Guild Wars 2

I’d like to see the LS1 dungeon instances adjusted so they can be done single-player – partly by toning the mob difficulty down, but also by including allies from the personal story. (Maybe even give us the option to choose which four.)

But aside from those, the open-world stuff from LS1 could quite easily be summarized in short personal story instances.

A R W E N.6895:

First of all, I could repeat that content as much as I wanted to get my rewards.

Secondly, the end chest reward was useful toward something (high end armor in terms of cosmetics)

GW2 dungeons and fractals provide tokens that work in exactly the same way. Try again.

Yeah… the biggest problems have already been mentioned. You let players vote, they’ll start kittening at each other as well as the developers. Anything we get to vote for has to be minor in effect, or non-binding – the ranger CDI for example.

Charr.

(…okay, tengu.)

And that’s why loyalty to a game isn’t the greatest idea.

I think it might have been available in earlier betas, but that colour isn’t available to players post-launch. A bit odd since you can pick some horrendous fluorescent shades for hair.

The problem is, discussions of how to solve problems that gold selling creates, that don’t discuss gold selling itself, are also getting deleted. When it comes to blocking whispers from unwanted parties, that’s a suggestion that’s valid for a whole lot of reasons beyond just RARRRR GOLD SELLERS BAD. It’s actually a sensible feature that would allow players some means to mitigate an annoyance without having to defer the problem to ArenaNet.

Actually, on looking at it again I prefer the female version above the waist. And I’m not a fan of the boots on either.

Maybe it wouldn’t look like a jumpsuit on humanoid characters but the male version has serious issues with charr – for reasons that the character artists became familiar with early in the game’s development.

All the detail is on the front. You don’t see the front on charr because of their posture. You see their shoulders, head, and back.
So when the back is devoid of interest, the whole outfit looks devoid of interest. A couple dragon figures isn’t going to hold the illusion for long.

The problem with GW2 dungeons, and high-level PvE in general, is that DPS meters would actually be useful in the present state of affairs. How much damage you do is the primary determinant of how useful you are.

If ANet configured most encounters so that thoughtful use of CC was the most effective way to complete them – for example feedback vs. certain ranged bosses, and retaliation vs. flamethrowers – DPS would not be as important and thus the idea of a DPS meter would not raise alarm bells. It’d be obvious that anyone basing their entire build on DPS was missing the point.

Right now, they aren’t missing the point. That is the game.

It does affect their profit, even if just a little. I’d have bought this set for a start.

They’re probably adjusting the dimensions so Rox can wear one.

Chrispy.5641:

Coming up next :::

Kessex Hills Chamion Farm Train
Brisban Wildlands Champion Farm Train
etc.
etc.
etc.

People will eventually learn new areas, and then all the whining and complaining about champ farm traisn is going to start all over again. Removing the farm train from the starter areas isn’t doing much, just saying.

Those are more appropriate venues however. I’m not particularly keen on champ trains being the first experience new players get in the game. They seem to be magnets for the wrong kinds of people.

Or it could just be they get really bored from all that button-mashing.

No Walking.6349:

1) Make the loot equivalent to a world boss chest
2) Make all red/green/blue servers go into the same OS map, EOTM style.

Hahaha.

Now that’s evil. I am a little concerned that OS is just not a very good map for a WvW dungeon though. It’s full of chokepoints that are going to be impossible to break through, even without the siege equipment anymore.

I do like the idea, but it’d have to be on a different map. The arena is a good reason to merge the servers on the puzzle, but ideally it needs a way to choose which map you end up on, to make organising guild fights a bit easier.

If they added a different dungeon zone (perhaps more than one) with a less difficult layout, it might make a good venue for a world boss chest.

Actually, it could just be a reworked GW1 Underworld.

Omnomberry bars, of course.

DrDivine.5378:

-They feel less humanoid than other races, A lot of people will probably disagree with me on this, but I like the all on fours running animation of the charr. I love Skyrim, but the designs of the argonian and khajiit bothered me because they seemed a little too human-like for my taste. The khajiit, another feline-like race, looks like a human with a cat head, not messing around with anatomy and behaviors too much. That’s what I like about the charr, they possess human-like qualities such as speaking english and using technology, but they also have different anatomy and behaviors that mix qualities of both man and beast.

That’s something that’s always bothered me about Elder Scrolls games. Their beast races don’t just look like humans with beast heads, they are reskinned humans with beast heads and tails. For whatever reason they’re too lazy to do another animation rig.

I’m not really a fan of the charr gait, but I’ll give Arenanet credit for trying.

That’s 51 unique borderlands.

I understand that community designers can attempt to alleviate the workload, but in fact with the amount of testing and fixing the designers’ errors that will be required, it’s unlikely to make any significant difference. The other problem is that players are only going to see a handful of these borderlands because any one server will only be pitted against a small number of servers, and NA/EU servers never meet. So, it’d be easier to just work on a few new maps and put them in a random pool.

[Edit: For the record, fighting in the Gate of Madness, Kaineng or Abaddon’s Mouth would still be amazing. Better if you didn’t have to do it every week.]

Suddenly I’m thinking bringing in 10-15 guild members to pull a 300 against massive hordes of zerglings is a brilliant idea.

Out of curiosity, does it still work that way if the accounts belong to the same person? I’m happy with my costumes presently but I’m wondering if this is something I should be careful of in future.

Bloodstealer.5978:

Junkpile.7439:

Well you don’t have to exploit just because you can.

Why is using multi monitor exploiting.. Nvidia Surround etc are legitimate – just ask ANET, they support it. Some people like to use 2 or 3 monitor setups for amore immersive gaming experience, just cos some don’t want to or cant doesn’t make it an exploit and certainly not a hack.

Surround sound doesn’t allow you to place attacks in locations that you otherwise couldn’t. Ultra-wide FoV does.

Really the best way to prevent exploiting ACs is to completely redesign them to use an arc like catas, mortars and trebs. Might actually require some talent to land them in weird places.

I’m loving the way this thread jumps 8 months like nothing happened.

Charr have this thing called sarcasm. I thought other races had it too but I’m starting to wonder.

It’s not there to deter spies. It’s there to deter bandwagoning during season 2.

In WvW it pretty much is an aggro magnet. I usually get a fair amount of attention, what with my tendency to play light armour zerker classes and all… a week or two ago an ANet staffer flipped on their tag partway through a fight over a tower (can’t remember if it was IoJ or FA) and it was like a switch. I could have stood on a naked staff ele next to him and no-one would have fired a shot at me.

That’d be a whole lot of work just to throw existing story out the window. I don’t mind them doing a temporal split… but it did work more easily in GW1 with much of the game in 4-8 player instances.

For the next season they could just throw a personal story component into it, which, like the release story, you could play through at a later date even if you missed some of the content that went along with it.

It’d be like an opportunity to replay all the instances from LS season 1, but with a bit more to work with instead of having to chuck a couple in the fractals and leave the rest behind.

Allie Murdock.8152:

I’m leaving ArenaNet, not quitting Guild Wars. Nice try though.

Good! Wouldn’t want to have to send Sadi after you…

BobbyStein.2315:

I’d like to echo Colin’s sentiments. Thanks to the OP and everyone else for posting your constructive feedback here. We’re always evaluating our past work and looking for ways to improve our future releases. Sometimes those improvements may come in the form of developing new technology to support our vision or improve the player experience. Other times it means evolving our writing and game design processes. In other cases, resource and scheduling changes are necessary to support the additional workload. The potential solutions will vary depending on the challenge in front of us.

Part of the development process is prioritization, so I’d like to know what you feel are the highest impact items you think would improve our storytelling delivery. What are your top three requests?

Hope you don’t mind if I drop just one.

1. Intrigue. GW2 has been very good guys vs. bad guys so far. Aside from the overarching dragon plot where there’s little room for ambiguity, we could use some bad guys who aren’t superhuman, don’t know they’re bad guys, and may change sides if it suits them.

Orr’s cleaning up. Imagine the political fireworks if some charr legion decided to finish what they started 250 years ago? Strained, perhaps broken relations with Kryta and Ebonhawke, nervous truce with the Pact and Lionguard, envy and skirmishes with the other High Legions, looking over their shoulders at Kralkatorrik and Palawa Joko, and in the middle of all this Rata Sum is going to find some way to profit.

HoD fell out of T1 a month after release, when much of Titan Alliance left the game. The only relevant experience left now will be the people who just transferred down a couple weeks ago.

Moa isn’t useless, not by a long shot. It’s pretty braindead to take it into a 1v1, but it works nicely in 3-5 man combat for negating condi bunkers. Time Warp and Mass Invis are certainly more useful in most situations in WvW, but that’s just because mesmer is lucky enough to have 3 useful elites.

I think the dislike of it amongst some mesmers stems from a misunderstanding. It’s not going to turn someone into an easy kill, it just stops them from doing what they were doing for 10 seconds. When what they were doing was causing your party serious problems, it’s handy to have the respite, but you have to do some work to make sure it succeeds.

There’s no situation I can think of where that applies to an elementalist. If a mesmer is casting Moa on a staff ele, it’s either for a joke or because they have no idea what they’re doing. Staff ele produces very little pressure and it’s easier to kill without morphing it.

The guild groups of that size went to Maguuma, SoS and TC.

Cloak and Dagger, most likely. That’s not a cheat, they’re just using you to refresh stealth.

I read the forums. Server meetings are always held when I can’t be there and listening to over an hour of complaining got old pretty fast so I gave up on those.

Most of SBI turns up or doesn’t regardless of what people on the forums decide to do, and our performance week-to-week doesn’t relate either. I’m seeing a bigger population during Oceanic/SEA timezones than last week, entirely due to the influx of casual players. They’re stopping us from losing everything this week, but we still lose a lot overnight.

Not to say the guilds aren’t making an impact – without AoD around it’d be much worse. They’re not the strongest WvW guild, but they make an honest effort and they have enough numbers for it to count.

Of course, my point of view comes from someone who almost exclusively plays Oceanic hours with other people who don’t attend meetings for much the same reasons as me, and almost all of them ignore the WvW forums as well. So there’s some sample bias there and it’s entirely possible that the NA crew pays more attention to the community WvW organisations.

I wouldn’t tip SBI for second too soon – IoJ beat us squarely over the mid-week days last week in effectively the same matchup (aside from two departed FA guilds), and IoJ had an early deficit to overcome that week too. The population is a little different this week – achievement hunters and all – but it’s the regulars who have the experience in winning fights, so any timezones where we were weak before, we’re still weak now.

I don’t think SBI is likely to finish any lower than fourth though. The latest exodus doesn’t seem to have hit us anywhere near as hard as the one at the beginning of 2013.

Can you say naked until the 14th?

Map completion in EotM counts towards nothing. So, there’s no reason to change it based on that alone.

Colours aren’t truly random either. It’s still based on rating, there’s just a random seed applied. Chances are that higher ranked servers are more likely to roll higher than lower; however, they can ‘roll up’ to the next tier’s red or blue rank as well, so the effect will hopefully be minimal. If most tiers have massive rating gaps between them, as NA did a couple months ago, then I’d expect to see a lot of first-placed worlds in the green spot.

I’d think about the first and third. The third one covers a number of different stories, as it’s essentially a biographical fiction; in terms of quality it’s head and shoulders above the other two but because of its pacing it doesn’t appeal to the video gamer crowd as much.

First book, Ghosts of Ascalon, is not too bad though the backstory explanations are very heavy-handed. It gives a better taste of the world (and is more recent, by the timeline) than Edge of Destiny, which I’d skip all the way to the last chapter if I were to read it again. EoD reads like a transcript of a D&D game – aside from a history of what happened to Glint and Snaff there’s nothing much to see there.

Just a random thought (and I apologise if this has already been mentioned; respect to the devs for keeping up with 62 pages but I can’t spare that sort of time).

What if rangers had some traits, perhaps in Wilderness Survival or wherever applicable, that reduced condition duration – and even a grandmaster trait or two providing outright immunity to one, e.g. poison or blind?

For example Sight Beyond Sight. Interesting skill from the Rit in GW1. Perhaps when you have a spirit active, you can’t be blinded – GM trait in Nature Magic line.

It’s too small to matter. If you kill a zerg right now, you have 1-3 minutes to do what you want before they’re back again. If you’re looking for a tactical effect from winning a battle, travel time would need to be a lot longer still – whether through larger maps or more obstructions.

But the problem with longer travel times is that people work around it by playing in ever-larger groups (or by using warriors that can run from anything) to minimise the risk of dying. If you die, you’re stuck running through friendly territory where there’s nothing to do because you already own it.

Realistically you’d need a combination of changes to make increased travel time (whether through less waypoints or otherwise) work without making the game worse.

• Disincentivizing zerging – there are a number of suggestions in this thread.
• Making playing close to spawn as useful as playing further away, so those who die have something to do without running all the way back. Participation in defense, reinforcement events etc. might qualify.
• Making attrition count. Respawning defeated players at the nearest uncontested waypoints would help. Reducing the speed of revive assistance on downed allies would too.

The main issue right now is that avoiding death means playing in huge groups. I suspect that if the easiest way not to die required playing WvW in other ways, it might go some way to rectifying the zerging issue.

What if small groups were more survivable and got better rewards?
What if there was more benefit to attacking several structures at once than sending everyone to the same one?
And how could you do that?

They’re on special and her face is driving me crazy with all those close-ups.

Behellagh.1468:

Then there’s the in game jokes that they may want to change so China gets them rather than think it’s wacky dialog.

Localizing a game isn’t the same as localizing a word processor.

How much wood could a fahrar charr tar…

Yeah, things like that will translate but it’ll lose the joke. Arenanet is quite fond of wordplay – keeping the spirit would require a rewrite. Because Chinese has so many homphones it’s easy enough to do but requires knowledge of the language that can’t be expected of the writers in Seattle.

Twinny.9304:

-10% Magic find boost (for their world) harsh i know but it would encourage people not to be fairweathered players and push that little bit harder

Actually it would encourage players to transfer to the top of T1. If it affected PvE outside of WvW as well, it would be a PR disaster.

There are no queues or overnight crew.

Proposal
Use the event system to provide rewards for engaging and defeating groups of players based on odds

Summary
At present, the only ‘event’ that spawns on a large fight are the orange swords on the map, and the only rewards are loot bags – unless you’re guaranteed a win you’re usually better off running. If possible, an event could spawn, on a timer like defend events, that provides rewards on conclusion. The idea is to make actually fighting players a good idea, and the more the better – so long as you are effective.

Details
- Standard 3 minute timer on engagement, with at least 5 (approximately) players involved from either server.
- On conclusion of the timer, a reward chest is given to players that participated in the fight, based on a number of variables. I’ll list them from most important to least.

- Odds. If you have 5 players, and you were fighting 20, your rewards are 4x standard. If you have 20, and you were fighting 5, your rewards are 1/4x standard. Zerging people gives you poor rewards, busting zergs gives excellent rewards. Fighting two servers at the same time is a good idea.

- Opposing players killed by proportion of total opposing players. If you killed 20% of their force, you get less rewards than for killing 80%. This should probably be on a logarithmic scale – good rewards in general, but if you didn’t kill any players you get no rewards. Soloing a zerg gets you nothing but a repair bill.

- Total participation. You get slightly better rewards for a 30-player fight than a 10-player fight, to offset the sense that players joining a fight are taking rewards away from their server.

Risk evaluation
My greatest concern would be that a system like this could be farmed, and thus the nature of the rewards would have to be carefully considered. However, there is a counterpoint that PvP combat is exactly what should be rewarded in WvW, or at least brought to the level where it’s more appealing than capping empty towers.

Something to be considered is the possibility of people killing most of the opposite side and then ressing up every 3 minutes. If this system were to be implemented, it would need to find a way to make this non-viable, such as forced resurrection at the nearest waypoint on defeat, setting a reward cap per zone per day, requiring all players of at least one side in the area to be defeated or forced out, etc.

It could also use some reason for those to happen more often. Presently it’s pretty easy to run around a map capping stuff for the WXP and avoiding confrontation with other groups. While I don’t mind mobility, the concept of territory has no real meaning in GW2 – you’re not much more likely to run into resistance at one end of the map than the other unless there’s a high population and they’re not zergballing.

I’m not entirely sure if this is a good idea, but providing the Bloodlust stat boosts only to small groups within a certain range of assets held by their server might aid in this. But I think a bigger draw would be providing more rewards for keeping assets than taking them. Where rewards are only given for people participating in events that’s going to require some thinking….

Stealth is beside the point – aside from PU the mesmer lacks the easy access to defensive boons that most of the other popular classes have. The problem is that this defensive stuff comes with stacking stealth which is just bleagggrrrgaghaghhhghghghhghhgerrrfff.

I despise the trait but I’m an idiot not to use it.

Long posts there.

I’m glad to see some consideration of the bandwagoning issues faced by lower-tier servers – one of the things that often grates about posts on server community from those based on JQ or BG is that they can seem oblivious to how badly a server’s WvW community is wrecked by a player exodus. So far, only 4 out of 24 servers on NA have yet to find themselves in that position – it’s no coincidence that three are T1 and the other is T2.

At the launch of the game, fighting for the server seemed to mean something, but when 80% of the server upped stakes for JQ, BG, SoR and Kaineng, the few of us left behind were left with few illusions about how far community gets you when you’re losing.

Deniara Devious.3948:

Actually the proposed 8 hour system would not solve any of the problems and would in many cases lead to the situation at the last matches are completely irrelevant to all servers!

So give rewards based on win count.

Deniara Devious.3948:

I think 8 hour match up and scoring based on how many such 8 h strips you win during the week would be worse than the current scoring system. It would just further complicate the system and alleviate the coverage differences. Assume one server would have slightly better coverage at one of those 8 hour slots (let’s say night time), it would consistently give it wins, because 7 points out of the potential 3*7 = 21 points is a lot.

This is a valid concern – if the night-time presence on one server is stronger, but not overpowering, they’re guaranteed 7 points based on wins where they may only hold 40-50% of the score. All they have to do is find another 1-4 from the rest of the week and that’s the game.

GW2 already has issues with coverage wars – this would give a server with a slight advantage absolute domination over the points during off-hours. For this reason a 24-hour format, or different scoring method (e.g. handing out several points per game based on score), would be a better idea.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Moon.7310:

Using fractals to tell story:

Proposal Overview
Fractals should be used to tell as more about the lore/history of Tyria.

Goal of Proposal
Increase the amount of lore used for the fractals and creating new fractals which story and background informations. This is such a good oppertunity to tell us about things that happende before GW2, things that could happen in the future, things of an alternate version of Tyria.

-snip-

Hi Moon,

Thanks for delivering a very good proposal for more Lore based fractals.

TimmyF this post is a good example to discuss ideas around.

Chris

Hmm. I wasn’t going to look through this thread, but thought I should show some interest in the parts of the game I don’t tend to play.

I’m something of a lorehound myself – however I really don’t like GW2’s dungeons or fractals at all. Going with a group of friends makes them tolerable, but… my issue with this is that putting so much story in dungeons and fractals makes looking into the background of GW2 a chore. So.

Brief proposal
Could we get a (ignoring the GW2 definition here) story mode that gives crap loot but makes these fractals and dungeons accessible for those who just don’t care about the rewards?

With the EotM format and adding some variety week-to-week as mentioned above, here’s the basics of what I’d like to see.

Proposal Overview
A rotation, week-to-week, of three different game modes that emphasise different strategies – short-term point-scoring, long-term endurance, and long-term large-scale campaign.

Goal
To provide more variety in WvW settings without further fracturing the playerbase, through different game modes with facets that appeal to all existing players. Existing servers retain their identity, playing as themselves in two out of three proposed settings.

Setting Outlines
Point-based
As suggested by Devon above, this would award points based on victories in 21 8-hour matches. Upgrade costs and their build times would be reduced substantially, but the maps would otherwise be much the same as present-day WvW in design. There should be a new pool of borderland maps (and possibly EB).

Endurance
In duration, this would be the same as WvW is now. However, maps would be configured with additional walls that may be upgraded to impede enemy movement. No upgrades on walls, towers, or forts (except waypoints) are lost on capture – instead, the conqueror must rebuild the walls and doors with their own supply.

Campaign
Bringing the EotM-style colour-grouped servers into a large world-map to accommodate the 8- or 9-fold player caps, this would see three factions – Orr, Kryta and Ascalon – fight for dominance of Tyria during the last Guild War. More freedom of movement than the Endurance setting above, but invading player caps are reduced to raiding parties, perhaps 20-30, beyond the front-line maps.

Problems
The development time for the Campaign setting would be huge. I don’t deny it’s an aspirational thing, but how cool would it be to fight in the Guild Wars in historical Tyria?

Aside from that, the goal of this proposal is to avoid alienating players during any of the three weeks, so suggestions of what may be distasteful for some are welcome.

DevonCarver.5370:

I’d say there is a pretty strong sentiment against the idea of collapsing all of WvW into 3 colors, rather than the current world set up. Which I agree with. I think world pride and association is an important part of the way that WvW works currently.

Here’s a possible version of shorter matchups that wouldn’t necessarily sacrifice the long term fight of a WvW matchup currently and wouldn’t involve merging everyone into one of three teams.

Matches last 8 hours, there are 21 matches in a week with the same 3 worlds, the winner of the week is the world that wins the most matches over the course of that time.

This solves some of the problems we see currently, namely the issues that can arise as matches get out of hand towards the end of the week. However, it would still give worlds with better coverage a leg up on their opponents. It also loses the feeling that you’ve had a long term battle for victory.

I’m curious what you all think of that? Does it retain the feeling of victory in WvW right now and solve problems or does it just introduce more issues without solving any core concerns?

Keep in mind that from another perspective, a lot of this ‘world pride’ stuff goes out the window within two weeks when your server is losing. It’s easy to say that when you’re sitting on JQ or BG, but the communities in lower tiers have been trashed over and over again due to bandwagoning, so any solution involving the present 24 NA and 27 EU servers is going to have to figure out what to do with all the dead servers.

You could merge them perhaps, and leave the servers that have no problems yet as they are. That may be kicking the can down the road, though – nothing but the WvW map population caps is going to affect bandwagoning in the current state of affairs.

One of the principal draws to EotM is that, for the players on servers whose WvW populations have imploded, it can bring them back to WvW as it used to be (sort of). As such I don’t think you should entirely discount grouping servers together in WvW, but don’t do it every week.

That’s something I feel could make WvW more interesting – week-to-week rotations of game format. You mention 21 matches of 8h (think about fort upgrades by the way) – I say one week of that, next week of the one long match.

This is not a map chat issue – this is being able to communicate properly at all, in /guild, /party etc. included. Korean characters are already supported.

It is possible to use the Roman alphabet (that’s what English uses… just in case) for Chinese words but it’s just as unintelligible as characters to everyone else, so the status quo is not better.