Guild Wars 2

This goes both ways. While these forums do contain some rather… colourful… trolls, I could say the same negativity is displayed by Anet’s community team (some parts, some like Gaile are awesome), particularly the black profile moderators. Having community leads make threads ending with ‘you have been warned’ (stealth edited later after communities expected response) or some of the other comments that have been expressed over the last year are not the most appropriate ways to interact with your customer base. If a retail store had it’s employees treat their customers the way parts of the community team do, they would suffer for it.

A friend of mine was banned from the forums for calling his Korean community friends ‘Korean’. Later attempts to discuss with the community team and explain the context and appropriate nature of the rational discussion that lacked racial tension, was conveniently ignored.

Respect goes two ways. If a business wants respect from their customers they should earn it, not expect it. If people are deliberate trolls or causing trouble they should be banned, but that is no grounds for the way these forums are upheld – often leading to more problems caused by angry customers.

As for obtaining ascended gear, this again feels like the development just don’t get it. Look at precusors, it has been over a year and the only ways to obtain one are rng or via the trading post.

1) Named exotics should be upgradable to ascended weapons, such as Infinite Light. They require a lot of work to obtain the materials for, it’s only fair they should be the highest stat combination (non legendary). Also people put a lot of effort into making these before ascended gear came around, having to then craft another gear tier and transmute to keep a weapon at max stats is not player friendly.

2) Less RNG. More player driven rewards. Instead of Teq having a random chance to drop ascended gear, make it a reward based on completion somehow tied to the event and map. So people can actually aim and work towards the reward, not rng. I don’t think I can stress enough how horrible your rng systems are for most players, but I don’t think anyone will pay attention as it certainly hasn’t changed since release.

3) Completing difficult event chains should reward ascended gear. Or atleast something skill based. Less of 2 blues and a green, more of something meaningful and actually rewarding. Liadri was a good example of this, instead of a mini, why not allow the player to choose an ascended amulet for completing her? Actually meaningful reward based on a difficult skill challenge that would be useful to the majority of players (mini’s are ignored by 95% of the population yet seem to be a majority reward…)

4) Crafting mats need to be better distributed among different game modes. Just compare the difference in work required to kill a world boss to taking a keep in wvw… yet the first is dramatically more rewarding. Event chains should reward fragments based on completion.

The current systems – crafting, rng, trading tokens… just feel so lazy. Like Anet wanted an easy excuse to add another gear tear and tie people up with what is, often pointless grind for minimal return for the sake of having something to log in for…

It was mentioned previously, but I would like to highlight the function of making ascended gear permanently account bound (regardless of upgrade/transmute). Let’s look at it realistically, ascended gear (particularly light armor) requires a huge amount of work to obtain, which is then further limited by what you actually obtain:

- One item
- Locked to one character
- For one stat combination

For most things there is a trivial difference between ascended an exotics, but that difference can matter and can be unsettling knowing the original way the game was marketed to prevent this. By making an item account bound, it can be moved to alts if you change character or the balance team decides your pve build is having negative impact on their glorious esports. [b]This additional functionality, removes the necessity of the vertical gear treadmill and offers additional utility based functionality[b] which makes sense:

White/Blue/Green/Yellow/Orange – Gear that provides the majority of stats
Ascended – Able to use infusions (fractals, wvw benefits, utility benefits). Account bound.
Legendary. – Infusions. Account bound. Able to change stats. (Able to change sigil would really really help btw)

As for ascended gear changing stats, a while back there was a gem store item datamined to allow an item to change stat combination, will this ever exist? What about an item in game which costs essence of luck/ecto’s or some sort of currency to allow you to change the stats on one item? That way the functionality is available but legendary gear can do it permanently.

Warrior.

/15char

I recently purchased the unlimited salvage tool, which is useful, but didn’t realize it had an annoying vocal effect. It is annoying and repetitive with no way to disable.

Anet could you please give us an option to disable this, also the visual effects on the gem store salvage tools. It may be nice once or twice but having the effect repeat over and over again is tiresome. Please let people have the option just to use these as normal unlimited tools, for something that can be purchased with real money it shouldn’t be too big an ask.

Ps, please don’t increase the gem cost to 1500 or something to add this function.

So if ranks are going, what is going to happen to the animal showing on the home/login page? Or am I misunderstanding something…

I would be surprised if Capes were released only through PVP as they are an item PVE players want and would likely spend decent amount of gems to buy… having special capes like guild logo displaying or some rank symbol would be cool though.

haviz.1340:

Asuka Shikinami.5462:

Most events can be solo’d, outside of world bosses, temples (depends on scaling) and the karka stuff (doable, but so fustrating). Are you in full exotics/using a build that is good for pve?

You can solo a few world bosses, including temple ones.

Yeah defiantly, I have solo’d Golem/Maw/Fire Ele or atleast most of the way before some interfered. It’s just not something one would want to do every day… especially when they want more people to play with.

Baron.8407:

JonPeters.5630:

Dahkeus.8243:

Josh Davis.6015:

Way to go, Jon…making me look bad!

Aww, don’t be such a grouch! Oh wait…

As for the new heals, I’m sure this will be good for some classes, but on my thief, I feel like I already have some of the best heals in the game. It’s going to be tough to add something that will appeal to me more than Withdraw or Hide in Shadows.

P.s. I’d rather see more Elites added than either heals or utilities.

Oh the new thief heal is going to mix some things up for sure!!!

Calling it now:

Assassin’s Heal
Healing: 4344 (+0.6 healing power modifier)
- Shadowstep to your target and immobilize them for 2 seconds.
- Range 600

Rotates to:

Assassin’s Withdrawl
- Return to your starting location and remove one condition.
- Breaks stun

30 second cooldown.

The heal could possibly be done on the Withdrawl for a more interesting/risky dynamic.

What about the opposite? The first part shadow steps you away (stunbreak), then you are healed when you shadow step back to your target.

A temporary fix that would help until a wider quest was added would be to add an ascended recipe for making a precusor. For example:

Staff Precusor Recipe - costs 50 laurels

3 Ascended Staff Head
3 Ascended Staff Shaft
3 Vision Crystal
1 Gift of Heroism

Gift of Heroism is obtained via either
- Completing the story
- WVW season chest
- 1 per 5000 point reward chest
- Gaining x rank points in pvp
- Liadri

etc

Recipes use existing material, have to add one item that is available from other means. Time gated materials that are available via farming, major ingrediant earned through achievement, not rng.

Hi John ^^,

A lot of the frustration here comes from the realization of the overall situation, not just the direct cause. Guild Wars 2 is a video game, and video games are meant to be played and enjoyed. As legendary items are the highest level/function for a weapon in the game, it is seen as a goal – as part of a game it is expected to be a somewhat enjoyable goal – or why would someone play the game at all?

Then we look at the process. Gift of mastery – makes sense. Gift of fortune – pretty much ‘gift of gold’ as most of it is dependent on farming gold just to buy the ingredients from the TP. Nothing epic, skill related or particularly enjoyable from a gaming sense here. Gift of the $legendary – still grind based but a lot better than fortune. Last is the precusor…

Since you can’t really farm for a specific precusor – you can farm for loot but not for the specific item, the only options left are buying it from the TP or from MF. Both depend on supply and demand – the demand a result of people wanting to obtain said item, the supply more linked to the drop rates Anet put in place – as the ingredients cannot be farmed (crafting rare weapons to forge is possible, crafting exotic is more expensive than buying so it’s pointless).

So we have a situation where the player cannot directly control the amount of work required to complete the final part of the weapon. Forging, is totally dependent on luck, and even if Anet increased the drop rates, they are still at such a low point where the cost of making one, averaging over a large dataset, still remains high. Hence why the high price of precusors on the TP – if it was viable to produce at a lower cost people would do so and bring additional competition to the market. If people save up the excessive amount of gold required, the suffer from the prices rising or erratic jumps like what happened with the legend a while back – which again the average player cannot control, nor can they control the demand from external parties going through the same strife. While some people do enjoy farming, I question if this is a fair representation of enough of the playerbase to justify the situation or if this pushes the idea of ‘enjoyable farming’ to the extreme. Again this is a video game, knowledge of markets and resource flow should not be required to obtain a pretty sword.

tldr; This isn’t fun. It doesn’t make the game better. It has been a year and the core problem remains – lack of availability and grind required. While drop rates may have increased, the overall cost due to other items such as the mats required or changes to farming spots have unbalanced the equation to be back where it was.

I am ranting, trying to keep this simple and obviously don’t have data to back up anything I say, though I think we can agree on one thing….

This is not fun.

Liadri. Knowing how weak most NPC’s are, I’m sure we could 2 man half of Kyrta in days and control the realm ourselves.

Most events can be solo’d, outside of world bosses, temples (depends on scaling) and the karka stuff (doable, but so fustrating). Are you in full exotics/using a build that is good for pve?

In that timezone on Tarnished Coast there are normally people around, or atleast people in LA who may help out. Otherwise the higher tier WVW servers like Blackgate and JQ have decent coverage. SOS also has a high oceanic population. Try guesting and see if there is a server you enjoy being on.

Good luck~

CMstorm.8679:

Signet of Attunement + Written in Stone would be really nice.

Definitely, it would allow 30 point into earth without taking such a huge hit from not having as much in water. Written in Stone seems like such a good idea but lacks the impact with most builds to make it worthwhile.

Signet of Attunement/Harmony (Ele)

Passive: Gain health whenever you change attunement.

Active: Recharge all your attunement skills. Heal yourself for each attunement on cooldown.

This could be fascinating if used correctly and help newer players learn the class… just have to be careful with the heal values so it isn’t over the top.

Signet of Indemnity (Mesmer)

Passive: Damage is transferred from you to your clones/phantasms (small amount per second). Having more phantasms/clones up = larger transfer. Cannot lower a clone/phantasm to below 1hp.

Active: Heal yourself

Potentially the active could be ‘shatter all your illusions and gain health equal to x% of the total health of your illusions’. Or something to do with sacrificing them for a heal whose impact depends on the number/state of illusions up.

Hi Grouch,

Who do I need to bribe to hook mesmers up with a movement signet? We are super slow out of combat and taking it would mean dropping a useful utility as traits cannot compensate (let’s not even mention that inspiration trait).

I have gold, girls, globs… all the good stuff… if you know what I mean.

Pyroatheist.9031:

Ross Biddle.2367

:sup rune of guardian + mimic

…huh

6th rune of the guardian is 1s burn on block. Mimic blocks attacks after the first projectile is stopped.

I tested using guardian runes in pvp with a 20/20/30 condi build but it didn’t feel worthwhile over undead or nightmare.

1) Does the + confusion duration actually work now? This neither increased the duration from the runes function nor from other skills (Mesmer scepter 3 for example).
2) If someone is using perplex runes and a thief interputs them with basi, they take 5 stacks of confusion. Has this been fixed?
3) Why only 8 seconds? These still may be the strongest rune set in the game…. atleast they let you keep 5 stacks of confusion up nearly permanently with many builds.

Regardless, thanks for the update Grouch.

On a side note, does anyone know if there is another State Of The Game or some sort of balance discussion coming up with the devs in the next month? I can almost guess their exact reaction and statements they would use to ‘justify’ making traits like this, but would like to see it discussed anyway.

Perfect immunity traits are bad. Hard counters are bad. This and automated response should be changed to either have a ICD or have -condi duration instead.

My real concern is the devs have already stated they will be watching this trait and buffing it if it’s not strong enough. Ie, moving it to master tier in earth or lowering the threshold. If this is how they balance passive traits, I don’t know what to think anymore…

oZii.2864:

Zenith.7301:

Phent.9350:

PU build is good only for WvW roaming, in pvp it is troll build nothing more

Not even for roaming. Roaming classes need to be able to kill quickly before someone else interferes or the zerg arrives. PU mesmers kill slowly.

The spec is just a bunker survival spec. It’s hard for you to die, but you also won’t be killing much if the opponent wants to retreat.

PU mesmer can’t chase at all.

Dueling build fits better I think. We probably all seen it in WvW you know the lone mesmer sitting around ruins like he is afk waiting for people to engage him.

I just ignore them and chuckles when they are chasing you spamming winds of chaos like it’s gonna hit anybody moving.

I hate you Sin.

Hype.8032:

Funny how chaining 5+ stealth abilities in quick succession isn’t considered spamming stealth

Utility:
Decoy (40s CD)
Viel (90s CD)
Mass Invis (elite) (90s CD)

Weapon
Torch 4 (30/24s CD)

At most Mesmers have 4 stealth skills, which using all 4 means you blew your elite, two utility skill and have to have a torch equipped – which means the phantasm you take is pathetically weak. Also those utility skills won’t be back up for a long time. As this isn’t likely in phantasm builds, I can’t see people doing this unless they need to escape (which other classes can do without having to blow so much, hi GS warriors) or if they have 3 staff clones up and are trolling, which is easy to deal with.

The only addition is a trait which makes you stealth on 25% health, but taking that means your giving up something actually useful, also it suffers from the same problem as thieves Last Refuge (ie you can’t control it and can accidentally proc revealed).

If your going to split it by weeks – so one week is pvp, one is wvw etc, make it to each week two topics are discussed. So you have two threads, each for a seperate topic. One thread could be based on player vote, the others based on something the devs would like to discuss.

That would make it far more meaningful – having 1 topic rotate on a three week basis is slow. Two topics could cover more ground and make it more meaningful to the player base as it’s more likely to bring about a topic players want to discuss.

For example, if you did your current system, the next topic for wvw would be skill lag. This is a pointless topic, as there is nothing players can really do or say to change it. So having a topic on skill lag and a topic on rewards would allow for far more discussion instead of the ‘oh, this weeks is not relavent to me, now I have to wait three weeks before something comes up. Anet really doesn’t care about wvw’ opinion and posts that may occur.

Mesmers can’t spam invis. Most mesmers have decoy (3s invis on a 40s cooldown) and maybe mass invis (5s invis on a 90s cooldown) but as this is an elite, it depends on the group comp.

If they are running torch they have an extra 3s invis on a 24/30s cooldown, also a grandmaster trait in the defense line makes stealth last one second longer. Condi builds will likely spec into this as it works well well with the playstyle.

It’s really not a case of spamming invis, the mesmer may have used these skills consecutively to try to recover cooldowns or to escape. It just looks that way due to the clones being out – if a thief stealth’s they comes out, it’s obvious where they are (unless they have thieves guild up). But with mesmers you still have to work out which is the real mesmer, and a good mesmer will know how to keep you guessing. For what it’s worth, chaining stealth to confuse your enemy is one of the few ways we have to deal with a good condi necro with our lack of removal.

A side note, there was a bug a while back to allow mesmers to sort of perma stealth with torch but that was fixed quickly.

I would love to see PvE versions of knights (T/p/p) and Valk (P/v/crit) to open up builds. Also celestial amulet getting a slight buff.

In terms of variety, making the amulet have less stats the jewel have more may help – such as a 2/3 to 1/3 distribution. This may allow more variety as builds could change the jewel more effectively to cover weaknesses in builds that may be not used.

Also, please add perplexity runes to PVP. As the currently are, no changes. Then the rage on these forums would be never ending and they may finally get fixed (ICD on 6th skill, make the +confusion duration actually work, thieves basi no longer triggers effect if you use it on a perplex user). The fact these have not been fixed after this many months is a really bad reflection on the balances teams apathy to any game mode outside pvp…

Bump.

/characters.

Bump.

/characters.

Bump.

/characters.

Since the world boss ‘update’ a few patches ago, some of the scaling on world bosses seems broken. The more people you have, the harder it gets. Obviously this is somewhat intentional so it’s not a case of things becoming easy to kill when you have a lot of people, but the scaling seems totally off.

For example, I have seen shatterer fail on high population pve servers with 40+ people attacking; the timer literally runs out. Yet with 10 people, he’s easy. Maw gets more and more time consuming when more people turn up – it feels like the health scaling is grows by an exponent rather than a somewhat linear fashion. This makes many of the world bosses frustrating, as they just become a time grind. I remember Devon and Hugh saying they don’t want a buff in WVW that gives you a disadvantage if you outnumber your opponents, yet it feels this way in pve – the more people you have the more likely you are to fail events. Worse is when people are afk and the event scales as a result, so they people trying to do it are punished based on others being away.

This seems to mainly affect Golem, Wurm, Maw and Shatterer. Other world bosses are not so bad. I am not sure if this is intentional, but really question the design. Look at Fire Ele as a point of reference – it is difficult regardless of the numbers due to his knockdowns and condi damage. You have to stay aware of your surroundings, one mistake care really mess you up. Yet it isn’t overkill – you can recover, he doesn’t spam CC like the annoying wurm does, he doesn’t one shot once cc’d like golem now. More so, he doesn’t scale in such a crazy way that the difficulty is approximately the same regardless of how many people you have. If you afk, you die. If you stand there spamming auto attack, you die. Why are more bosses not like this?

Anet if you are reading this, I ask you to reconsider your boss mechanics as these are no longer enjoyable. Wishing there were less people around as it’s easy to kill something with 5 people instead of 30 doesn’t suit how you marketed or portray this game. It isn’t about farming or trying to maximise gold, it’s about being able to enjoy the more ‘epic’ events in the game, instead of wishing there were less people around so they didn’t make things needlessly time consuming.

Btw, Ulgoth and Maw have an issue when lots of people are around, their ‘wind’ summons do not render properly so you have to dodge an enemy you can’t properly see. This needs to be fixed.

Ty for reading.

You didn’t elect Evon, expect no sympathy from him.

Mystic forge all the ascended gear in existance then salvage the result for 1 piece of elder wood?

Gladly.

John Smith.4610:

Account.9832:

John Smith.4610:

I can’t go into details, but we have plans for insider traders.

Unfortunately, “I can’t go into details” is typical game publisher code for “we’re not going to do anything about it but we’re also not going to say anything, so people think we’re doing something about it”. Of course, that applies mainly to games with subscriptions (where the publisher doesn’t want to lose income, so they value cheaters the same as honest players). GW2 isn’t really subject to that kind of pressure.

Still, if you do intend to punish them in some way, announcing that would act as a deterrent.

Will you ever “go into details” ?

I have a proven track record here of taking action when I say I will take action. I’m not sure where your idea of a typical game developer response derives from, but given that assumption we’re clearly not typical.

This man speaks the truth, and to many is likely the most respected member of Anet on these forums. His posts are always respectful, insightful and shows he has a good understanding of the game and community.

That being said, if the games lead economist started talking about what he was going to do or change, it would affect the markets, or in this case how people behave regarding what they are doing with inside information. If he started providing data we don’t have access to other than speculation, it would likely affect the market, or atleast open up aspects people may not/should not have considered before… which is similar to the concept of insider trading this thread is allready about…

Go back to the thread and pick the second most requested topic. I presume this would be rewards or something to do with the current constant grind in the game.

As a community development initiative, it makes sense to discuss with the community the problems they have brought to your attention.

Stooperdale.3560:

Is this a CDI about how to do CDI?

So meta.

Hi Chris,

Don’t you think it’s a little early to be gathering feedback on this process? In retrospective of what has happened (using pve as the scope):

1) Thread made to gather topics which people felt was most appropriate for discussion with the developers.
2) Thread made by developer, with the intention of being open for a few days to gather feedback on single topic. Thread opened for far longer than anticipated, totally went on a tangent (often at developers discretion).
3) No thread created for next topic, or expansion on other topics raised in step 1. Instead gathering feedback on overall process.

I think this situation is a little shallow to gather feedback on at this time, as really… little has occurred which feedback could be gathered on, especially without bias as this is only focused on one topic. Why not go back to the threads people brought up topics, make some more feedback threads that are only open for a week, then gather feedback once this has been occurring for atleast a month.

This feels far too ‘meta’, which is going to drive people away who don’t like high level discussion. Bring back the project to it’s roots of gathering feedback on the actual game – not the process, then see how it goes from there.

Nike.2631:

I suspect “grow a skin” is in my top three. You cannot have individuals with 100% hit rate at responding to approving posts and a <4% rate of responding to critical insights and suggestions for improvement.

Unless all you’re looking for is a rubberstamp on decisions already made.

Fully agree. The amount of well written analytical posts that were completly ignored, with a dev them coming along and saying ‘Thanks for the feedback’ to someone with a one line thread about how they like Scarlett, was discouraging, to put it lightly.

Anet, some of the people who come on here to help you know what they are talking about. Some have experience in these fields or a deep understanding of the issues at hand. When people to go a length to accurately point out an issue and the impact it has, they are doing so with little personal gain to help your business. Seeing mods and Anet staff, treat the community like children, isn’t exactly encouraging for a ‘collaborative development initiative’. It would be nice to see a little more appreciation regarding the amount of work people put into this, instead of line line generic responses that a computer program could generate.

Somewhat on the topic at hand, closing the threads earlier than leaving them open for so long would be better. The other one went on a tangent, to say the least. More focused direction from a developer with meaningful responses would be nice.

Agree that it feels better now, after running in SOR BL after reset, there were some pretty large blob fights which didn’t lag too badly.

The next problem though is particle effects… look at the first fight in that video for example. Half the time your screen is covered in flashing lights and combo field spam, while the visual indicators are nice it’s still over the top.

Chris, when are you moving on to the next topic from the topic suggestion thread?

There has been plenty of good discussion and idea’s in here, but it has been open for over two weeks, I’m sure there are plenty of other topics people would like to bring up outside of the living story.

Also, I have to point out having some of this living story affect WVW is a really really bad idea.

Look as it is now – merc camps also have Krait and another NPC’s there. Not only does this make is far more difficult to take these (which in EB, are worthwhile to take and control), but for this season they are tied to an achievement, which is going to make it far more difficult to obtain. The WVW achievements are not casual friendly outside of dominating servers – restricting these further based on living story is not cool.

If such things are going to be added to WVW, please add them in a place where they will not influence the main game mode. People go to WVW to fight other players and servers – not to mess around with PVE mobs who impede that goal.

Chris, you may want to have a look at this thread on Reddit, they share a lot of reasonable concerns with the Living Story and rollout process, even if the title is a little misleading.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1qixm0/why_make_expansions_when_you_can_sell_a_pack_of/

Btw, make sure you capitalize you ’I’’s. Your high school English teacher would be aghast.

John Smith.4610:

FirstBlood.7359:

Remove the market, and appoint John Smith as our central planner.

After I’m elected, bribing me will be considered a “gold sink”

:)

Are you suggesting this wouldn’t work now?

I’m interested in the staff precursor, if you know what I mean.

I thought there was a major bug or exploit in D3 which caused so much inflation it destroyed the economy.

You couldn’t remove the TP without redesigning many systems in Gw2 – the loot drops for example are just so low. Can you imagine the amount of pointless grind Gift of Fortune would require – 250 of each T6 mats which drop once a century as it is… Until Anet actually address how little skill based rewards there are in the game and how the most profitable things are farming (often farming whatever Anet accidentally made worthwhile) or playing the market, this wouldn’t help.

Most ‘general’ champions around the maps, including Orr/Frostgorge. Can be a nice change just exploring a map and seeing a champ to fight without others around. Some event champions are designed not to be solo’d though, such as way too high health pool or resetting constantly.

Before the buff, solo’d the golem world boss and most of maw/fire ele (people interfered in the end, hard to fully solo). Golem and fire ele should still be solo-able, maw probably has too much health now. Close on Ulgoth, but he always had a timer. I remember getting close on the pirate boss in Bloodcoast Tide (with someone else there by dieing constantly) but having to pull out for some reason.

Did anyone solo Wurm/SB pre buff? I considered shatterer but his healing would probably be to high.

The other mes stealth skills give revealed, for what it’s worth.

This was raised in the mesmer forums so many months ago but no clarification was given. As it’s not giving stealth but a separate buff it may be intended.

It may be a bit of work to redesign but it would really be worth it. Let me sum this up in one slight rant of a sentence You have created an amazing open world that has so much story and character, likely the deciding purchasing factor for so many of your customers, yet forsake this to reward a biweekly grind and repeating dungeons/world bosses/champ kills over and over again. The living world, Scarlett, these bi weekly things are not Guild Wars. I honestly disbelieve a large number of people would buy the game based on the living grind, they buy it for PvE in general, WVW and PVP. Please do not place so much focus on your living world the rest is forgotten about. Please give people reason to remember why the open world is so well designed, what the story is, who the inhabitants of Tyria are. Make Arah path 5, put scarlet there and be done with it, the epitome of bad design can remain the epitome of annoyance in her rightful place.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Xae Isareth.1364:

I think where the failure is lies in the rewards. You don’t get nowhere near enough rewards for doing DEs compared to other things, because karma is not very useful. Also, doing something extremely short and simple like killing a champion gives the same if not more rewards than a long DE like escorting someone, so no one does the escorts.

We agree, this is something we’ve been discussing a lot lately and working on some various answers for, but I’m curious:

What rewards would you like to see from rewards? Would they be different when you’re leveling up than when you’re level 80? What would motivate you to want to go around the world playing as many different events as possible, rather than the same 4-5 over and over again?

Some of the fun challenges we are currently solving, but it’s great to hear peoples thoughts on this subject as well.

Token items Oh dear, I can expect rage for this. Completing events relating to Seraph rewards seraph tokens. These can be then traded for human cultural gear (weapons, only armor if human). Each zone relating to seraph dealers could have a token swap for items relevant to that level. Even more, you could make these vendors locked until certain events were complete – such as unique vendors only available once the Hirathi chain is open. Add unique rewards such as titles for actually contributing a lot (please stop this farm a living world to get a title, titles should mean something not represent the fact you signed on during a 2 week period and joined a zerg). So completing the full Seraph chain (you would actually have to take part in many of the events) and trading in a lot of tokens could get you a title ‘Slayer of Ulgoth’. Rewards based on contributing to the world in meaningful ways that relate to the lore, are totally lacking at the moment.

This makes perfect sense. More difficult events could reward more tokens. Events which have been up for a long time could reward more. It gives a reward related to the actual events. Farming events would be possible, but atleast zones may be a little more active. The big note is making things equal risk = reward. Also add scaling so bonuses can be added for completing a large amount of the event compared to someone who did 10% damage when you did 90%. So when people were at level 80, the amount of work they put into helping the world and completing events for the world actually can amount to some level of reward, that actually represents said contribution. Add really difficult events that have to be started from a contact in the city zone, cover different maps and have decent rewards.

Next the counter argument – we have so many tokens allready. Well, why not merge these with dungeon tokens. So no more dungeon tokens, instead you have ‘Badge of the Seraph’ relating to events which help out the seraph, completing large human chains, human storyline (you do so much for the queen yet get nothing from it…), random small chance drop on human enemies and a larger reward from dungeon tokens. Add some unique rewards/unlocks for completing each dungeon, such as only being able to access a dungeon sale vendor once you have completed all the paths of that dungeon.

tldr:

- Completing events relating to a specific organization rewards tokens for that.
- Harder events give more rewards. Contributing more gives more rewards. If chains have been open for a long time, they offer more rewards (urgency bonus). Additional benefit for completing more of a chain/completing events in multiple zones within a time frame. This stuff is hidden from the UI of course.
- Completing event chains unlocks dealers to spend the tokens, such as killing the centaur boss to open a unique dealer in that zone. Some dealers move through zones themself at random times to reward exploration.
- Rewards are not just weapons/armor. Special food, crafting mats, backpieces, even titles for contribution (T1 human = Protector of the innocent, T2 = Knight of her majesty , T3 = Lord of the unbroken).
- Remove dungeon tokens. Dungeons now give tokens relevant to that token type. Dungeon token dealers can only offer rewards based on your dungeon completion, so example, to get Arah gear you have to complete Arah story +3/4 paths. Then dungeon rewards are less about farming the dungeon and more about unlocking the ability to buy something for your contribution
- Most importantly, this can be tired to the heart system and make hearts continue to be worthwhile after completed.
-Continued with rant below—

I recall in Unreal Tournament (original, oldschool yo), the flags were kept inside your base. Capturing an enemies flag meant you had to push their base to take it then return it to your base – though if I recall correctly, you couldn’t return their flag if you didn’t have yours in your base, so the offensive/defense was balanced in an interesting way. Killing the flag bearer made the flag drop in it’s position, either ally picks up and it returns after x seconds or enemy picks up and can continue back.

The maps were relatively large, the mid point between the two basses was always something of interest – in some ways the major choke point of the map. Though there were hidden passages to get to the enemies base that required a bit of work to get through. My favourite were this map with a island floating above lava, with a mountain area in the middle. There were three caves through the mountain area which connected both basses, and harder routes through the underneeth part to flank their base (a castle) from the side.

I don’t know how well it would translate, but it was so fun in an FPS setting. Also scaled with number of players quite well. If an opponent pushed your flag and zerged you, you could stealth their flag so they couldn’t return cap. The independent/group play aspects worked well. Of course you could add additional objectives to provide buffs, portals or npc elements.

Just a thought. /roseglasses

Hi Jon/Jonathan,

Not sure if you are still reading this, a couple of points on mesmers which may have been overlooked.

1) Winds of Chaos (Staff autoattack)

- Projectile speed is too slow.
- In PvE events, it is difficult to tag mobs with the staff as the projectile takes so long to hit.
- As it’s so slow, you can use stealth, then have the projectile you cast 1s ago hit an opponent, breaking revealed.
- Please increase the projectile speed. The attack rate is fine, the projectile speed needs a buff. The phantasm (3) could also use with a slight buff to attack speed for the same reasons.

2) Arcane Thievery
- The tooltip states this is unblockable, this is incorrect. It can be blocked.
- The skill often fails. I cannot isolate why, even after frequent testing, making it unreliable to use.
- The CD is too long. Mesmers are so limited in condi removal that we can often only take one utility for it without affecting the build too much. This skill only removes three condis, and while the stealing skill is useful, it’s not often both come into play at the same time. Please reduce the CD a little, similar to the Null field change.

3) Malicious Sorcery (Scepter Cooldown trait)
- This is in the incorrect trait line.
- Inspiration is focused on phantasms and healing. The scepter is does not relate to either.
- The scepter is a condition weapon, likewise this trait boosts condition weapon. There is nothing else in this line regarding conditions and it has little synergy with the line in general.
- Please move to illusions tree as a master trait.

Justin ODell.9517:

For more context, I’m interested in improving matches beyond just finding players near your MMR. This includes doing things like preferring a better spread of professions and builds, matching people with dishonor with other people with dishonor, grouping people by rank or play style, etc…

These things can sound like a good idea, but can also cause you to wait in the queue longer. I want to know much longer than typical MMR pairing you’d be willing to wait. We can compensate for that wait by doing things like shutting off extra filters if you’ve been waiting, or adjusting the scoring weight by wait time.

Could you just have two options:

- Put me into the next match (assuming common sense requirements, no rank 5 in a rank 60 match) (You Only Queue Once button :P)
- I’ll wait, put me into a suitable match

Justin ODell.9517:

Better quality can mean what ever you want. E.g. only one or two warriors at most.

If you have an opinion on what a good match should look like, please share it.

Oh dear, that’s a lovely definition of ‘better quality’. :P

I would presume the logical request would be fairly equal rank, equal (active) numbers on both teams with some sort of class split (max of 2 of a class on each team if possible, take total pool of participants and allocate to create balance if possible). Of course that is a lot of conditionals, especially for higher rank players, but we are talking about ideals right?