Guild Wars 2

Katz.5143:

I too would like a 1 week minimum break between temporary content. Two weeks would be even better. 2 weeks on, two weeks off, repeat.

I made a thread about this a few months ago: ( link) It seemed like a fair compromise that most people could live with. Unfortunately it hasn’t happened yet…

The original poster’s comments are irrelevant. He doesn’t address the following problems:

-SAB was overlapped with another Living Story chapter which also ate up people’s time,

-SAB was promised to come back, which implied all rewards would return as well,

-Anet never warned people the backpack would not be returning.

Not to mention the fact that maybe some people didn’t have the “minimum required time” that the original poster has calculated in order to force themselves to play content that they were told is coming back later anyway.

Some people work. Some people have lives, families, or go on vacations. And some of those people liked SAB and wanted the rewards associated with it, but are excluded from ever getting them. That is the issue.

Aki.7891:

That would mean that the SAB skins are the only ones that haven’t/wont be released twice, right?

You know, I wouldn’t even mind paying gems to get my blue backpack if that’s what it took. I’d brave the RNG and try for some black lion ticket scraps.

But… no. Preserving the specialness of the first edition backpacks seems to be more important than my willingness to pay Arenanet money to get one. Oh well.

Tera: Rising has swimsuits and school uniforms available for micro-transcations. I bet they’re making a killing on ’em right now: link link

Banatine.3691:

Exclusivity breeds elitism, and we REALLY don’t need any more of that around here. i own plenty of ‘exclusive’ items in real life, but i certainly would begrudge other people for getting them as well.

I agree completely…

The current model of temporary content just excludes players – who through no fault of their own – may be left out.

I essentially paid for a game that continually dangles a carrot in front of my face and never allows me to get it.

The original post in this thread should be a wake-up call for Arenanet.

Yet, no reply from them for 12 days and counting… Why?

road range.6293:

I agree. Some new content is fun. But, It’s killing the rest of the game…

Sir, your entire post was beautifully and eloquently written. And I agree wholeheartedly.

Also, +1 to the original poster.

Slushey.8236:

It was 25 Bauble Bubbles last time for the backpack. Assuming you did each map available once per day, you earned 7 Bubbles (plus enough Baubles probably to make. But lets continue to assume 7. This should have taken no more than 20 – 30 minutes. If you ran it on two characters per day, you would have made at least 14 (possibly 16 assuming you gathered enough Baubles). But again, lets continue to assume 14 per day on two characters. Hell, let’s just assume you did 1 character per day in 20 – 30 minutes and got only 7 Bubbles. Do it for 4 days in a row and you would have had 28 Bauble Bubbles. You had not only 4 days, you had WEEKS, to collect the Bubbles. People put time and effort into earning the backpiece. It’s now a rare item that couldn’t just be bought with gold. If you didn’t have 20 – 30 minutes each afternoon for at least 4 days, I’m dearly sorry that you missed it. But people like me earned that backpiece and bringing it back just ruins the aesthetic of it. Nothing in this game is guaranteed to come back, get it while it’s here.

What if I couldn’t spare four days, on top of the other days required to finish all the other overlapping Living Story content at the time? What if I went on vacation? What if I work 60 hours a week?

You seem to be saying that if other people earned the backpack now, it would somehow invalidate the work you put into getting it. This makes no sense to me at all. Look at it this way. As time goes on, more people will have Legendary weapons – Does that mean that the people who crafted a Legendary 6 months after release are somehow invalidated by the people who crafted one a year after release? Of course not. Those players are just getting the rewards they want – on a schedule that suits them.

I just find it ridiculous that Arenanet would decide to bring back old content (i.e., the original SAB worlds and achievements) but not bring back the associated rewards. It is extremely frustrating to gamers with tight schedules like myself.

I find myself playing the living story despite not wanting to.

I’d much rather work on other areas of the game, but because living story is time constrained, I feel I have to play it if I want the time-limited rewards.

And that kind of sucks.

Living story has sucked out the relaxed, casual experience the game used to have. Now the game just feels like a bunch of tasks and assignments with deadlines.

Thomassassinate.9370:

It makes it unique, that if you accessed the very first super adventure box you get it.

What about the people who did participate, but didn’t have time to get the 20 bubble baubles necessary, due to time constraints?

That really isn’t fair…

If it was akin to the festivals from Guild Wars 1, where you got a prize simply for showing up, that would be different. But getting 20 bubble baubles was not a quick and easy thing to do.

I’m unhappy about this as well. I made my own thread here voicing my concerns.

I was very disappointed today, to find that I can’t get the backpack from the original SAB. I had no interest in any of the other skins the first time around. But that backpack was PERFECT for my asura character.

However, I didn’t have time to complete SAB, due to the fact that it was overlapped with another living story, and I did not have time to complete both, due to work and home life.

Since I knew SAB was returning, I saved ALL my accumulated baubles and continue coins for this day…

Only to discover that the thing I wanted all along is NOT available.

I understand that you wanted the backpack to be “special” to those who participated in the first one, but what about people like me, who participated, but couldn’t log the hours to get those 20 bubble baubles? (I got 9.)

The new green/yellow one will not suffice. It will look completely wrong for my character’s colour scheme.

What point is there in depriving your players the chance to get the things they want for their characters, through no fault of their own?

Think about this. Please.

+1 to original post.

When I was at work today, I thought to myself, I would LOVE to go home and relax and play some Guild Wars 2 and finally finish that cool gauntlet that I haven’t had time to do all week. I’m gonna get that Liadri mini for sure today!

So I log on.

Oh, there’s a patch. New content… Right. Okay, no big deal. The gauntlet’s still there. Nothing to worry about. Right?

Hm, a new cutscene and some battles, with a new giggly villain who’s after the queen. Okay, sure, kinda neat. But, back to business… I can still get down to the gauntlet, can’t I?

Nope. Turns out the giggly villain sue is hatching evil schemes down there. Fine. So what do I have to do to get back down to the gauntlet?

Hmmmm. Close five portals. Doesn’t sound too bad. The living story blurb says Scarlet’s minions are attacking Frostgorge. Let’s go there…

Hm, nope. I’m in overflow. What the hell is going on? Fine, I’ll try later.

Later: Scarlet’s minions are attacking Blazeridge Steppes now. Okay! Waypointing there… Nope, overflow again. Fine, I’ll try again LATER. Jeeeeeeez.

Even later: Scarlet’s minions are attacking sparkfly fen. Guess what? OVERFLOW. AAAAAARGH.

I finally dig through the forums and find – buried – a single post from Anet reminding people that you have to get in within the first 10 minutes of every hour. UGH. That would have been nice information to have known inside the game somewhere. But fine.

I pop into the event at the top of the hour… What the…

I have to finish five of these? AND THEY’RE AN HOUR LONG EACH? And they’re mindless grinding with monsters that are not fun to fight??

That’s a minimum of five hours of grinding just so I can get back to playing the content that I want to play. And apparently the “Portal Closer” achievement is just a prerequisite for MORE stuff that I may or may not want to do. With my schedule the way it is, looks like I may not get my liadri mini after all.

I’ve been a critic of the living story for a lot of reasons, but I was actually beginning to enjoy the Queen’s Jubilee. Now we have living story content that directly impedes the completion of other living story content.

All I wanted to do today was fight in the bloody gauntlet.

But no.

Thanks alot.

(EDIT: Yes, I am aware that you can get someone to portal you down. I waited around DR for about half an hour trying to find someone who would take me to no avail.)

The living story chapters do seem to have quite a few bugs. Anet scrambles to fix them, but like the OP said, I wonder if they’re getting enough playtesting before launch…?

All content releases are bound to have a bug or two, but I think we’re noticing it more because the content releases are so frequent. (I still think that the two week schedule is not a good thing).

I can’t believe this thread has gotten this many posts.

OP, if you didn’t like the light steampunk elements in Guild Wars 2 why have you stayed with the game? It was obvious since launch that that was the direction they were going (as if the addition of an engineer class and the addition of guns wasn’t enough of a giveaway).

And we knew since GW1 that the Asura would be showing up. And they had pretty advanced technology back then!

+1 to this.

I’m not quitting yet, but I really hope Anet will change their strategy soon.

I want to start off this post on a positive note. I just want to say, for the record, that I am extremely impressed with the new permanent content you have added thus far (such as the new achievement system, account wallet, PVP improvements, etc). That’s all great.

BUT…

I’m here to write about the Living Story and its two-week schedule, as many others have done. It is causing problems, most notably for players who fall into these categories:

a) casual players
b) new players
c) people who work full time
d) people with children
e) people who take holidays
f) people who play other games
g) any combination of the above categories.

As evidenced by these threads (click each number to read):

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 (there are more, but too many links put me over 5000 characters).

In response, you tell us that some lingering permanent content will be added and that we should be happy with that. Unfortunately this is missing the point entirely. Adding permanent content does not solve the problems that this schedule creates. The issue is not that we want all the living story content to be permanent content – some of us might – but a workable compromise is simply to give us a schedule that allows everyone to enjoy it equally. After all, the lingering “permanent” content does not allow us to go back and get item rewards and achievements we missed, right? Nor does it allow us to get the full experience of each event. Picking through the wiki or forums to find out what you missed isn’t very fun.

Flame and Frost felt right. So did Secret of Southsun. But now I feel stressed out whenever I load up Guild Wars 2 because you are essentially asking me to devote time (and lots of it) in a short time span toward events and activities that I may not necessarily feel like doing at that time.

I don’t feel like I have a choice of what I do on Guild Wars 2 anymore, because in the short time amount of time I have to play, I feel like I have to dump it into the Living Story achievements in order to secure my prize. I guess the problem is, I really want the prizes. They’re good prizes. I want to get them. But you’re setting the bar too high, in too short a time span.

To make matters worse, the living story chapters are becoming grindier and grindier (farm 20 events, play 15 rounds of an unenjoyable mini-game, kill 100 aetherblades; effectively: kill 10 rats!). This isn’t fun… It’s repetitive and unengaging. This sort of thing is what makes other MMO’s not fun, and is why I became a Guild Wars player in the first place, because up until now you guys have known better than to do this.

Now that there are daily achievements associated with the living story chapters, this presents an additional barrier for casual players to set aside a single day (or even two) to power-play the content and finish it on time.

What if you can’t afford to play the six or three days required within the 2-week span? Because life got in the way, you will never get a cool reward? How does this create a positive experience for the player?

I understand that not everyone is unhappy with this new schedule, but a lot of people are. The people who fall into the categories listed above love guild wars 2 as much as the hardcore players do. We are as much a part of your player base as they are. Please listen to us.

I honestly wouldn’t mind if they removed Living Story altogether, as all of the other permanent content they continue to add is excellently done.

2 weeks is too short. I’ve said this in a previous thread and so have lots of other people.

4 weeks is also too short, if another event is stacked on top of it (i.e., bazzar + cut throat politics).

Charak.9761:

I dont want it longer cause the content is doable in 1-day

And… This is no longer true. With Queen’s Jubilee, there are only 14 static achievements possible toward the required 16 to get the reward; the others must come from dailies.

Which means minimum 3 days.

I agree with the original poster. I brought up some of the same concerns in my thread here. It feels like the things that made Guild Wars 2 great at launch are being slowly eroded by the new treadmill content.

The user base seems very divided over this though… I wonder how many people, statistically, are actually happy with the new content? I would say it almost warrants another email poll.

panzer.6034:

New content comes out and a literally takes 3 hours to finish off. The rest of the the 2 weeks till then next release is your break.

Secret of Southsun was like that, and that was good. I finished everything in one day. But this is not possible with Sky Pirates.

I’ve spent way more than 3 hours simply trying to fill out the various “Aetherblade Assassin” achievement tracks, and I still haven’t gotten them all.

Not to mention that the Aetherblade Retreat can take a few hours to do, the jumping puzzle can take a long time if you fall at all (or lag), and the fact that all of the Aetherblade caches are in jump puzzles of their own that also take time…

3 hours? Really?

What about the people who haven’t explored much, and have to travel for hours to get to the jump puzzle locations? They can somehow finish all this content in 3 hours?

I’m sorry, but if this could have been completed in 3 hours, I would have completed it already, but I haven’t. * shrugs * This is not the same pace as Southsun, not even close. With Southsun we had double the time and half the content to finish.

I am all for making living stories that can be done in a day; then at least people can find time to set aside one day to do them. But that’s not what we currently have.

And since we don’t have that, I proposed the idea of breaks between Living Stories. Or at least bring them back to the same pace as Southsun – Minimum one month, and content that doesn’t require hours of grinding.

Jemmi.6058:

I understand your desire to want to play more content, but you choose to play less regularly. That means that this can’t be that important to you, and I do not see why the entire game should change and warp itself to your personal schedule.

First of all, I do not choose to play less regularly. I have a job. And no, I will not quit it to play Guild Wars.

Secondly, at the beginning of my original post I stated that Guild Wars 2 is one of my favourite games of all time, and therefore very important to me. If the game wasn’t important to me, I wouldn’t have gone through the trouble to express my concerns here.

Just because I do not play the game as much as you does not mean I love the game any less.

As for your idea of extending the living story periods, I think it would be an improvement, but some of the issues I raised in my original post would still stand.

Okay. I’d just like to say foremostly that Guild Wars 2 is definitely one of my favourite games of all time, and one that I always come back to.

However, I am a casual gamer, which means I don’t have as much time to play the game as other people do. Some weeks I don’t get online to play at all.

With that said… Can we have a break in between living story chapters?

I’ve seen mention in previous threads that there doesn’t seem to be time to finish the living story content and the normal (permanent) content at the same time, and I definitely feel that way… I keep postponing dungeon runs, personal stories, exploration, etc. because there’s always time pressure to finish the current living story chapter before it goes away.

But the problem is, the living story never goes away, because a new chapter begins as soon as the current one finishes, so all I seem to do is living stories now.

To make matters worse, living story events now overlap – Such as Flame and Frost and Super Adventure Box. I didn’t have time to do both. I just didn’t. Which is a shame because I REALLY wanted one of those pixel weapons. Now Dragon Bash and Sky Pirates are overlapping, I still haven’t found time to do the Aetherblade Retreat and it’s going to be gone less than a week. I likely won’t finish it, nor get my mini, because I have things in real life I need to take care of. * shrugs *

There are other problems too. Foremostly, it seems difficult to find PUGS to run normal content now; finding people for dungeons seems harder than ever, and the only solution seems to be to join a large active guild (which I have no desire to do, partly because I wouldn’t have time to contribute to one).

For people who enjoy the living story’s narrative (like me), there is an additional problem. Since the living story is a linear sequence of events, missing a chapter is like skipping a chapter in a book. Let’s say a user goes on holiday for 3 weeks and has limited internet access. They miss an entire chapter because chapters only last two weeks. The next time they get into the game, they are thrust into the midst of events that make no sense because they missed the previous narrative. Sure, they can look up what happened on the internet, but how fun is that?

It feels like casual gamers are being pressured to play when they can’t or don’t want to. After all, if you don’t play – on the predetermined schedule – you don’t get the rewards and you’re excluded. Hardcore players are kept happy, while casual players are left out. And that kind of stinks.

So what I propose… is giving us a break in between living stories. Maybe two weeks at minimum, maybe a month? So people can relax, enjoy their loot, breathe, and get some notice in advance as to when the next one is coming so they can make time for it. The game will still experience a constant stream of new content, but at a pace that can accommodate everybody.

I imagine a lot of casual gamers like me (who don’t come onto the forums often) feel the same way. Please consider it.

I agree with the original poster. Not everybody has time to play the game every day. Casual gamers love this game as much as hardcore gamers do, they just don’t have as much time to spare.

Keiara Grisbane, level 80 blood mage. Daggers and lifestealing.

RP character. Paleness due to a condition that requires her to drink blood to survive (can you guess what it is?)

I agree with the original poster; my necro is my main character, please don’t make me listen to these low-key whimpery groans every time I cast a mark. I also had no problem with Necrotic Grasp’s sound before (though I agree it was a little loud). Please fix!

Been seeing this a lot too… I bet this explains why material prices keep dropping…

I had a theory that the way they do it is to mine node, guest to another server, mine fresh node, then guest to yet another server… ?

I tried it… It would work in theory (if you’re very lazy or automated) but the node randomization would mean you’d have to walk sometimes to get to the next node… So it doesn’t explain how these bots seem to appear exactly at the node they want to farm. shrug

Hi, it’s the original poster again.

Krathalos.3461:

a) My warrior can solo camps by itself. Thieves require far more to be able to do it.

It’s one thing to be able to take supply camps solo, and another to be able to take them and not be killed by a zerg of 6-8 people who are hunting you down while you lead them through packs of monsters then disappear, run away and begin taking another camp across the map, causing us to endlessly chase you. I could waste my entire evening hunting you, but since it’s futile and not fun, why would I want to? Furthermore, if thief is the only class that is capable of doing this, there is a balance issue. I’ve never heard of a warrior being able to fight and outwit a group of 6-8 dedicated players for an extended period of time (over 20 minutes, or longer) without dying.

Krathalos.3461:

b) They weren’t competent, then… A group of three people could easily be communicating and targetting, whereas the other group may have not been as coordinated.

They were competent. We were in party, we were communicating, we were calling targets. We were wiped more than once. The thief had one teammate helping him only one of those times.

Krathalos.3461:

I don’t even think you play this game that often. This is, once again, one of the biggest complaints about stealth by thieves. If you’re using a channeling ability, stealth does not interrupt it. Hopefully the bold will help you understand.

I play this game daily. And it’s good to know that some channeled skills – from some classes – do not get interrupted, but the fact remains that some of the skills I use with necro do. Otherwise I wouldn’t have made my original post to begin with. Here is what happens, and maybe the bold will help you understand: My skill stops casting abruptly, and then the icon on my skillbar goes black and needs to recharge for a few seconds the same way it does when I’ve been dazed. There.

If this is not intentional from the developers, then perhaps I’ve turned up a bug? If it IS intentional, I’d suggest that Anet determine whether all classes – or none at all – will have their skills interrupted when a thief enters stealth. The playing field would be level, at least.

Krathalos.3461:

Stealth also doesn’t interrupt skills in progress. This is the complaint by thieves. For example, if you stealth while a Longbow Ranger is using Rapid Fire, every single arrow will hit you while in stealth. I don’t think you even know what you’re talking about with this part.

See bolded section above.

Clark Skinner.4902:

OP, keep in mind you are posting this to a bunch of thieves. They’re not going to be happy with you asking to take away their invulnerability.

LOL no kidding. I had thought to post this elsewhere (as stealth is not exclusive to thieves), but thief seems to be the only class that is able to abuse it right now, so I figured this was the place to post.

oZii.2864:

What the OP should have done is roll and or play a thief. Then posted about a single fix or something.

I have played a thief, but I did not enjoy the playing the class. As far as I’m concerned, enjoying the game is what we’re here for, and facing off against permastealth thieves is not fun. I really don’t care if I lose a battle as long as I know that I have a chance to win. I have enjoyed every other aspect of WvW so far.

Anyway, despite all the resistance from the thieves on this forum who are currently enjoying their permastealth abilities, more and more people are rolling permastealth builds and abusing them and people are beginning to notice. Every day this week in WvW, I have heard multiple complaints from people about how annoying these unkillable thief builds are. It is a problem.

I honestly thought my original post did a good job of addressing this problem with a reasonable compromise that would not neuter the thief class, but since attempting to do so has evoked hostility from people, I will bow out of this conversation for now.

I wish you all good luck, and I’ll see you on the battlefield.

So I was in WvW most of the night and noticed a lot of thieves using the perma-stealth pistol build (I think it’s called the Wild Bill build?) . I saw no less than three thieves who were able to do the following solo:

a) take supply camps
b) wipe groups of 3-4 competent players while losing less than 50% health
c) engage a group of 6 determined players for 20 minutes without dying

So, while fighting these thieves over and over, I realized precisely what makes stealth so overpowered:

Its ability to interrupt your current skills in progress.

I lost count of the number of times that I targeted a thief, cast Dark Pact to try to immobilize them, but before the skill could even finish casting, poof, he’s gone, and my skill suddenly stops in mid-cast and my skill timer resets. If I had at least been able to successfully cast my spell, I could’ve still laid some AOE down on his last location, landed some successful hits with my dagger, or at least done something to inflict some damage, but no.

So how about this? Add a rule that allows skills-in-progress to connect against a player even if they enter stealth before your skill is finished casting. After that, you lose target as usual. I think that would at least give regular players a fighting chance against these builds, because right now any skill that does not have an instantaneous casting time is useless due to the fact that these thieves typically only unstealth for a single second or less.

In short, I do not believe that nerfing the Thief’s skills (duration, recharge time, etc) is necessarily the way to fix the stealth abuse issue. It seems to me that the stealth mechanic itself that needs to be looked at and reworked.

-PT