it’s on my interest to let you know our strengths and failings).

To the rest of you please stop commenting on how dead/alive tiers are outside of your own unless you have persistent experience in those tiers or some sort of data to back your claims up. You’re hurting our servers based on faulty information and it’s not fair.

Swagger.1459:

Jayne.9251:

Jim Hunter.6821:

Quit spamming the forum with this dumb idea

+1000!

What’s your “smart” idea to fix most things wvw mr(s) +1000?

How does eotm style fix more than 1 thing in wvw? Idk if you do much eotm, but there are often empty maps, constant coverage disparity, 1-2 teams almo always have outnumbered etc… Eotm style would barely fix anything.

Sad fact of the matter is, people don’t have to offer their own suggestion in order to rightfully point out that another suggestion is truly terrible. The fact is, this suggestion is truly terrible. It makes no accommodation for server loyalists, it barely solves any problems and creates many new ones, it’s just overall terrible as an idea. This thread is for people to discuss this particular idea, they don’t have to put their own up to say it’s wrong. It’s valid to just criticize thte idea.

lolitsage.2185:

I don’t see how it was implied since the exact same post I said otherwise.
The fact you think it’s ok to time gate MAP COMPLETION to one map per day if it’s only use was for a legendary tells me to stop trying to get my point across to you.

You were saying it like it was a deficiency, like it should involve skill when nobody in their right mind expected it to have anything to do with skill.

I didn’t say it was okay to time gate map completion, I said I’d be fine with it but it wouldn’t make sense in that instance. I’ve done map completion multiple times, I wouldn’t care if it were time gated personally. That doesn’t mean I think that’s the way it should be.

Time gating isn’t bad, only impatient people think it is. It’s a tool that can be well applied to certain things. The important part is making sure there’s not too much—or too little—to avoid spoiling the experience. The fact that you can’t explain why it is wrong to time gate means you very probably don’t have any good reason to think so. Other people have pointed out in this thread, time gating is absolutely necessary to avoid certain folks from getting the new legendaries way too fast.

Having to wait two months to get the most valuable thing in the game is not too much to ask and you know that full well.

lolitsage.2185:

I never said the time gated aspect was about skill nor claimed it was, I actually said the complete opposite.
Yes I agree obtaining items like badges, map completion doesn’t require serious skill but you’re missing the point. Take the same example of time gating and apply it to time gating map completion to one map a day. Would that be fair?
I’m not saying to remove time gating from x item because that would obviously destroy the market but the fact an item is locked behind a 60 day wait because of time gating is over the top.

I know you never said it, but it was implied in your response when you said “so yes I thought it was implied” lol.

On the topic of time gating map completion, idc if map completion were time gated, I think it’d be fair for a legendary but since map completion isn’t only for legendaries I don’t see any reason to do it there. I’m perfectly fine with time gating where it makes sense, such as on crafting certain items. I don’t see why it doesn’t make sense here.

TexZero.7910:

Anyone else noticing the hypocrisy of players feeling entitled to watch others suffer a time gate, when they themselves are complaining of how long it took them to create a legendary ?

When did they all complain about it taking so long? They were mentioning that it took them a lot longer to make their legendaries to show 2 months is not a ridiculous time gate. That doesn’t mean they were complaining that it took them that long rofl.

lolitsage.2185:

Wanze.8410:

lolitsage.2185:

Wanze.8410:

lolitsage.2185:

Jesus it seems everyone’s just trying to make a smart us reply and is completely missing the point.
There is no skill waiting to press the “craft” button due to time gating, there’s literally no point besides making people wait for the sake of waiting.
The whole idea of time gating items has gone a bit far considering the amount needed.

Did Anet mention that they implemented timegates in order to prove skill or did you just make that up to make a smart us reply?

Well when you’re making a legendary item you d assume skill was involved so yes I thought it was implied.

So should every step of the crafting process involve skill?
Should the npc you are getting the recipes from run around at super speed, so you have to cc him while talking to him?

You have a very odd rebuttal to what I said.
Needing to cc an NPC to buy a recipe isn’t a logical approach to skill.
Needing 60+ items that are time gated to a crafting staton on the other hand is absurd.

No he’s pointing out a clear flaw in your logic. Let me quote you:

Well when you’re making a legendary item you d assume skill was involved so yes I thought it was implied.

This was in direct response to him saying that anet never mentioned time gates having anything to do with skill. This means you’re implying that, because skill is involved in making a legendary, that therefore skill must be involved in this (the only reasonable way that’s true is if you’re implying skill must be involved with EVERYTHING about making a legendary).

That’s where his reply comes in, if skill must be involved in this time gating thing, why not in the case of buying something you need from an npc (say the gifts from dungeon vendors, or icy runestones, or badges of honor)?

More to the point, who on earth thinks skill has anything to do with it? I’d say determination and doing content are what the legendaries are about, not skill. It doesn’t take any serious amount of skill to get 500 badges of honor, or map completion, or karma for obsidian shards, or the mats for the gift of fortune etc etc… It’s about playing the game, doing forms of content, not about skill.

They should make transfers to the bottom tier, tier 8 NA and tier 9 EU, completely free permanently for starters. They should also make the lowest ranked server the default pick for new players permanently, though new players should be allowed to choose from other available options if they wish. This’ll automatically net the bottom ranked server the “idc I just wanna play” crowd and any other stricken too much by indecisiveness.

Merges are terrible, it’s been discussed to death. It’s a temporary solution on the best of days, it just pushes the problem back until next year. It also destroys loved and valid playstyles that people choose for themselves, to help the few of those who are in bronze who don’t want to be there (and they are the minority, most of my friends are bronze leaguers and I was in t6-7 for the better part of 2 years straight).

They also need to more fundamentally address the map design and how it seems to actively steer people away from each other by being so large and having so many objectives. Fewer objectives on a smaller map = more people running into each other accidentally. This would be a smart way to make the game use the population it has more efficiently without even needing to actually increase the population.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Ayrilana.1396:

TheBlackLeech.9360:

Plot Twist…. you can’t get into any active maps because the expansion flopped.

Brink usually has a low-medium population most of the time.

Auric Basin has a decent population….. but I’ve never seen the meta event succeed there.

Imho the best map out of the entire “expansion” is Tangled Depths…. and I’ve pushed the map to the Gerent about thirty times now…. and I have still yet to see it succeed.
Even when all the preparations are complete, and everyone taxis people in…. One of the lanes always fails.

Constant failure = negative morale

negative morale = nobody wants to try

nobody wants to try = no attendance

no attendance = compounded failure

repeat

Dragon’s stand I’ve never even seen anyone trying to complete the events there…. not even once.

If nobody is doing the events there…. there is no reason to stay….. and if nobody stays….. the problem compounds itself.

Good luck waiting for Anet to do something about it tho.

Bottom tier WvW servers have had the same problem for years now…. where nobody wants to wvw if all they do is lose…. so once they hit bottom there is no bounce back.

They literally can’t figure out how to fix it.

Didn’t flop. Maps are just full and they haven’t fixed the mega server issue yet. Hopefully they will tomorrow. Likely the case based on your Dragon Stand comment as I have seen otherwise to what you claim in your post.

The contrast in experience could also be time of day playing or region (NA/EU) as well.

I play during oceanic atm, lot less players than eu/na. I have no trouble doing tarir/ds/verdant brink at the appropriate times. Ever. Just gotta use LFG.

Lonewolf McQuade.2153:

Lmao @ everyone hugging DH like it’s the greatest server ever. I’ve never had so many people try to curse me out through whispers after they either lost a 4v2 or just lost a 1v1 in seconds. Their WvW is full of trash players, maybe a decent guild or 2 for fights. Trash roamers, 1 decent roaming guild that still has to 3v1 people at the bare minimum (and still gets easily upset when someone (1 or 2)v3’s them and calls them out about winning it). Out of several months (about 17 separate weeks) of match-ups with them I’ve only met a few people (3-4 at the most) who were cool to whisper back and forth with—a.k.a. no salt, no immature retaliation (which describes a majority of the server when they lose). Never played on the server, never plan to; seems to be full of disillusioned kids who make the most out of the smallest things, {i.e. “Our WvW k/d is 1.2 and we’re beating the other 2 servers, (disregarding the fact that 18+ hours a day our server outnumbers both other servers so we just have roaming groups that get easy kills for those 18 hours. But when we meet up with a server with fight guilds online we get wiped 9 times out of 10 unless we double their size.)”}

Trash server, trash players (for the most part). I still don’t know why people join the server, maybe the name just sounds cool when they sign up, I don’t know. But I’ve met enough people who left the server because of the reasons I’ve mentioned and a considerable amount of other reasons. Never met a different server (including guilds from Darkhaven) that likes Darkhaven players as a whole.

Ahah an enemy hates us, oh noes, we’re doomed. Also what server are you from? TAG will beat any guild from your server if you’re below t3 in 15s. Put up or shut up?

As a final word, a lot of enemy servers actually like Dh: to name a few, NSP, GoM, BP, AR, EBay all prefer Dh over most other servers (check comments section on gw2wvw to verify, though I mostly know EBay does because of my ungodly amount of friends from that server lolol).

2. Come on, that’s a technicality. By that logic, you can buy your way into guild runs on TD meta. Technically you CAN get almost anything by spending gold or gaming the system.

4. You can get experience virtually anywhere (except WvW and in some sense PvP) — the issue is what that EXP counts towards, not if you can get it.

They’ve already announced raids won’t be gated behind tons of different things in masteries, only basic things. If you do each meta event, personal story, silver-gold in the adventures you come across, you will have enough to get the masteries for raids. No need to grind same content over and over. Only if you’re going beyond what is necessary for raids will you need to grind—and it needs to be that way otherwise the new content just gets ded instantly. Believe it or not, the vast majority of people already grinded in gw2—people who wanted money grinded silverwastes/dungeons, for example. It’s not like grinding specific types of content is a new concept to gw2, and at least Maguuma offers a plethora of varied content to “grind”.

7. I don’t follow your train of thought. I think the example we were discussing was invisible stuff so your character can go without armor appearing in certain slots while maintaining the stats. What in specific about it being easy to make these items makes it easy to invalidate?

8. I don’t think that a lot of what they did was bad calls though. Some of it certainly was, IE their failed attempts to bring us precursor crafting and legendaries. Instead, I think it was a decision on what the xpac’s philosophy would be. I think they opted for long term benefit over short term benefit. Having lots of good features in the game benefits the game in the long term, but having larger quantities of content only really benefits you in the short term (because no matter how large the sum, you’ll just play through it all anyway). By building a lot of huge features (ie raids/guild halls/map contribution mechanics) they make it much easier on themselves in future xpacs/content updates to add more content BECAUSE they don’t have to worry about the features. Because they don’t have to worry about getting the technology and features built in to host guild halls, maybe next time they could put a larger budget and reorganize personnel into focusing on more content and away from focusing on features.

IoW, HoT gives you more of what you want (sheer amount of content) BY giving you less of it not and focusing on the more core additions first.

They’ve announced their focus will be on FotM and Raids for the future, dungeons are basically getting the axe. I don’t think by adding a dungeon path and revamping rewards they were making dungeons the focus for the overall game, just improving dungeons.

I agree it’d be nice to know what they plan in regards to expansions, but there is no confusion that the living world will certainly always be a part of GW2. Whether they do an expansion again or not is up for debate, but I don’t think not knowing that is a big negative. Of course they can always improve communication, but as an experienced MMO player this is not something new rofl. This accurately describes every MMO company ever.

9. But did they ever explicitly say we’d get them for free before we bought the game? As a consumer, we are only entitled to what we are promised/assured, assuming and inferring without good reasoning/evidence doesn’t entitle to anything more. When you used the gem store you were paying for gem store items, you were not entitled to anything else from that whatsoever. If it wasn’t made clear this was part of the package of the purchase we were making, you can’t feel entitled to it rationally.

Yeah, again I’d agree I’d like more communication from ANet. Doesn’t mean we’re owed it, doesn’t mean it’s necessary, doesn’t mean they’ve done anything wrong and more fundamentally as the thread is supposed to be about this, doesn’t mean the expansion is bad/not worth it. Lack of communication sucks, sure, but the expansion stands on it’s own regardless of that.

Versepelles.1972:

Weapons

Sword

• Unrelenting Assault: Reduce damage by 50%. This skill should be an evade and teleport, but the damage is too high.

Why do you think this? The damage on the skill has lower DPS than auto attacks, and is halved by just having one other target present. The game is not balanced around 1v1, the skill works fine in group situations (it does VERY LITTLE damage when near multiple foes, and forces you to appear where your enemy is even if you don’t want to, this balances out the evade/teleport/free damage aspect of it)

Hammer

• Coalescence of Ruin: Reduce damage by 33%. Just a moderately overtuned skill, like True Shot.

33% Would leave it doing LESS damage than an auto attack at close range, roughly the same at mid, and only marginally more at range, for a telegraph attack that can be dodged with an energy cost. This is tremendously bad.

If anything, the damage should be the same but with say a 1-2 second increase in CD so it’s not virtually spammable. The skill is easily dodge-able and hits appropriately hard for it’s ease to dodge (and the fact that it’s useless in close quarters dps-wise), the only problem is it can be spammed so easily.

• Drop the Hammer: Reduce cast time to 1.25s (-29%). This skill is fairly useless in mid to high tier PvP, but could be more interesting with decreased cast time.

Skill has it’s place as downed control. Personally I would simply change it to be more like dragon’s tooth, fire and forget, instead of basically it requiring you to channel. It’s a hard hitting ranged AoE KD. I think the long telegraph is necessary just not the cast time.

Mace

• Misery Swipe (chain): Increase range to somewhere between 300 and 480. This weapon would see much more use in condi builds with some range on the auto attacks.

Aesthetically this makes very little sense, and although I’m not opposed to it the fact that rev’s condition DPS isn’t strictly tied to weapons is an interesting part of the class.

Axe

• Temporal Rift: Add a chain skill to detonate the rift, like mesmer’s focus 4 (Temporal Curtain). Decrease the range to 600 (-33%). This alone could make axe a viable choice.

I think this is an interesting and fun change, but what would the detonation do? Condi application? CC? Damage?

Mallyx

• Pain Absorption: Transfer 2 conditions from each ally and youself to the target. Increase cast time to 3/4s (+50%). This allows active counterplay to conditions, and gives revenants meaningful condition removal. This change alone makes Mallyx competitive with Shiro.

While I agree Rev needs condi removal, I think Mallyx is the only legend that already has enough anti-condi play. A boon dura heavy rev can easily be 100% immune to condis unless someone pulls off a boonstrip. It seems to me condition removal should be added to Jallis’ utilities instead (to help it feel distinctly like a condition removal/tank spec), or perhaps even say glint’s facet of element’s final pulse as an interesting addition to the “play” of the skill (ie you can choose to use it for it’s exception offensive capability, it’s swiftness, or stand in it for the condition removal). I’d like that, but it’d make glint even stronger which is probably the last thing we need atm lol.

Herald

• All facets: Add 1/4s cast time to initial cast. This forces Revenants to think when to activate the signets, rather than spamming them during Unrelenting Assault or Crystal Hibernation. (Leave Infuse Light and Gaze of Darkness chain skills as instant cast!)
• Infuse Light: Make this skill about 5 times more visible (+400%). This is a great active mechanic but is currently not visible enough except in the buff bar.

I agree on infuse light being much easier to see, I disagree with adding cast times to facets personally.

Devastation

• Malicious Reprisal: Remove the hidden ICD from this trait. This allows active counter to bunker builds which rely on blocking.

Interesting to be sure…

Invocation

• Roiling Mists: Reduce critical chance while under fury increase from 20% to 10%. This is not vital, but it might be a good place to balance overall Revenant damage.

I very sadly agree. I love this trait and it’s the core of my current build (a no prec rev), but it’s definitely pretty op, such that invocation is basically necessary.

Herald

• Shared Empowerment: Reduce might duration to 5s baseline (-38%). Currently, this trait alone overpowers Revenant raw damage output. A fair reduction will put Revenant damage in line with other classes.

I do not agree with this at all, I don’t think the Rev has this excessively high DPS some people seem to think it does. Having that high passive might seems like a cool feature for rev to have.

@Harper

2. Okay, but surely you realize it’s unreasonable to assume ANet will build an alternate method to get every single thing in the entire game? Also dungeon armors sure, but not fractal back pieces or fractal weapons for example. There are many unique skins tied to unique activities in the game.

3. I suppose we may never know for certain, I just go by the best evidence we have available.

4. Why would someone want masteries for maguuma if they don’t even want to do maguuma content though? The thing is raids will only require some of the absolute most basic masteries, in fact the hardest one I know of to get is the mushroom speed mastery which isn’t hard at all. The masteries are built to only help you in Maguuma, if you don’t want to play in Maguum, why get the masteries?

That said I’m not entirely opposed to an alternate method to supplement your mastery growth by, say, a maguuma reward track that gives some xp pot at the end or something. But I still maintain that masteries should force you generally to play in those specific areas to get them. Gliding masteries don’t make you glide to get them, all you have to do is xp-worthy stuff in Maguuma (daily adventures, personal story, meta events, mob grind etc…). Think to legendaries in the base game, they require you do all types of content (except PvP I believe) to get them. You can’t get the gift of battle from PvE, you can’t get map completion from WvW. You have to do all kinds of required content. This isn’t a new concept to GW2.

7. I think it’s worth isn’t at all determined by how much time it took them to develop, but rather how much you personally desire it. Content should be judged, I think, on it’s own merit, the time it took to develop doesn’t seem to be relevant to me.

What content do you think they removed or saved to release as part of an xpac, in specific? Not clear on this atm.

8. I understand having a different preference, I’m just saying that expecting as much content as you did while also expecting it the day the xpac released might not have been feasible for anet. In other words, they had no choice but to do it this way. To each their own, though. Personally I like having promise of loads of future content as well as a big amount of it up front.

And the thing is, for all we know they plan on doing another 2 years of content before going into the next xpac (if there even will be another xpac). We don’t know how they’re structured, it might not have been possible to give us all the content in 6 months (in fact I expect it wasn’t and it probably would have made the entire venture not profitable for them).

9. Alright, but I paid for that content whereas that other stuff was free post gw2 launch, it wasn’t really part of the packaging. We didn’t know we’d be getting precursor crafting when we bought gw2, it wasn’t told to us beforehand (as far as I know). Yes, it would be a huge jerk move for them to remove the living world and place it behind the next xpac, but for different reasons.

I understand fully being upset about not getting what was promised. I was too. But fundamentally I was upset because they said it would come out and it didn’t, not because they owed it to me.

Ashen.2907:

Raids are content, essentially a version of the dungeon concept. More complex perhaps. More difficult perhaps, but still essentially an extension of something that already exists.

Elite specializations are trait lines….such as every class already has.

It is nice to see Guild Halls added.

Yep, listing masteries twice does make the list longer.

Fixing problems with guilds may be a feature, I guess.

Listing elements of Raids, such as the UI, twice does make the list look longer.

Not sure that adding a new way to get something that has existed since launch, a way promised to be delivered two years ago, really counts as a feature. If it does then being able to get drops from mobs on new maps would be a new feature for both expansions.

Not sure that new gear, something that existed in both expansions, counts as a game feature.

Raids include content, but the technology and game-type of raids did not exist prior to this feature. Previously you could not have 10 man (or 50 man as it is now) groups, now you can. Raids are a feature, Spirit Vale itself is content.

Elite specializations are NOT just a traitline, they come with a weapon, set of utilities, an elite, and a healing skill as well as a unique class mechanic (IE celestial form for druid, or 3 dodges for daredevil). They are in no way just a trait line rofl.

I didn’t list masteries twice, I listed a particular mastery which was so big that it merited it’s own mention. Gliding opens up so much for the game that it is worth mentioning separately from the mastery system as a whole.

Guilds didn’t have that many problems, and they didn’t just fix problems. They added features like being able to chat with guilds you’re not repping, adding guild missions for every game-mode instead of just PvE, enhancing the way guilds progress etc…

Except when I say “raid ui” I mean the UI that isn’t just for raids but is utilized in raids, the “raid ui” (meaning SQUAD UI) can be used in WvW and open world as well. It’s not part of raids, they’re completely separate, raids just also utilize this ui.

Precursor crafting, of course it counts as a new feature, no matter how long it has taken to make it or how long it should have been in the game… Also it’s not just for old precursors, it’ll work for new precursors as well, so it’s not just for old content (even if it were, that wouldn’t matter). Yes, it’s a new feature, and a huge one at that.

New types of gear, there was no such thing as legendary armor/backpacks earlier. It may technically be armor, but it’s a feature to have a whole new category of armor (not just a new set of armor, an entirely new category for it altogether, like ascended armor was a feature).

1. I don’t agree, I think it’s wrong in certain places (ie what is it, 600 cry ore for a set of runes of leadership, that’s ridiculous). Overall I feel the gating is very well done, but there are most definitely specific instances where it’s implemented poorly and those need addressed.

2. How does HoT restrict your options? You level up Maguuma mastery in Maguuma, WvW rank in WvW, SPvP in SPvP, Tyrian mastery in Tyria, and general leveling (1-80) in any of those. Of course to get HoT specific rewards, you play HoT. Just like to get dungeon specific armors you play dungeons, or to get PvP rank you play PvP and not fractals. I see no issue here.

3. I said users and critics though, I agree critics alone would be a bad way to judge, but I was also taking into account user reviews why are notoriously pessimistic. Despite the 100 or so 0/10 reviews on metacritic, HoT is still at 7.7 on user score and even many of the negative reviews will mention how much they like the maps just disliking things like hero point grind.

4. Yet virtually everything they announced about the expansion was feature additions, not content additions (in the sense that we’re distinguishing the two). Some of their earliest statements were them driving home the fact that one of the biggest things about this expansion is that it lays down the foundation for future content, with systems like guild halls, raids, and elite specializations.

On legendary weapons, the very first thing I can find announcing them specifically mentions:

It takes a lot of work to craft these legendary journeys for release, so rather than take the time to develop the full set before releasing any of them, we will be releasing new legendary weapons in small groups at regular intervals until the full set of sixteen has been added to the game. Collections for the existing legendary weapons will be available on launch day, while the first three new legendaries will become available shortly after launch, alongside raids.

I understand some of the information can be missed, but ANet clearly implied that the set will be available to those who purchase HoT and that it will come after HoT launches alongside raids. Legendaries are a relatively small part of the expansion which is likely why less focus was put on this.

Honestly, all content in this game has been free up until this point. I mean, since it was stated early on the new legendaries would be tied to Maguuma, it should have been obvious that it would require the xpac but nothing else.

5. You’re right, my mistake. Still enough time known in advance, and yes possibly this info was released later to keep sales as high as possible… Like any company would do in the history of the world. You market the strong points but make sure folks are aware of the reality of the situation.

6. They’re not, but they are distinct armor sets, just like chaos weapons are each distinct from each other even if the same theme influenced their design.

7. Who cares how much time/effort it took? If they could design the best piece of equipment you’d ever seen in your life, but they did so in 5 seconds, would that invalidate said piece of equipment?

No, a skin is clearly something tied to the item itself. They probably made it a skin to sell more transmutation stones.

8. Depends. You can’t just paint everything in life with one broad stroke. Sure I wouldn’t want to get my car in pieces and bits. The way your analogy breaks down, as you highlight later, is that you do in fact get one full functioning product and THEN you get bits added onto that. It’s like buying a car, yes it’s pointless if I don’t get all the parts necessary for a car to work simultaneously, but what about the radio/speakers? I may want those immediately, but getting good speakers for your car often involves you purchasing them separately—it’s not feasible for you to get it all at once.

Simply put, they just can’t give us as much as we might want up front, given that they’re giving us so many features it’s astonishing (I’ve NEVER seen such a feature-dense expansion). Instead, the settled for a nice compromise, they can’t deliver the quantity of content some of us (irrationally, in my opinion) expect, so instead they deliver what they can with promise that they will continue to build on it in time. It’s a compromise, because life isn’t perfect and sometimes you trade one thing for another. In this case they traded initial quantity for quality and ability to produce greater quantity over time (by laying the foundations for many necessary systems).

Even if the legendaries existed, they probably didn’t feel comfortable implementing them until precursor crafting was introduced. We all know how many times they’ve said they wanted to do it much earlier but they couldn’t because they were struggling on HOW to do it.

On the analogy, yeah you can twist any analogy to be dis-analogous. The point of my analogy was to demonstrate that even if you expected a part for free, that doesn’t change the hard cash value of that part even if you don’t get it for free. The two are not in any way linked. The reason your twisting of my analogy fails is because you stretch it beyond the scope of how it can be analogous, you didn’t pay $50 for legendary weapons, you paid that for HoT (which includes them). Thus your re-telling of my analogy makes no sense, and hopefully my original analogy still demonstrates my point that the value of something is it’s value regardless of your personal expectations.

Lol, had a full in-depth response written up, went away for coffee, came back and when I reviewed it and clicked post, it said anet I needed to sign in again. Once I did, post was gone. Rip wall of text, you’ll be missed.

Harper.4173:

Yes but some of the gates are ridiculous – it takes around 19.800 Aurilium to make all the Exalted weapons and unlock the backpiece. That’s a bit much no?
I don’t imagine anyone would still take enjoyment in doing Auric Basin for a period of time long enough to gather 19.800 aurilium.

A select set of gates being ridiculous (which I agree on) doesn’t make the decision to make a lot of gates bad. Gates are still good, they just need refined.

Except in the core game there are multiple ways to get most stuff – including tier one legendaries (not saying this is a good thing). Just because incentive is needed doesn’t mean it should be placed behind a single method of obtaining an item that’s also incredibly grindy.

Yes and in the core game most areas are barely populated even after this xpac released. As I said earlier I’ve been doing map completion, virtually no one pushes meta not directly relevant to say world bosses or dungeons.

The forced grind FOR A REWARD is a good thing for the overall health of the game. Don’t want to grind? Don’t go for that reward. Simple. The base game didn’t suddenly disappear because you bought HoT, every goal you had before HoT, every reason you ever played, is still valid.

Odd – the vast majority of people I spoke with disliked the maps – I’m pretty sure nobody knows exactly how the majority of players feel about these maps but in general the average player has difficulty and is frustrated by things that are above average in difficulty – which these maps certainly are.
Their difficulty comes from their convoluted nature and odd way of navigating them.

Except I’m not going off of anecdotes I’m going off of overall review count of professionals and users on sites like metacritic. Not that I think they’re worth anything, but since metacritic is actually notorious for being overly negative, it’s noteworthy that the reviews that praise the new maps outnumber the critics by 3 or 4 to 1. Best evidence we have say most people like it, plus my anecdotal experience in game and on these forums even.

Except for the small fact that I’m judging it based on how it was advertised when it was sold to me.
When I got HoT – it was advertised as an expansion – it was not called a feature expansion, the number of maps was not yet confirmed and most importantly there was no talk of this season-pass like situation where I pay for it all up front and get my content in a stream, with some coming on release and some coming later.
There was no mention that only 3 legendary weapons would release with HoT nor that they would come later than the expansion.
So I’m judging it on what was put in front of me in terms of information when I decided to make my purchase.

An expansion focused on features is an expansion, you simply assumed the expansion will be focused on content or unrealistically assumed they could do both. That’s your fault as a consumer for not thinking things through. That’s your fault as a consumer, they didn’t promise 16 maps (in fact they relatively early on confirmed there’d only be 4, and that’s even a pseudo lie on their part considering guild halls and raids are big enough to be maps, and that’s not including the free content they introduced such as the WvW map which dwarfs anything in PvE or stronghold).

You also pre-ordered before you had enough information. Pre purchasing is a risky habit, I did it too but only because I knew no matter how bad it was I would be playing it (I have around 6k hours in game, not suddenly gonna stop cus hot released rofl).

In addition you’re not getting only 3 legendaries with HoT, you’re getting a full new set, you just don’t know when they’re gonna come out. Can’t keep intentionally leaving important bits out like that, it comes across as dishonest.

Do you believe that at that time Anet did not know they would only release 4 maps? Or that Raids and Legendary weapons would come later at the moment they opened up preorders?
They knew – but they omitted these details in order to not hurt sales – knowing full well that being up-front about it would kill hype and cause controversy.

Pray tell, who would have NOT purchased HoT if they knew the raids would release 1 month after HoT? Legendary weapons were barely even one of their selling points too rofl, they focused on a lot of other things instead.

They announced only 4 maps would come with HoT a longggggg time ago, many months ago. We knew that for a long time. If you bought it before hearing that, again, your fault for pre-ordering. Accept the consequences of your own actions instead of blaming others for your mistakes.

Let’s make something clear -a set is a specific armor across all weight types. Stretching it out to make it seem like it’s a different thing when in fact it isn’t is silly.

Bladed armor is an armor set – with 3 weight types. Each weight type does not constitute a whole set because it is still bladed armor – the same theme.

To say they share the same theme does not mean they should be counted as the same. Thematically the chaos hammer is similar to the chaos sword, but they’re completely different in actuality. Light bladed pants don’t go with medium bladed armor. Each weight type is a different armor set, they’re not the same, they look very different in spite of the fact they share a common theme.

To me, an armor set is not a name, nor a set of stats. An armor set is a full set that can be applied to my character. Just because balded light and bladed heavy share the same theme/name, doesn’t mean they’re the same armor set.

24 misc armor pieces – I didn’t know back pieces counted as armor now. Nor did I know that the lack of armor ( eg. shoes – an already existing in-game asset) constituted as armor.
By that logic – adding an item that removes armor visuals from all slots actually constitutes as armor added to the game?!?!

There are 12 backpacks and 24 armor pieces, that later number doesn’t include both. Backpacks are individual aesthetic pieces that your character wears (except the invisible skins which we’ll just count all of them as 1 skin). In the sense that you were meaning armor, I think backpacks should count, and even if not they are at least relevant because they contribute.

Yes invisible things should count because for example you can’t have a monk type look without completely removing your upper armor thereby losing stats. It adds a whole new aesthetic choice for your particular armor slot (in the case of the analogy, the body armor). That’s why there’s such a huge thread about people asking how to get them and such, they’re a big deal.

If you’re also going to consider the 3 revenant creation headgear choices as armor ( which is a sad attempt at making the expansion seem like it had more stuff) let’s compare to the game – that brought 24 such choices ( as much as the expansion’s total unique armor pieces) only via character creation.

We’ve already shown, repeatedly, why comparing it to the base game does nothing to help your case. GW2 being more bang for your buck does not show HoT is not worth your money. GW2 is more bang for your buck than, say, Call of Duty, does that mean Call of Duty is never worth $60? Maybe in your personal opinion, but I think you’d understand if someone disagreed with you. Everyone has their personal opinion, just doesn’t pretend your opinion is anything else.

On the subject of 24 choices in the base character creation (if that’s accurate), that’s not more than the total unique armor pieces in the xpac, just the bladed/guild armor sets alone constitute 36 unique armor pieces.

Also – it’s funny how the addition of the 2nd generation of legendary weapons is praised as this huge deal that’s come with HoT.
People forget new legendary weapons and new legendary were said by the developers to arrive in 2013 and we all know how that went.
So yeah – getting stuff that should have been in the game for years now won’t get a hurray out of me – sorry.

Doesn’t matter what you hurray about. Regardless of when you thought you’d get legendaries, that doesn’t change the fact that legendaries are a part of HoT and therefore a part of it’s value. You can’t just NOT consider them because you thought you’d get them earlier.

Say I make a vacuum that’ll automatically clean the floors of your entire house in 5 minutes daily, and say I tell you I’ll give you 1 for free tomorrow. What if I wait instead for 2 years, give you nothing, and then start selling this vacuum for $5. Would you then go to my amazon page, buy it, then 1 star review it “THIS VACUUM IS NOT WORTH $5 HE WAS GOING TO GIVE ME ONE AGES AGO, IT’S NOT WORTH THE MONEY OBJECTIVELY”? The value of the object doesn’t change because you thought you’d be getting legendaries earlier. They’re part of the expansion and part of the value, it’s just a fact.

Also you’re not only getting 3 new legendaries, you’re getting a full new generation of legendaries. Again, it’s dishonest to not count these things as part of what you payed for when anet specifically said you’d be getting them in the future as well as living world updates.

Also I’m not challenging you on this, just actually curious, when did they promise we’d get a full set of legendary weapons in 2013? I remember precursor crafting, but nothing about a new generation of legendaries.

Doam.8305:

Nope you can even get there 30 minutes and still get nothing

What’s going on is obvious the overflows are all gone and the only organized map is the original map.

Yeah no, during oceanic every time DS refreshed there’s at least a half-a-dozen maps that go full and are completely organized. I can tell because a lot of my friends/guildies are often doing DS in other organized maps. Oceanic being the most dead time for the game too lol. It is not in any way true that there is only one organized map lolololol.

BrotherBelial.3094:

You misunderstand what I mean. If you have missed the LS. Then you have to buy that on top of HoT. Lets face it, you kind of “have” to buy it, the story of HoT will make no sense at all. Any one who got the game after LS2 finished, or got GW2 after playing it on a F2P account has to buy it.

So if you look at HoT and the Core game as they are now. The Core game offers alot more than what HoT dose for the price you payed at launch of both games.

This is how it works in all dlcs/expansions for any game ever. Especially modern games, where content is much more interesting/sophisticated than it was in older games, and as such they can’t afford to make anywhere near as much of it.

You pay $50 for GW2, you got a massive game, with a lot of content. You pay $50 for HoT and get 4 maps(not including the guild halls) I fail to see how HoT is the same value of GW2, unless HoT adds a load of maps.between now and the next xpac, so far for me HoT has not been worth the price ANet asked for it, but then I got mine from Amazon and saved about $10 on the price.(I’m from the UK so I payed £, but its easier to use $).

HoT isn’t the same value as GW2—but that’s because GW2 is a huge steal and not because HoT is not worth it. By your own line of reasoning, you should never buy a normal single player video game, because they’ll never be worth as much as GW2 (GW2 has at least 200 hours of unique content in it, map comping, personal story, basic wvw/spvp before you’ve memorized everything, 9 classes etc…).

It made me laugh today when I was playing, that VB and AB had a load of players in them, but TD and DS where empty, HoT might include all future LS in the price, but I’m starting to wonder if there will be anyone playing HoT by then.

Yeah that’s because the maps cycle. When dragonstand is on it’s set cooldown timer, virtually no one is there because nobody needs to be. But when that timer pops, LFG lights up with dozens of LFG posts taxing people into different instances. Sometimes these maps will be empty—but not for long. That’s the point of the metas and how they have down-time. I can consistently find 3-4 full maps of Dragon’s Stand in oceanic (deadest time of day) when it resets. Easily.

Harper.4173:

Except nothing interesting is happening in the new maps as well – with the exception of the last one.
The only problem is that you need to grind them out if you want to level up or get any sort of progress that is gated behind said map currency.

Bah you responded before I finished editing my post to respond more directly to the op (figured it’d be rude to just randomly target the random responses in the thread without first addressing the op directly). But I’ll go ahead and respond to you.

This is your personal opinion. Your opinion =/= to fact. I find the metas and boss fights in each map fun and challenging in and of themselves, I do Tarir and Dragon’s Stand purely for my own enjoyment and not strictly for their own rewards.

The maps themselves are not what are keeping the players playing – it’s not the awesomeness of the jungle that keeps people in these maps – it’s the gating of progress, collections, skins, masteries and Raids that these maps bring.

This is true of any content addition that could be made to any game ever. You can’t get someone to re-do content they’ve already done (outside of specific types of players) except by giving them INCENTIVES to do so.

It is artificial. Players do it because they need to.
Look at CoF P1 – a dungeon that’s been done and overdone by most players – and yet they’re still doing it now to farm masteries – is that happening because CoF P1 is so awesome? No. It’s happening because people want to farm their stuff.

Agreed, but is it the case that it’s a bad thing that players do it because they need to? A player may do Tarir meta because he needs to, but that doesn’t mean he’s not enjoying the content again. They’re not mutually exclusive propositions. No matter what content they add, or how much, eventually people will beat it and that’s that. If they don’t provide incentives via rewards that are in some way gated, the maps die and that decreases the joy of all those who come to the game later.

Same with the HoT maps.
Ask yourself how many would be in these maps if there were no forced gates that made you stay in those maps.

Ask yourself how many would be in this game if there were no rewards/incetives that made them stay. Very few.

I did not complain for more map space – my personal complaint is with the lack of armor skins in which case more is always better because it creates visual variety.

Okay, that’s your personal preference, so the xpac is not satisfying for you. Fine. Can’t satisfy everyone.

Also as a personal preference I’d have rather had 3 1 level maps – or even 2 – instead of a 3 layer map that’s a complete clusterkitten.

Complete personal preference, the vast majority of people very much enjoy the new maps and auric basin/dragon’s stand are actually quite easy to understand and explore. Very little verticality, and even then generally in only very specific areas.

I never said GW2 isn’t unique – but unique is not an excuse to give us very little stuff.
Unique is no excuse to have very poor Exalted mastery rewards only to add an Exalted themed glider in the gem store.

I addressed this in the post I edited it. You’re viewing this as a traditional content expansion when instead it was always intended to be a feature expansion. Big difference. You’re committing an even more grave error when you judge it only based on the content you immediately get when what you purchased was some immediate content and then some content which would come out later.

Since you seem to care so much about skins, consider:

We’ve gotten:

Armor
- 10 full distinct armor sets, Bladed, Leystone, and Guild armor for all 3 weights (light/heavy/medium), and Mistward heavy armor set
-24 misc. pieces of armor (2 per class, 1 for mastering base class and 1 for mastering elite spec, 3 for revenant character creation choices, 3 invisible shoes 1 for each weight to make it so you can just see your char’s feet)
-12 backpacks (3 per order, 3 orders, 1 auric, 1 luminary, 1 legendary)

Weapons
-8 complete weapon sets (Auric, Chak, Reclaimed, Plated, Machined, Golden, Shimmer, Tenebrous, and Golden Fractal)
-18 class based weapons – (1 for completing the elite spec, 1 for collection)
-21 misc weapons.
-Finally we have a guaranteed 2nd generation of new legendaries coming into the game.

These are just what I can confirm from dulfy’s article. There may be way more I don’t know about. http://dulfy.net/2015/11/08/gw2-hot-weapons-armor-and-backpieces-guide/

I don’t think this expansion is as light on skins as you seem to think it is. Consider, these aren’t just slightly different skins, they’re not re-skins or minor alterations like we’d see in other content expansions (such as eye of the north, anyone who looks at most of those can see a lot of them are very same-y to older content). They’re very unique/different skins.

Spirited Was Eceni.3869:

I took this from the Eye of the North website:-

The expansion introduces:
41 new armor sets, including rare, stand-alone pieces
100 new profession-specific skills (10 per profession, none of which are elite)
50 new PvE only skills including 3 elite skills
10 new heroes
18 Dungeons
124 new quests
The Hall of Monuments, a place which allows you to obtain unique titles, companions, weapons, armor, and miniatures in Guild Wars 2 based on your achievements in the original Guild Wars.
More than the previous campaigns, Eye of the North is full of easter eggs and “hidden” quests, which are not immediately accessible.

For those who may not know, Eye of the North was the only expansion Anet released during GW1, the other releases were separate campaigns within the same world.

I’ve not delved too deeply into HoT so far but for those that have, how does what we bought compare to the previous expansion in terms of content and value for money?

I don’t think the comparison can be made like this and be fair. The two expansion’s had completely different philosophy that can be summed up as: Heart of Thorns is primarily a feature expansion, EotN is primarily a content expansion.

Heart of thorns adds many, many mechanics and concepts to the game that affect it overall and provide a very good base for building additional content in the future.

Eye of the North added a good deal of content onto the already existing game—but very little in the way of actual new features.

So why don’t we compare the FEATURE additions to EotN’s FEATURE additions (and not their content) and see how each 1 comes out?

Heart of Thorns
-Raids
-Elite Specializations
-New class (Revenant)
-Masteries
-Gliding (part of masteries but so substantial that I felt it merited it’s own mention)
-Guild Halls
-Guild Rework (completely different/new guild missions system, new way for advancing guild, new ways of guild chatting etc…)
-Raid UI
-Map Contribution mechanic & accompanying UI
-Precursor Crafting
-Legendary Armor/Back pieces

Eye of the North
-Hall of Monuments

BrotherBelial.3094:

Most of what got added to the “core” of guild wars 2 is gone. And if you are talking about the LS, you have to buy that on top, so it would probably be the same with HoT. So if you do compare the 2, including price. HoT is lacking big time.

You absolutely did not have to buy the LS, all of us who were there at the time got it for free. HoT, from what I gather, INCLUDES all living world stuff to come, and is not merely required for it.

Kitiara.2706:

Well, technically I wouldnt just stand there. I was bouncing all over 1 map upgrading stuff. Preparing for prime time, getting it sieged up, ready for the fights. It was fun, it was building anticipation.

I respect your personal preference, but to most of us who did it, we only did it because we had to as no one else wanted to do it. It may be fun for you to sit there for 5-6 hours, watching for swords on all your objectives, constantly running in circles upgrading this or that… but to most people that wasn’t fun gameplay. It’s something most who did it were basically forced to do if we wanted to be competitive.

Kitiara.2706:

Replace it needing a real person to trigger it. It can even stay in the order they choose it to be in. Let it stay free, let it not use supply. Just require an actual person to trigger it. Makes sense?

WvW playing itself is just not a good environment. My guild LOVED standing around the upgrading keeps, towers, and camps. It was quite an accomplishment. Not only that, it made my entire guild want to defend, and brought out the other server who wanted to break down the walls we spent all day upgrading. And vice versa. Nothing quite as challenging as going and knocking down all the walls of that fortified keep some group of people spent all their time working on. And, they wanted to defend, as well.

It helped fights! I mean, come on. Its completely boring with auto upgrades.

How is wvw “playing itself” when the only thing that’s being automatically done is a button being ticked here and there?

As someone who frequently BL defended (only reason I don’t now is because the BLs themselves suck) it was a huge pain to have to constantly be micromanaging the upgrades (and often people would for example mistakenly order say fort walls instead of wp first).

The fact that you don’t have to go to the quartermaster and click an icon then click upgrade is not in any way a bad change. What may be causing issues to people who like bl defending is the fact that it no longer requires supply, which gives you 0 real reason to actually defend camps and such in order to help it upgrade. No real reason to be defending unless you actively are expecting an attack.

The auto-upgrade system is also a massive help to folks during their own dead timezones, it helps counter the nightcappers and such by making it so they’re more frequently facing upgraded objectives. It’s a good system itself, in no way is it a bad thing that we no longer have to micromanage ticking boxes constantly. That’s not WvW.

Swagger.1459:

Server pride means nothing. Guild pride is more important, hence the changes with guild stuff… Mergers are going to happen buddy and the focus will be guild status and rewards.

If server pride means nothing, why does guild pride mean something? Sounds like personal bias speaking and no reason/facts. Server loyalty is the ONLY reason I play WvW, if I were just guild-loyal I could just as easily play Eotm, pvp, or pve. Want to see what megaservers do to WvW? Go to EotM.

Your solutions are bad and your reasoning is atrocious.

Morwath.9817:

Arius.7031:

No self respecting rev uses staff AND sword. If they do, they’re not going to be very helpful to their team having no range/aoe.

Phantaram uses staff AND sword…

Because he’s popular and decent at pvp, therefore he’s doing everything right? Think about it. Without hammer you have no aoe, no ranged option, and are forced to engage in melee for everything. It’s not smart and it’s certainly not common.

Reverence.6915:

Yuffi.2430:

Finally – it’s too many changes. Introducing something new like merging servers in addition to the recent changes already made is not going to bring people back, if anything it may well push more people out of WvW. After all if I’m forced onto a different server to play a style I don’t really want to, in a map I don’t know well with people I don’t know yet… where’s my motivation?!

Just picking this last paragraph out since I don’t really have an issue with your opinions above it.

Try server surfing with a F2P account. You’ll find that basically all servers are the same, with similar players and play styles. The only difference in play style between T1 and T5 is in numbers. There are only small cultural differences between servers. Your server being merged with another won’t affect you much at all, especially since you’ll probably still see the same people that run with you now (if server transfers aren’t given and the entire server was picked up and merged). Playing on Blackgate (roaming) and playing on Eredon Terrace (when I can find people to run with there…) is more or less the same experience to me so I take issue with your claim that there’s a different “play style” on other servers.

This is as patently false as it gets. Anyone who knows anything (esp about low silver/bronze) knows communities vary MASSIVELY between servers. I’ll give concrete examples:

-Mag is full of trolls and #fites players.
-NSP is full of community-oriented players.
-EBay is full of kind spirited players who treat each other exceptionally well (generally).
-Dh is full of very “internet-esque” players if you know what I mean (lots of memes, lots of hashtags, very non-serious personalities).

Those are just a few that come to mind. Servers all have all kinds of different people, but there is a palbable difference from server to server. It’s more pronounced in certain servers, where servers like SF and SoR might be hard to distinguish in culture save by the fact that SF has more hispanics… but if you were to compare NSP to Mag it would be night and day absolutely.

Reverence.6915:

Because we want a variety in maps available to play on. We’ve had EBG since launch and it’s only had a few gimmicky changes with HoT. The Desert Borderlands aren’t conducive for fights since they funnel players away from each other than towards each other (all the while trying to deal with the environment – PvP map design at its worst), which means that you need an overwhelming amount of players on the map to get any action at all, which the servers can’t deal with.

Then that’s a problem with maps, not a problem with population. This thread should be “desert bl sucks” like every other thread, because server population isn’t really the problem, it’s the fact that the new bl makes everything more dead (by scaring away players and by being so big it’s hard to find the few that aren’t in eb/pve/spvp).

SchmendrickTheMagician.8247:

2x ~6k heal and long block from Shield #5
~2k heal from staff #4
very low cooldown block on staff #3
semi-spammable evade+stunbreak in shiro
12 second cooldown evade that does tons of damage and stacks might

6k heal is only with clerics ammy. Running 800 healing power in WvW I don’t even heal 6k with shield. It scales well with healing power, at base it’s actually only about 4000(it’s just over 900 per tick, 4 ticks over the course of 3 seconds).

No self respecting rev uses staff AND sword. If they do, they’re not going to be very helpful to their team having no range/aoe.

Shiro’s stuff isn’t really spammable because it costs a lot AND they need the energy to spam quickness. You can’t use more than 3 evades back to back, and if you do you will go from full to 0 energy and will have no effective dps/surviva capability. Rev relies on utilities and energy to do everything.

What you guys are neglecting to account for is the fact that shiro/glint is hard countered by condis, the standard shiro/glint build ONLY has the glint heal to counter condis (for 3 seconds every 30 seconds, all damage heals you). For that tradeoff, don’t you agree they deserve to be OP against other power builds? It’s the only way it can work, unless ANet reworks that design choice (which imo they should, but they don’t seem to want to).

Yeah what NTDK says is right, join a party with other people, they probably won’t even talk to you. If you dc, right click on their name and join their instance after logging back in. This works 90% of the time, you should get your progress and instance back unless the map is full (I always did at least, before downloading the 64 bit client which solved my issues).

Tigaseye.2047:

Maybe it’s more like they’re acting like it’s not making them enough money?

Which, of course, is even more unacceptable, if it actually is.

In what way have they acted like they’re not making enough money?

dank.3680:

T3 was the typo, but I just moved from mag a couple days ago, so I have both perspectives anyways. the mag match is dead too btw except some activity in ebg.

Then with all due respect, I feel as though your standards are irrationally high for the state of the game. Destroying over a dozen servers to make 6, maybeeeeee 9 servers that would fit your level of preference for activity would be utterly unacceptable and damaging.

albotelho.2931:

joneirikb.7506:

Expectation management: It seems everyone in this thread have different opinion of what is a “healthy population”, I think you should agree on that before discussing further. Some examples I’ve seen used here:

A) Activity in EBG

B) Activity on multiple/all maps

If people can’t agree what is a “healthy population”, they will never agree on server merges or any other topic regarding this.

The only sign we have of what ANet thinks about this, is their new population caps. Anyone got some rough estimations for how much activity these locks up at ? (my own server is nowhere near the caps to find this out).

For me healthy population is when all 3 servers of the match have a good number of players in all maps, I dont care about blobs or zergs, but if you at least have some few small groups and roamers around and it will not take more than 30 minutes for something to happen it is close to good.

Why does it matter what happens in bls other than the one you’re in? If you’re getting action, you’re getting action. Doesn’t matter if while you’re getting action the northeast tower flipped in red bl, and sw camp/sentry flipped in green bl. All that matters is 1 map imo, anything more than that is unreasoned “I just feel like it’s better this way”, and I’m pretty certain that’s not a line of thinking we should be acting on.

Jana.6831:

Darkhaven is T5 – just saying.

Edit: And I think the problem is that people are quitting the game/wvw and the question is why and the solution is to fix this, otherwise we could merge servers until only one is left.

I think Darkhaven was a typo from him, not sure. That’s what I assumed in my post anyway.

dank.3680:

I’m on Darkhaven, “t3”. It’s dead. If this is what you call very lively then I don’t respect your opinion because it is crazy.

And I can’t transfer to a more populated tier because ITS FULL. T1/t2 have players… The rest of us? Yeah I spent 4 hours in BL yesterday to see 1 guy.. OOO EBG lagfest is slightly populated though!!!

Why is EBG a lagfest for t3? Because there’s so many players, or is it bugged? If it’s bugged, ANet needs to fix the bug, not merge servers. If there’s so many players, you’ve defeated your own point. You don’t need the BLs to be populated to have fun, and the BLs do have people in NA prime.

I think most of us can agree the new BLs suck, and are driving people away from WvW. If they old BL’s were added a good few people would come back. It doesn’t help that PvE is so popular right now. Taking such a drastic course of action so soon after a major patch that has shifted the focus of many players is completely and utterly irresponsible.

I also don’t care if you do or don’t respect my opinion, my opinion accurately reflects reality. Respect it or not, but I’m right. Merges don’t solve much of anything, esp if you consider t1-3 to be dead, in which case we’d have to merge all but like 6-9 servers in order to fix this, which would destroy the variety/community aspects of WvW almost entirely. That’s not what people have been proposing in this thread from what I’ve seen.

Sich.7103:

I hate EB, even more that the new BL….
HoT just made that EB have more player when the BL are close to dead now…

And my server is not full…. It’s just anet who say that… I don’t see my server as full… He is not full… Really not….

Okay so we should destroy the playstyles of tons of players, going against probably the majority’s wishes, because you dislike EB?

And okay! My server isn’t full either, but it’s usually quite active, in fact it’s only “high”.

I like it, keep it the same or at least keep it different from normal masteries imo.

Sich.7103:

hum… guys…. do you know that we have 10+ server close on EU ?
How should I transfer to higher server if they are all close ?
And for what ? There is no one who play at off peak time now… You can have some fun at prime time, but off peak is dead…

Then yeah, at least with server merge we could try to regroup the players at off peak time to maybe have 20 people online and not only 3…

And yes, my server is full…. But only in arenanet head… Except EB we don’t see queue… Imagine at off peak time…

Then please, stop with the “just move to up tier server”..

As long as one map has activity, the matchup has sufficient activity. You don’t need red borderland to be active if you’re playing in EB, stuff happening in red borderland is irrelevant to you.

Folks have an irrational implicit premise that WvW should have multiple maps active at all times or it’s not working properly. Only one map needs to have any level activity for people to play WvW. If you’re claiming your server, that is full apparently, has all maps completely inactive at ANY time of the day, you are just straight up wrong/lying. I play on a “high” ranked NA server (in tier 5), we have at least some activity at all times in EB, usually commander tags with small zergs (SEA/EU/NA generally always have at least small zergs running around, NA turns into blob fests, OCX sometimes has no zergs but always roamers).

Also are you suggesting other servers should be merged into FULL servers? Because servers that aren’t full getting merged won’t help your gameplay 1 bit if you are full, so you’re suggesting something radically different to what others in this thread are suggesting and most of them I’d wager would not support your idea of merging.

InfernusX.4936:

For the past few months my guild and I on IoJ, have been in t8, we recently managed to push with our server to t6 and we still believe a server merge is necessary. There is almost nothing happening in t8. ET is barely going to break 15k this week. Kaineng has dominated enough to be triple the score of both other servers combined because the other two servers neither have the manpower nor motivation to play. Reset in t6 is the only day that either of the three current servers, IoJ, GoM and BP have any decent sized presence over the week. As someone from a lower tier server, as someone who has been in the lowest tier very recently and as someone who refuses to leave my server – server merge would drastically improve the quality and population of at least the bottom three, if not four servers.

Yet again you’ve asserted a server merge is necessary without even listening to the solutions offered.

Why is a merge necessary when you can transfer off of your server? If you don’t like where you’re at, 500 gems is not an insane price to ask (that’s like what right now, 60-70g? idk). You can farm the transfer in one day. Two days if you want to go to a t3 server.

In what way is the server merge necessary when you have an alternative? The facts defeat your claims. If server loyalty is SO important to you, then you’re choosing server over population. That’s YOUR choice. Do not destroy other people’s playstyles because you personally would prefer if you could have server loyalty and more activity. That is so incredibly selfish and self-serving it’s embarrassing. You’re asking ANet to 100% destroy the way other people want to play so that you don’t have to inconvience yourself slightly to improve your own experience. Think about that for a moment.

Also Dh was in t6-7 longer than 90% of the servers in this game (we were a t6 resident for like 1 year straight and only fluctuated between t6-7 for another yeah, we’ve only been in silver for maybe 10-15% of our time as a server). I know full well what bronze is like.

albotelho.2931:

Well this may be your opinion and I understand that some people prefer things the way they are today, but I see a lot of lower tier players asking for a merge and a solution for population balance.

I have played in a lot of diffetent tiers I began in Darkhaven, passed through Crystal Desert, Enhry Bay, SoR, and now I am in YB since april 2014, so I know enough about lower tiers and high tiers to say that the majority of people want a merge.

Yeah, and I know enough to say they don’t (having my main account on Darkhaven, and alt account moved to YB, SBI, AR, and BP at various times).

Answer my objection. Why is destroying a valid playstyle preferable to people simply paying 500-1k gems to solve their own problems? You’re pretending server merge is preferable but you’re ignoring the fact that there’s a solution to population problems already in the game. That’s no opinion, that’s not personal preference, that’s hard cold fact.

Jasper Defthand.3018:

I agree pretty much everything woodenpotatoes has said as well of the rest of you. I’ll contribute my own bit to this i suppose.

My over feeling about the expansion is how I feel about just about everything as a whole that arenanet does. They come up with a GREAT idea, they start working on it, then realize “OH kitten, this is gonna be so much work, and we are so under staffed cuz our business model doesn’t make kitten for money, and its all on me and my meager pay check that barely feeds my family and i gotta make this deadline. I guess I’ll cheese kitten this kitten, make it look pretty and cool to disguise the fact that theres no real depth and the underlying mechanics and engine are shoddily build and held together by bandaids.”

GW2 is the second biggest earning product at NCsoft lol. Where on earth do you come up with their method not making money?

UnitedChaos.8364:

Woodenpotatoes recently did a video going over HoT in general. He highlighted what ANET did well, what they did poorly, and his general thoughts on the expansion. I, for one, think that EVERYONE at ANET needs to watch this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tL-8bSUothk

It is so thought out and highlights things I didn’t even think about. Things like poor masteries, lack-luster lore, and more.

What do you guys think? Do you agree with some of his major points?

He didn’t go over HoT in general, he went over the story. That’s why it’s called a story review, not a HoT in general review rofl. Did you even watch the video? 99% of time is dedicated to the story. Woodenpotatoes (I watch him stream) is almost completely positive about everything in HoT BUT the story. Even in the video he mentions he thinks the expansion is easily worth it in spite of how terrible the story is.

If you’re whining about needing a server merge because the game feels too dead in your matchup, transfer, it’s 500 gems to get to a t5 server which is fairly lively or 1k to get to t3 which is very lively. Don’t ask anet to kill a legitimate style of play because you’re too cheap/lazy to improve your experience yourself. That’s downright scummy to do.

If you’re whining about needing a server merge because you’re in t1-2 and think the poor uncivilized heathens in low tiers need your protection, please go away. Your opinion is not wanted and not helpful in any way. Unless you have experience in these tiers, leave the discussion to those who this would actually effect, specifically t6-8.

When will these threads stop popping up? This was getting tiring a year ago.

Yeah DS was exceptional. Not too difficult, not too easy, very good climax… It felt a bit like marionette but better. Best PvE they added imo, though I love most of the PvE they added (just don’t get me talking about the WvW).

If you’re competent and not full zerker, playing solo is perfectly plausible. I did the entire xpac without a party. That said, you will have to team up for events/hero points unless you’re good (I solo’d most hero points, but I’m a WvWer, I’m more used to that type of fight). This doesn’t mean you have to party, just ask for help, wait for someone to stumble by, or check out the LFG. It’s still solo play in my mind.

There is also solo content in the xpac, ie adventures and personal story. It’s not purely group content.

As to if HoT is required, it will be for future raids/living world, anet has announced. It won’t be for things like balance updates or pvp/wvw changes in general, but for pve content it generally will be.

Did you try the 64-bit client? I have literally not even crashed 1 time since I downloaded it.

Test.8734:

I’m not sure if the disconnects are directly because of ArenaNet. The situation with the Ancient Karka all the way back in 2012 was more likely because of the way the event was setup (a one time event where A LOT of people had to be online at the SAME TIME? It wasn’t surprising that ArenaNet couldn’t handle it) than because of poor servers (or because the players would have had poor connections at the time, like Zaklex implied above). We have never had something like the Karka thing for us to see if things really improved on this aspect of ArenaNet’s servers.

They said back then, in response to the outcry, they didn’t have the proper server infrastructure for the event. They weren’t prepared for so many people, they said. Every living world event after that had very similar levels of participation, after the improved the servers we saw very few issues like 6 second skill delay or frequent disconnects again.

But anyway, the LFG thing isn’t a solution to this issue. Using it to taxi people from empty maps to not so empty maps isn’t what the system was created for; players improvise using it because that’s the best option right now, but it’s more a “less worse” option than a good option.

It may not be perfect, granted, but it’s most definitely a step in the right direction, and a large one at that. The LFG tool may not allow people to easily precisely navigate the mega server maps, but it generally allows you to get where you want to go. IE say you’re looking to pug an organized DS attempt, you may not be able to select server 22’s organized DS attempt, but hey a guy from server 15 has a taxi up for his organized DS attempt.

It’s not perfect, but it solves the vast majority of problems we face.

Lothirieth.3408:

Arius.7031:

That’s player incompetence. I joined a map going for t4 about 4 hours ago and we were a hair away from getting it. It’s not a player population issue, there’s enough people, the issue is the players.

Okay….. annnnd? I said nothing about player population, but was refuting the whole ‘just LFG and everything is grand’ claim that keeps being thrown about here.

People brought up the LFG in response to the person saying the maps were dead… We obviously weren’t saying LFG cures cancer, solves world hunger, or in general fixes everything. We were saying it specifically solves dead maps. If you weren’t discussing that, you were just mentioning random unrelated facts.

In fact, your quote of me had me saying specifically “As was said earlier, you have to use the LFG tool to taxi into lively maps.”. So how did what you say refute what I said in any way?

Pezz.4758:

dude im running out of companies to support here.

blizzard is done for me after WoD and their focus on micro transactions.
activision (same company as blizzard) is done after destiny putting out DLC faster than CoD games
EAs “free to play” of SWTOR and well…its EA
ncsoft after wildstar was already done for me, but i read that anet works with
their own people more than carbine did, but now HoT happens.

where do i go? honestly what is going on with the industry.

i cant refund, i need SOMETHING to at least log into from time to time when isaac is platinum god and bloodborne DLC is over.

Support ANet. You’re acting like people didn’t offer a solution to your problems, but we all did. Get into active maps using the LFG feature. If you need a hero point, see if anyone else is doing it in LFG, or post in LFG “Need x HP”.

On the subject of the map moving past things, yes unless you want to kill every mob you have to move past them. Why is this a problem, this is a fact of gaming life rofl. If you want to do something, you have to do it to… do it. If you want to admire the map itself, it’s generally quite easy to do unless you’re standing in the middle of a mob hot-spot. I play solo most of the time, other times just duo, and I have NO issue playing slowly, by myself, and just admiring the jungle.

On the subject of why play they HoT maps, you’re probably not realizing a lot of random stuff you get from HoT is super valuable atm. Take a look at rare reclaimed weapons, for example. I got 4 today, each worth 8g+. I find tons of flax, ancient wood, and orichalcum. Another thing is if you get a lot of exalted keys, after the Tarir meta you can descend into the bottom of the city and there are 27 things to open down there (1 key per) and 5 iirc are particularly rewarding. You will make a LOT of money from doing that.

You can also do map comp to get ready for the legendaries that are about to come out. Not to mention tons of unique rewards from collections (ie mistward set, or specialization ascendeds) that you can only get by playing the jungle. Or unique sets of armor/weapoins (bladed, ley-line, auric etc…). Or achievement hunting (the jungle is filled to the brim with achievements to get, check the story journal and heart of thorns tabs). Or lore hunting (ie did you know there are tons of random lore objects scattered around HoT, the most known perhaps being the plaques in the golden city, which tie into a lore-based achievement that rewards you with more lore rofl).

There is a lot to do in the expansion content that you can’t do anywhere else.

Test.8734

:Ask for a refund.

GW2 has two long standing and huge issues: events attribution and server navigation.

All the way back in 2012, there was an one-time meta event – the Ancient Karka one – that had such a big drop rate that people nicknamed its reward the “Precursor Chest”. The event took quite some time and of course a lot of people were playing it, and ArenaNet’s network wasn’t particularly stable so quite often we got someone with a disconnect during the event…

…And boom, there went the event reward. Upon a disconnect, people would return to an empty map that had either just finished the event (thus no reward for the now returning character) or that had no chance of finishing the event at all. With no way to return to the maps those players were in, and no way to get the rewards for an event after a disconnect, people simply lost

Lol this exact thing happened to me those few years ago. Booooyyyyyyyy did I rage.

Now, three years later, we still have the exact same problems. It’s STILL impossible to navigate through the megaservers map properly – at best, all we can do is improvise with the LFG feature, but that often doesn’t work. Being disconnected while finishing a long meta event STILL makes a player lose his/her rewards more often than not, no matter how much of his/her time said player has just wasted.

ArenaNet is obviously not even trying to fix either of those issues, because if they were – and both have been very well known for quite some time now – they would already have fixed them.

The reasoning doesn’t work out here, there’s a valid 3rd option, they’ve been trying but can’t (either conceptually they can’t conceive of a way to do it, or they’re technically restricted from carrying out their conceptual fixes). Doesn’t mean they’re not trying.

Complaining on the forums doesn’t work, this is something people have been complaining about for quite some time now. The best we can do is to press ArenaNet economically. So, ask for a refund, tell your friends to ask for refunds too, and tell those who stay to stop buying gems. When this issue is fixed, then you all can come back. But we have to make ArenaNet listen, one way or the other.

Or how about you stop trying to coerce people because you’re unhappy with 1 faulty aspect of an otherwise amazing product.

If he wants a refund, let him decide, don’t try to pressure him, and don’t tell him to tell his friends/those who stay to try to hurt ANet as well. Believe it or not, the less money ANet has, the less likely they are to fix an issue as well. ‘Voting with your wallet’ works well when getting people to role back undesirable changes, it works significantly less well as a way to force a company to fix something they’ve probably been trying to fix for years.

Also, you’re BSing straight up if you say ANet hasn’t improved the situation immensely. Not only does the LFG tool work really well, disconnects happen far less frequently (the new HoT ones we can’t really blame them for, it’s a massive new release, and the 64-bit client has fixed 99% of them), and you can generally taxi back in by partying up with another person. They seem to have a system in place that “reserves” your spot for a little while as you relog. Every time I dc’d pre 64-bit client I was able to get back in with all my progress, every single time (though granted sometimes I got back in after a boss died or something, that’s just unavoidable).

Lothirieth.3408:

Arius.7031:

As was said earlier, you have to use the LFG tool to taxi into lively maps.

I keep doing this.. and I’ve yet to see a t4 Verdant Brink. It’s getting really frustrating. I joined a map just now that didn’t even make it to t3 and I was having to try to solo the rally points.

That’s player incompetence. I joined a map going for t4 about 4 hours ago and we were a hair away from getting it. It’s not a player population issue, there’s enough people, the issue is the players.