Guild Wars 2

Kentaine.4692:

Splitting PvP/PvE skills is always in the games best interest if PvP is any good in the game. CoH is a bad counter example because its PvP was horrid from day one due to the fundamental design issue of having every active power cause you to root to your location. The decision to split them was still the correct one, however, because PvE was great and did not deserve to suffer for the splashing magikarp that was CoX PvP.

That is where we disagree. City of Heroes was designed from the ground up to be a PVE MMO. It was only later that PVP was introduced into the game. The PVP system originally worked just like the PVE system, which was a bit wonky but could be worked around, due to the forgiving potion system that was inspirations. Issue 6 is when the infamous split happened, which is what caused the majority of the PVP community to simply stop PVPing. The reason being that, get this: the PVP was actually fun in the game. Yes, it’s not a twitch based action combat system, but there was still the intensity and uncertainty of combat, as well as a myriad of different enemies and fighting styles you could face.

But the split ruined it in a couple of ways. First was the immersion breaking:, which was more important for the CoX community. Second was the new build requirements. Originally, when you built yourself for PVE you were already well built for PVP. But with everything working differently, you had to come up with a completely new build, along with a new set of enhancements for that build, as well as a new inspiration lineup to deal with the new mechanics. Third was that, to anyone entering into PVP for the first time, there was a massive learning curve that prevented new players from getting into the game. Issue 6 basically destroyed the game people were already having fun playing, and replaced it a new game that was vaguely CoH skinned.

To this day I say that CoX was murdered instead of dying off, but it is easy to see how the lack of PVP contributed to its death. PVP can vastly extend the life of a game because human opponents and strategies are always evolving and always interesting. It is much harder, if nigh impossible, to pin down an exact routine to deal with a human player. But, without a thriving PVP community, the game quickly becomes stale and repetitive.

Makai.3429:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I think you guys are horribly overreacting. I read the patch notes myself, and immediately though “From a PVE perspective, this doesn’t mean a darn thing for me”. The tweaks are minor and in the grand scheme mean little to nothing for any of the classes that were changed.

I take it you don’t play Mesmer, right? Persistence of Memory went from a six second reduction in phantasm recharge to three: and that’s under the most optimal settings. I wouldn’t call a 50 percent reduction minor.

It’s not just about this patch, either: it’s about the incremental shaving because of eSports: kind of a frog boiling in water scenario.

Oh I play mesmer alright. I take compounding power over persistence of memory, largely because I don’t shatter my phantasms enough to warrant a cooldown reduction. Whether I’m a mantra vanilla mesmer or a chronomancer, I keep my phantasms alive as long as possible. Both to do more long-run damage, and also to buff my teammates with alacrity and break bars with slow. I only shatter my phantasms when I’m going for a full continuum split burst, after which the phantasms are right back up again. But even in emergencies where I have to break a bar or become invulnerable, the timeframe between these moments is long enough that my phantasms have recharged anyway.

Persistence of memory basically means that, in the situation where I have both spawned a lot of phantasms and have chosen to shatter them while the skill is on cooldown, it now takes 3 seconds longer to get them back. Considering I’m never in such a position wherein 3 seconds on phantasm reduction would matter, I would call this change minuscule at best. It alters a trait that I don’t even use.

Sigmar.8614:

P.S.:

They’re not forced to farm.

Sure… they can also get the mats from the TP where their low drop rate drives prices up. So they need gold. Whiiich you can get in viable ammounts only by – you guessed it – farming.
Or playing the TP. Because everyone loves when the best source of income in a MMORPG is maintaining excel sheets for a virtual stock market.

Oh please. Mats are cheap. Linen is 5.69 silver each. You get 2 gold doing dailies, and another gold for tequatl, plus all the salvage mats. That gets you 52 linen for basically existing each day. Or you can do what I do and convert karma into cloth/leather grabbing gloves, mystic forge them, salvage the products, and end up with stacks upon stacks of the stuff. You get them as loot for running events in the lower level zones, as well as the level appropriate dungeons. Or if you want to get really technical, you can just get a level 50 character and have them open all of the various boxes and bags you get, so you’ll be showered in the stuff.

There’s no grand economic crises that suddenly makes AFK farmers into robin hood. That’s just license for greed and laziness. Gold rains from the sky, and the mats rain from the sky, and you don’t even “need” it at all. If you ran fractals you’d learn that ascended armor and weapons drops are actually quite common.

Auric Basin also has plenty of nodes around the map.

Honestly, I just wonder how people fail.

It is a legitimate question. I see topics/posts with this content all the time:

“This stuff is too hard! I watched a video guide on what to do, but it didn’t work! I watched a build video, but it didn’t work! I got a group together and we still couldn’t do it! Nerf the content!”

And yet, each one of those things is a great asset to me. The biggest disadvantage to these threads is that, I don’t actually get to see the person who makes the claim play. I can’t critique them, and give them specific advice on how to help them deal with problems. I am expected to accept the notion that this player has reached some type of personal skill ceiling of which there will never be any improvement, and thus the game needs to cave to their demands.

And yet here I am, walking through hot in 8 out of 9 different classes, all in full glass cannon gear, and I’m not having a problem on any of them. I’m not exactly a “skilled player” either. In skill I’m rather average. I don’t encounter the problems that other people have. So, to give meaningful advice, I have to actually see the problem that someone is having.

If HoT is too hard, provide some type of evidence. A video of some kind, showing HoT being too hard.. That way, we can actually see the specific problems.

I think you guys are horribly overreacting. I read the patch notes myself, and immediately though “From a PVE perspective, this doesn’t mean a darn thing for me”. The tweaks are minor and in the grand scheme mean little to nothing for any of the classes that were changed.

I say this every time this topic comes up: skill splits are what caused City of Heroes to fall. The change in how everything worked from PVE to PVP meant that it was a massive learning barrier that most players couldn’t be bothered with. “Why try to learn the entire game all over again just so I could fight some guys”? The answer was they didn’t, so the PVP community perished and the PVE community could barely keep the game afloat.

Seamless transition between modes is a good thing that should be strived for.

Hard to say. Going by the most hours clocked, it is probably the elementalist, since I use that one for fractal running. But I explore new content with my thief first.

TexZero.7910:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

TexZero.7910:

You could start by working on the baseline economic problems that cause people to auto farm. That’d be nice. So it likely wont happen.

That’s just absurd. The “baseline economic problem” is that people want money. Period. You can’t fix that.

Or maybe just maybe there are people farming the materials there whose rate of acquisition are substandard compared to their usage. You know like leather/linen.

But you’re right it’s absurd that we have nice things.

So they’re afk farming a valuable source to (gasp!) make money.

TexZero.7910:

penelopehannibal.8947:

TexZero.7910:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

TexZero.7910:

You could start by working on the baseline economic problems that cause people to auto farm. That’d be nice. So it likely wont happen.

That’s just absurd. The “baseline economic problem” is that people want money. Period. You can’t fix that.

Or maybe just maybe there are people farming the materials there whose rate of acquisition are substandard compared to their usage. You know like leather/linen.

But you’re right it’s absurd that we have nice things.

What you’re suggesting won’t fix it. It’ll just migrate it to a new area. For instance, if they “fixed” the linen thing so it’d end up only being 50 copper a piece, the AFK farmers will just migrate somewhere else, such as gaining cotton, then we’re back to square one.

They’ll AFK farm for the highest priced item they can possibly get. They don’t care if it’s linen, gossamer or pink inflatable moas.

And why are they farming… ?

Fix the source of the problem and it will cease to exist.

Why exactly are players forced to “Farm” for drops when we have a lovely map event reward that could be tweaked into giving more. This will get people into the game playing the events to get loot. I know that’s like some foreign concept…especially here. Heaven forbid people are rewarded for the actions they take in game.

They’re not forced to farm.

TexZero.7910:

You could start by working on the baseline economic problems that cause people to auto farm. That’d be nice. So it likely wont happen.

That’s just absurd. The “baseline economic problem” is that people want money. Period. You can’t fix that.

Well, it’s a tough call on what exactly Anet “learned”. The problem with the whole “learn from mistakes” thing is that there’s a million ways to rationalize, deny, and explain things away. There’s arguments that somethings are wrong, and yet there are arguments that those same exact things are right.

I’m in the camp that HoT was alright:

Difficulty: Solid. I liked the need for cooperation, the harder mobs, and a terrain that isn’t just a flat plain that is easy to navigate. About this level is where I think the game should stay, but I could still see the difficulty bumped up a bit.

Story: A bit anemic. It was fairly fast and bare bones, and it felt like the story was purposely avoiding a lot of things that it should’ve covered for the sake of “mystery”, but we all know that’s just lazy writing. Probably the weakest aspect of the expansion right here.

Mastery System: This was pretty good. The masteries need to be a bit more creative, since a lot of them were “You’re now allowed to press F on this object”. It seems like an unassailable and daunting task at first, but I soon found myself capping out points and having no use for experience again. The gliding mastery was pretty awesome, though. It really did change the way that I looked at the game.

Events: Solid again. Though a lot of people hated this because it was on a timer, that is exactly what I like about it. I like the fact that I can glance at a clock and know what is going on, and what will be going on. There’s daily rewards for hero points encourages players to group up for them, and I’ve found the awards for most of the map metas to be satisfactory and the events entertaining.

Elite Specializations: Here is the prime example of ambiguity in “learned” here. The elite specializations were way too hard to acquire at first, and this was changed. It wasn’t changed because Anet thought it was a wrong decision, but because a mass of people gave GW2 a bad metacritic score for being unhappy about how elite specs were handled. So, what did Anet learn? Did they learn that their decision was bad in the first place, or are they going to try the same thing again and just convey the grind earlier in the future?

Regardless, this was initially a mixed bag, but now it is great. Getting the elite specializations at first was like pulling teeth. You had neither the masteries to get the skillpoints, nor the knowledge to get mastery points. Running through tangled depths at launch with basic gliding and mushroom jumping is the definition of grueling. But now that the requirements were lessened, it is much better. The specializations themselves are fun, and the only bad side to them is that they eclipse the other specializations.

Precursor Journey/Legendaries: Not going to lie, I haven’t done this. Once I learned that it was a massive gold and material sink, I said goodbye and never looked back.

Guild Halls: Haven’t touched this myself. But it seems awesome, at least from what WoodenPotatoes shows in his vids.

WvW Map: Haven’t really gone here myself. I grew tired of PVP and WvW awhile ago, so this remains neutral for me.

Gear Prefixes/Runes/Sigils: These are pretty good, too. As always, there’s a bunch of “play how I want” sets in the mix, but I can legitimately see players running around in Marauder, Trailblazer, and Viper. Most of the runes are pretty meh, but Berserker and Chronomancer Runes have made it on to a few builds.

New Skins: On these I’m pretty indifferent. This is a matter of aesthetics, so it’s subjective here.

Revenant: Love the new class. Though its build possibilities are placed squarely in a box, it’s a good box. And hey, thanks to Ventari I managed to reflect the dreaded Schrodinger Wurm (A triple trouble run where the server had an aneurysm and the in-server lag was several minutes long. Named so because the server’s processes were lagging so far behind that, at any point in time, you weren’t sure if you were alive or dead).

… I think that’s most things. There are somethings I’m not sure whether to include or not (raids and squads, for example), but generally I think they did things right.

Romo.3709:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Put down a lower buy offer and sit on it. According to your logic, if the price goes down then everyone will sell (which is exactly backward, but I digress), so if everyone puts the price down, then you’ll get what you want.

My logic never specified anything about selling, so not sure where you got that from. What I’m saying is at the current system you can get only about 30-40 mystic coins a month, which is way too low for the amount of things the coins are used.

Lets try this gain:

Romo.3709:

Because at current prices it’s frankly too expensive to consume! So people hoard it for that one item they might make in the future when they finally get enough of them.

Hoarding = Not selling.

You’ve somehow come to this strange conclusion that when things are really valuable, people don’t sell them. This is generally the opposite of what happen: when prices go up you enter into the sellers market, where people cash in and sell their coins. This is done for two reasons: first because the coins have a high value when compared to other items in the game, and second because the price of coins will inevitably drop. So you cash in your coins now, knowing that you can just buy them back at a cheaper price in the future, or fearing that the coins you have will lose value and you will miss the opportunity to make gold.

Romo.3709:

Chris Cleary.8017:

If players are willing to pay more…

They’re not willing. They’re forced to as there is no other alternative to get them!

Put down a lower buy offer and sit on it. According to your logic, if the price goes down then everyone will sell (which is exactly backward, but I digress), so if everyone puts the price down, then you’ll get what you want.

My advice is that marauder is only good on thieves/eles/guardians in PVE. The hit points you gain from the set, how valuable they are is proportionate to the hit points you already have. Revs sit at 15,992 HP, so the extra 5790 health you get is a 36% health increase. Zerker revs aren’t hurting for durability, what with having two heal skills, high armor, and plenty of invulnerability skills. After the 6.5k heal from Shiro and then a secondary heal (going to go with Empowering misery 4.6k , since facet of light can be a bit tricky to factor), assuming you don’t get burst down you have 27k “starting health”, which makes maurader only give you 21% of a health increase.

You’ll be sacrificing around 10% of your damage for the additional health. I’ve been playing rev since HoT dropped, and never once have I felt the need to switch out of berserker gear. I’m plenty durable. Though “20% for 10%” seems like it would be the obvious choice, the fact is that I never encounter a situation where that extra HP is both needed and sufficient.

Orpheal.8263:

4: Waypoints will get changed to cost money based on your total money that you own on your account, instead of having a general small cost, they costs will grow now also if you get richer and richer, so that WPs stay a good money sink also over time.

There’s a big problem with this; the people who pay the most for waypoints are the people who are the worst at playing the game. Players who are constantly dying have to pay more money. So, by having a scaled cost per gold, the players who are undergeared or aren’t good at the game have to pay more, which makes them unable to afford better gear, which makes them lose more, etc. This change will cause elitism to skyrocket, because now horrible players don’t just cost you time, they cost you dozens of gold with each loss. Elitism means ascended only requirements and painful gear checks for the most valuable items (which themselves will raise in price, due to elitist demands), making the barrier to entry that much harder and making everything more expensive for poor players.

Think of what this does for content, too. The dungeon running community will take a massive hit, because instead of warping from dungeon to dungeon, they’ll be stuck running between them. Now, if you want to run a dungeon, the chances of getting a group together is reduced to nigh impossible, because nobody wants to pay a lot of money just to play with you. Same thing with world bosses, group events, and map wide meta events. Playing the game gets more painful for everyone.

Orpheal.8263:

So easiest way for getting lower WP costs is, spend some Gold instead of playing Dagobert Duck and hoarding gold like there is no tomorrow… Gold is there to spend it, not to hoard it forever, only when Gold is constantly in flow and also constantlyx removed from a game like GW, only then you have a healthy economy, where poorer players can also catch up slowly and where a game doesn’t get super inflatious prices for things in the tp, just to unlock some skins or to get an achievement done, because of the game offering only very poor designed options of obtaining said things in the game which makes it super rich players very easy to become even richer, because these people abuse the fact naturally on the cost of the poorer players, that the game offers for certain things only very limited ways of income for the offer, especially when making something self barely lets you save any money worth it, when its just quicker to preorder something, if you are willing to wait.

You know very little about how money works. The richest players in the game don’t just sit on top of a massive pile of gold. Their money is constantly shifting through various investments and materials. Their total gold “worth” is flowing through the economy constantly, buying things from players at prices they are willing to sell, and taking gambles on what players are willing to pay for an item later. This gives money to new players, and keeps the economy flowing so “poor players” are never left sitting on materials that no one is willing to buy.

The fact is, there is no “catching up”. You talk as if there is some inherent disadvantage to not having thousands of gold in this game. There really isn’t. At most, you can buy the rare cosmetic items and convenience items. “Oh wow, that person has a permanent hairstyle kit! Now I can’t beat his server in WvW?”. You’re talking about cosmetics as if they actually matter in this game. They don’t.

Also, while having a lot of wealth means that you can get capital and economic gains easier, it also means you can suffer from capital and economic losses more easily, too. If you’ve ever actually played the TP for money, you would’ve learned that not only is it not this grand magnificent money making device that only the rich get to use, but also that it is very likely you’ll encounter a downturn in an items value, causing you to have lost money overall. Unless you can make an immediate profit greater than 15% trading an item, you have to take a financial hit on the risk that the item you’ve bought will eventually be more valuable. Or, another bad case, if gold over-inflates so that the item you’re selling is now worth relatively less than what you bought it for.

Orpheal.8263:

Best example for this is Pendant of Orr, from all items required to get a single lousy achievement done, this is by far the most costy item that rich people abuse to get richer, which the rich palyrs manipulate to keep at high cost at any time, because items like these are it with that rich players make quickly more money with due to buying in when its cheap and selling again, when they make some few Gold with it that is higher income than the trading post taxes they have to pay so that they make profit from the item. Simple market basics.

I demand proof that this item is being abused. Because last I checked, it is an extremely rare drop from an event nobody does, and because of this it is so rare that the pendant is actually that valuable. Show me the palyrs that make this item too costy, because otherwise I’m just going to chalk this up to supply and demand. “Oh, this item is being abused because people buy it whenever there’s a cheap sell”. Seriously? You’re attributing to conspiracy something that is common sense.

Orpheal.8263:

5: Account Limit per IP. Every IP should be able to own maximum 3 accounts, this is also a very important aspect against Gold Sellers that should have been done right from the begin on!! Yes, that might be a very frustratign change for all people, which might have already more than 3 accounts, but peopl can (and will) sell them anyways in that case, but for the safely of this games economy and in protection against Gold Selling, this change is long overdue and neccessary.
Even the most hardcore altoholic players should have with 3 Accounts more than enough space for possible characters.
Limiting the maximum number of accoutns, limits extremely also the maximum gold a hoarder can accumulate together in regard of farmed materials/general gold to be able to try to monopolize the game’s economy.
There needs to be borders for such people, a point, where they simply can’t get more anymore. Stop until here and no further, thats the principle that is missing in this game to protect the game’s economy from dagobert duck syndrome players, which don’t know anymore, when it is enough.

Other people have already elaborated on horrible an idea this is. Punishes players for very little reason, extremely easy to bypass, and to cope with this problem you are encouraging the real world trading of accounts. Again, this does nothing to solve the problem you are proposing.

I suppose that is the best way to sum up every one of your suggestions. Make a series of drastic changes to solve a problem, when there is absolutely no evidence that this is a problem, the series of changes would do nothing to solve the problem if it were one, and this would just harm most of the gaming community to spite the richer players. And why, exactly? I would assume that, since the game rewards you with gold and valuable goods for accomplishing various feats, then a player who earns a lot of gold is one who is playing the game well. And as such, I see no reason to punish people who play the game well.

Orpheal.8263:

The OP has some points and there are some things about the games economy, that I would like to see changed, even if that means that it will be negative for like 1% of the games community..

But if that 1% of the game is richer, than then 99% of the rest of the community together, then theres somethign really wrong in this game.
Clearly, it is more than understandable, that Anet wants us that we pay thignjs in the game with real money, because its more comfortable to get thast way the gold that you need for things in the game quickly.

Not really. A disparity in wealth is only a problem if it creates undue suffering. In real life, it becomes a problem when the poor are no longer able to afford necessities (food, water, shelter, safety, etc). But if you aren’t without necessities, then there isn’t really an issue. If I make 40k a year and my neighbor makes 140k a year, and I am not being deprived of anything necessary to live, then why should I care that they make more? If anything I should be glad to know someone is more fortunate than I am.

And herein lies my problem with all of these claims that the GW2 economy is broken somehow: There are no necessities in GW2. There is nobody who is being deprived of something that is necessary for them to function in the game. Sure, there are many frivolous things that you aren’t able to buy (invisible shoes, for example),but there’s no starving children in the street because invisible shoes are 4k gold. Gold is produced from thin air, and it is quite easy to acquire it either directly, or indirectly via gathering various materials. Everything is balanced around exotics, which are easily obtained through multiple means.

Orpheal.8263:

However, this doesn’t mean, that there can’t and should exist mechanics in this game, that keep the economy so far in check,

I’m going to cut this one off a bit early, because this devolves into a paragraph long run on sentence. But here are mechanics that exist in the game to keep the economy under control. There’s the TP tax, account bound and soulbound items.

Orpheal.8263:

This is called Monopoly!! And Monopolies are bad for the economy, there you can say what you want, thats fact!
Thats the reason why there exist for that in real life things like cartels, that make sure, that a monopoly doesn’t get created at all in a country, so that small portions of a market can’t rule over the a large market alone.

Not really. A monopoly isn’t necessarily good for an economy, but it isn’t necessarily bad, either. In fact, the real world is full of monopolistic competition, wherein each individual good is manufactured by one company, and the goods themselves are competing for your wallet. I.E. only Apple is allowed to make Iphones, but that won’t stop Samsung from making a similar but alternate product for you to buy.

Anyway, the problem with monopoly claims are that everything in the game appears from thin air. To have a true monopoly, you would need to have control over both the production and distribution of an item. That doesn’t happen in this game.

Orpheal.8263:

1: The Game receives a new maximum Gold Limit you can own per Account by 1000 Gold (GW1 had also a Limit, that you could own maximum 1000 Platin for the Account Chest and 100 Platin on characters) GW2 will use now the same System. You can have now maximum 1000 Gold in the chest per Account and maximum 100 Gold on your Chartacters.
This will limit the maximum Gold one will be able to store and will discourage super rich people to get richer and richer, because it iwll become more of a hassle to organize all the Gold, instead of spending it and removing it out of the Game or being maybe a bit more generous and helping out every now and then some poor players out.

This is a horrible idea that will hurt everyone and won’t accomplish the goal you set out to accomplish. I’ve played games with cash limits before. Phantasy Star Universe and City of Heroes, in particular, actually had limits on the amount of currency you could hold at any one time. This didn’t somehow limit players from becoming rich, as much as it just inconvenienced the average player. Here’s how:

#1: Alternate currencies were developed. Instead of trading meseta or influence, they would trade collections of items that were deemed more valuable. If you were to put a gold cap, players would start using stacks of ectoplasm as a currency instead of gold. In GW1, platinum became worthless, and ecto’s became the default currency of that game, too. By continually shifting investment to more valuable items, wealth can continue to accumulate.

#2: This meant that there were a large set of items that weren’t publicly traded. Due to the fact that, even if you try to arbitrarily cap wealth, work hours and rarity still exist, there will inevitably be an item that the community values more than the gold cap. There will be a lot of items, actually. And these items will never be listed for trade, precisely because they cannot accurately be valued under a limited gold system. To get the top of the line stuff, you had to be in the know, and you also had to deal with the possibility that you’d be scammed due to the complexity of the trade. Players would have to swap accounts several times to facilitate the entirety of the gold transfer before the items would be exchanged, making it dangerous to trade.

To recap, the poor people pay, and the rich still get obscenely rich. Nothing is solved.

Orpheal.8263:

2: The Trading Post Taxes get changed to the point, that they proportionally become significantly bigger for players, that are super rich, to ensure that the economy of this game stays healthy and also to discourage people to get uber rich and to try to build up monopolies of so much Gold that they become able to buy out stocks of items just to resell them then greedily for double/tripple the price for what they bought the stuff in.

Again, this wouldn’t work. It doesn’t work that well in real life either. You may have heard the term “swiss bank account”. You see, the “swiss bank account” is infamous because it is highly confidential, so rich people will dump their money into an overseas account to hide their assets and avoid taxes. The same thing would happen here. If you have disproportionate taxes for wealthy players, then the player is just going to dump their money into another account or invest into items in order to hide their wealth, so they can trade at a level that everyone else would.

You also run the problem of punishing players unfairly if you go by total assets instead of just liquid gold. Then, players who don’t have a dime end up being punished because they bought a legendary weapon at some point, and now have a permanent tax because of a cosmetic choice.

Third, if you charge a higher tax in order to discourage wealthier players, this will just hurt the poor players again. Wealthier players will respond to this shifting tax by increasing the price of their goods to compensate. Everything becomes more expensive for poor players, because now the barrier to entry on trade is that much more difficult.

Orpheal.8263:

3: Relisting Items and Preordering Items gets changed, underbidding for a lousy single copper won’t be possible anymore. Relisting and Preordering will be now only possible, if the prices are at least 5% higher/lower than what is currently the highest/lowest price. This will benefit especially parts of the market, where people constantly underbit themself to ensure, that people buy from them, but if you can just underbit people with a freaking single coppe,r its no miracly, that players stay always so super high, that many people can’t buy the things from the TP, or first after having done some obcene and absurd money grinding or beign lucky with some loot drops that give them instantly some bigger gold income if they sell it, like a unneeded precursor, or like an already unlocked very valuable dye …

This just hurts competition and stagnates the market. Underbidding people isn’t a problem because you have to eat the 5% listing price. Players in competition for selling a high value good, this can actually consume a whole lot of wealth. Likewise, relisting items and bidding differences of 1 copper aren’t actually a problem. At all. The whole point of a buy offer is to be patient and wait for players who are willing to sell the item to you. If you have a problem with someone always out bidding you, you yourself can raise the top bid by a significant amount. There’s nothing stopping you yourself from raising the price by 5%.

Relisting increases availability, and the free bidding system allows the buy and sell prices to more closely match each other. This system does not need to be fixed, at all.

A cheese build is a build that’s too Gouda to be true.

They’re working on it. The gold seller issue is complicated, because with every invention Anet makes to stop them there’s a real life human being who programs around it on the other end.

It comes in waves, and nobody likes them, so take solace in the fact that Anet is working on it.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

eithinan.9841:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

#6: Working the TP to get money isn’t lazy, either. To be successful requires research, plenty of math, a lot of patience, and plenty of luck, too.

This is actually false. I have amassed a sizable fortune without a single spread sheet or calculation, simply intuition. I also make the majority of my gold on the tp, while playing aspects of the game I enjoy. The rich want people to think its hard work and lots of math, which everyone hates, but it isnt. Just need to pay attention to a few things here and there, especially patch notes and seasonal market shifts. Farm zone shifts based on the zone level are also a thing to watch. When HOT came out and the population shifted to mostly lvl 80 maps all mid mat prices adjusted for this lack of supply and other factors. Farmers who know the rich nodes are very happy about this.

There should be another shift in a few months.

says it’s easy and not hard work….

2 paragraphs about tracking multiple things, reading from various sources and following trends…

People like the OP would consider that significant effort and very hard work

It isn’t just that information. It’s having the ability to acquire that information, and also having the wit to realize that other investors are doing the same thing, so you have to be ahead of them. Reading markets requires a certain amount of skill and awareness that most people plainly do not have.

danielrjones.8759:

@Sartharina enjoyed you post about your family. Brought back memories for me. Also a mirror image cept Army instead of Air Force and we were a family of 11. I’ve heard comments similar to the poor get poorer and it’s one I complete disagree with, with the exception of the poor get poorer if they choose to do nothing and expect others to make them rich.

Well, technically the poor don’t get poorer in that case, either. Globally the quality of life is increasing everywhere. Food, energy, safety, water, cleanliness, and medicine are cheaper, better, more widely available, and will continue to do so. The total amount of welfare and wealth is on the rise. Now, technically the growth in quality is disproportionate, in that the rich do gain wealth faster than the poor, but the poor is still gaining wealth in the absolute sense.

However I digress: These threads are always annoying, and they show up every week or so. Somebody is convinced that there’s a group of rich players who control everything and scheme to rob the average player, or that free trade is inherently evil, or that gaining money through the TP is evil. And every single time, it follows the same trend: No evidence for their claim, and a lack of knowledge on economics and trade.

So, to answer your questions:

#1: Wealth is monitored.
#2: There is no super rich player who buys all of one item and then sells it for three times the price. If you’ve ever tried to merch on the market, you’d quickly learn that this is impossible, or just plain isn’t true. Players will constantly make new items, and undercut you, or you’ll make a trade and watch it sit for a month before realizing that nobody will buy it for that price.
#3: The prices of things change all the time. It is called supply and demand.
#4: There is probably some top limit, depending on where the decimal is located, but that wouldn’t matter because if there really was an evil overlord who’s robbing the entire game blind, then they’d just take their gold and invest in ancillary items to maintain their wealth. I.E., gems.
#5: Nothing is unfairly priced on the TP.
#6: Working the TP to get money isn’t lazy, either. To be successful requires research, plenty of math, a lot of patience, and plenty of luck, too.

The proportional of benefit to cost is horribly imbalanced. When I said “barely any names were used” a few days ago, I get the feeling that nobody knows what “barely” stands for. In all the names that were purged in City of Heroes, less than half of 1% were ever used again. I can’t get the exact number, since that resource was wiped off the face of the planet, but of the thousands of names purged, less than 100 were ever used again.

This is because, and as hard as this is to consider: a lot of the “inactive” accounts had unique names that other people weren’t vying for. For every fanboy who wants to be named Gandalf the Wise or Chuck Norris or Wolverine, there’s at least 200 players who’ve named themselves Diavara, Van Rahl, Morgol Fangbreaker, etc. who haven’t played since launch, and may come back to this game later.

So, lets consider the name purge, both from a historical sense and from a logical perspective:

Pro: A couple of players who can’t/won’t come up with a name might get the option to name themselves what they want.
Con: The players who would be negatively affected by this outnumber the beneficiaries at least 200 to one.
Con: The vast majority of names that get wiped are unique ones that never get used again.
Con: Out of the all the people who do want to name themselves Wolverine, still only one person will get it. It’s not going to be you.
Con: Every person who does come back will have their experience ruined when they find their account gutted and robbed.
Con: Most of the players who would benefit from this have already chosen a name and have moved on.

Really, no sane business would ever make this move. It didn’t work in the past. It won’t work again for the exact same reasons.

Balance around PVP. It matters much more there than in other places of the game. You can always adjust the enemies in PVE to deal with PVP changes, but you can’t adjust PVP to deal with PVE changes.

Thaddeus.4891:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

It should be plainly obvious that I’m talking about gear here.

Ya and that’s the problem. People just latch on the gear as if it was the biggest portion of a build, but in reality it’s one of the least important part. It’s like the tree blocking players from seeing the forest.

No, it’s a pretty important part. Gear provides the substrate on which the rest of your build stands on. It is the body of stats you always have and bring to every fight, and acts as the upper limit for how potent your build can be. It is much easier to add active defenses than it is to increase offense, so it is better to go with glass gear and change utilities/traits accordingly.

Thaddeus.4891:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Full glass gets the gold faster.

Not necessarily. Better sacrifice personnal dps for more offensive boons like a Druids, PS Warrior or Chronomancer. Better sacrifice some personnal dps for some CC to break bosses. For some fight better sacrifice some dps to bring some support like Reflect, block, etc. In high level fractal, brining a healer instead of a 5th glass canon is actually faster for a good portion of the population. Of course not if you are a very high skill group, but for the majority of the players a Healer in T4 will make your fight faster since less people will down. In pugs I often like to take Valor instead of Zeal and take 2 meditation skill at Mai Trin. Boost my survivability by a lot and that’s allow me to rez people when needed.

There is a lot of situation when you need to bring something else than dps. That said, this isn’t really true of gear. But that’s a design choice. Active Defense (Trait, Skill, weapons) are made more powerful than passive defense (Gear, stats) in this game on purpose. There is plenty of support, utility, buff coming from trait, skills and weapons. But all that people see is the gear that stay dps, so obviously, only dps count in this game.

It should be plainly obvious that I’m talking about gear here.

Currently I have one endgame:

Possess enough money that, should some item that I need to have (still waiting on those swimsuits) is released in the gemstore, I have enough capital to buy it outright.

I’m already sitting on 100 gold and 800 gems. It should be enough, but there’s always a chance that it won’t.

penelopehannibal.8947:

This is going to get at least 400 replies..

Well, obviously. This information is conclusive proof for whatever preconception you had before viewing the data.

As much as I’d like to say that there isn’t an issue… there kind of is one. Because when you take away peer pressure, any sense of selfishness or selflessness, a “meta” of some sort, even if you decide not to do raids which would require such a gear by design, an issue still exist: Profit.

You instantly heal between fights, so long term survivability isn’t a thing. It is all about how fast you can kill an enemy in each individual engagement. Death isn’t punishing, so failure is at most a minor inconvenience. It isn’t particularly difficult to go full glass in this game, and many times enemy offenses are so high that they tear right through defensive stats. Once you have the knowledge on how to run in berserker gear, a very clear operational difference emerges between gear prefixes. Full glass gets the gold faster.

This is one of those things where I hear it suggested a lot, but I’m not sure it is even needed. Changing your build and gear isn’t some big to-do. It is the mildest of inconveniences. Actually, I wouldn’t call it an inconvenience, because there is no barrier between wanting to change your build and changing your build.

Swapping between builds is very fast. The specializations are just a few button clicks, and it is done. There isn’t enough of a build system that a preset would be required. The gear is pretty fast two, as everything except your weapon swap and one set of earrings and rings can be changed just by double-clicking them in your inventory. If I want to change my build, it doesn’t even take me 30 seconds.

I’m not sure the feature is needed. It’s like making a robot to grab a beer for you. Yes, it is convenient, but all it does is save you the trouble of standing up, and grabbing a beer.

Ophidia Moonstone.2587:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

This is something I wrote about a long time ago.

#3: Dead deal no DPS, and they give great rewards too. The faster something dies, the faster you get its drops, the faster you can go do something else that gives more rewards. Make no mistake, when berserker gear tears through content 50% faster than other gear types, it also gets 50% more rewards. It also means your teammates get more rewards, too. If you have a limited window of playtime, this also means that you get to do more in that window.

I have worn Berserker armor on all of my characters. I get two sets of armor for each one, always one meta, the other to support their class in open world roaming. There is only one I would roam in Berserkers with, and that is my ranger. She doesn’t encounter too much hand to hand combat, and even when she does I use a pet with lots of aggro to take the heat off me. You can only dodge so much, you can only kite for so long, and if you get into a fight with multiple large AOEs, etc, you die if you are a glass cannon. I don’t even like Berserkers on my Reaper, and she has the toughest skin of any of my characters.

I just have to say, after using Berserkers on multiple characters on lots of different content, the fights do not end 50% faster. They end probably about 5% quicker, and I guess you might get an accumulative effect with 5 man content of 20% faster. But if everyone dies then you have to restart the content. I suppose that doesn’t happen when everyone knows the mechanics of the fight for all of the content, but if a person pugs the content, they aren’t necessarily running with people that can hold up their end of the canoe, and it takes a lot more effort to survive.

The thing is, I’ve done the math. Given equivalent builds, the difference between berserker and other gear sets (knight and soldiers, for example), is that berserker has 50% more effective power, both baseline and after buffs. It changes a bit from class to class, but swapping out all of your defensive stats for offensive stats does far more than a Sigil of Force.

You’re probably mistaken here on two accounts.

1. is that your primary zerker character is a ranger, and from how you’ve described it you basically hang back with one of the bows while your pet handles the enemy. In this situation, you’ll see little gain: your pet is doing most of the damage, so even if you do 1.5x damage you didn’t have that much to begin with.
2. is that you’re judging by absolute magnitude of the individual enemy, instead of relative magnitude or overall contribution of multiple enemies. Most enemies, even in HoT, are pretty glass. Even without berserker gear they die fairly quickly. Yes, berserker gear is killing them 50% faster, but because that amounts to a few seconds, it gets dismissed in your mind as “barely anything at all”. You have to consider the summation of saved time: yes you’ve bought yourself 2 seconds, but 1000 enemies later that’s a full half hour of time.

Likewise, your analysis on group content is incorrect. The total time gained by offensive gear isn’t a net, it is the average. If one player is doing 50% more damage, then that means the entire group will move through the content 10% faster: (1.5 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1) / 5 = 1.1. If you get everyone together, then you move 50% faster.

Ryou.2398:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

This is something I wrote about a long time ago.

The short version is this:

#1: Running in berserker gear isn’t much harder than other gear sets. There are technically more efficient stat distributions (soldier, marauder come to mind), but in the end this simple fact remains: the ratios of damage to durability in this game are close, and each class is designed to be sufficiently survivable with no additional stat investments. When you get defensive stats, you loose offensive capability, and so the enemy lives longer and deals more damage in response. This means that the more durable gearsets aren’t actually easier, they just take longer.

#2: Active defenses are king. The ability to dodge, block, reflect, evade, blind, cripple, blur, and break bars makes it so there are countless ways to avoid damage that don’t involve getting hit. Even if you do get hit, there are heal skills to wash away the damage.

#3: Dead deal no DPS, and they give great rewards too. The faster something dies, the faster you get its drops, the faster you can go do something else that gives more rewards. Make no mistake, when berserker gear tears through content 50% faster than other gear types, it also gets 50% more rewards. It also means your teammates get more rewards, too. If you have a limited window of playtime, this also means that you get to do more in that window.

Ok but ive played many mmorpgs, and every class using pure dps gear was far from meta, regardless of the enemies living longer, now maybe thats the case in this mmorpg but im stating just because something lives longer doesnt mean it decreases chances of survivability with the right support/classes.

But the drop thing makes sense I guess, im a little dissapointed since every class is using nearly the same kind of gear but I guess thats just the way it is, atleast for now hopefully it will change. But it doesnt seem likely since as you said drops are better the faster the enemies drop.

Other MMORPGs have large ratios between durability and damage. In other games, the tank is 20 times more durable than the other classes. Here, it is only 2 times.

I suppose I should add this as an addendum: While they say “go berserker or go home”, in reality there are many glass cannon sets that are acceptable.

Berserker: Most common. Usually the best.

Assassin: Nearly the same as berserker (usually off by only a few percentage points). Some classes are better with full assassin, and some players will hybrid berserker and assassin gear.

Sinister: Also a good set. It’s a condi set, so in the overworld the ramp-up time will mean you kill things slower, but against tougher enemies you’ll occasionally match berserker in damage output. Due to the frequency at which condi attacks are ranged attacks, this is sometimes “safer” set over the all-melee berserker set.

Viper: Also a good condi set. In the short term (sub 10 seconds) it is worse than sinister, but against longer fights it is better than sinister. However, if your primary damaging condition has its duration over 100%, swap out viper pieces for sinister pieces until it reaches 100%.

Stay away from rampagers. It’s an inferior version of sinister.

Besides, even if they did, it wouldn’t do much. City of Heroes tried a name purge at one point, only to find that barely any of the names that were purged got used. It works like this: when people find a name is taken, they try other names until they get one, and then they never revisit the issue. There’s only a select few players who sit and stew on a name for an endless amount of time.

From the looks of things, yes you do use the discovery method.

This is something I wrote about a long time ago.

The short version is this:

#1: Running in berserker gear isn’t much harder than other gear sets. There are technically more efficient stat distributions (soldier, marauder come to mind), but in the end this simple fact remains: the ratios of damage to durability in this game are close, and each class is designed to be sufficiently survivable with no additional stat investments. When you get defensive stats, you loose offensive capability, and so the enemy lives longer and deals more damage in response. This means that the more durable gearsets aren’t actually easier, they just take longer.

#2: Active defenses are king. The ability to dodge, block, reflect, evade, blind, cripple, blur, and break bars makes it so there are countless ways to avoid damage that don’t involve getting hit. Even if you do get hit, there are heal skills to wash away the damage.

#3: Dead deal no DPS, and they give great rewards too. The faster something dies, the faster you get its drops, the faster you can go do something else that gives more rewards. Make no mistake, when berserker gear tears through content 50% faster than other gear types, it also gets 50% more rewards. It also means your teammates get more rewards, too. If you have a limited window of playtime, this also means that you get to do more in that window.

Yeah, that website is only so valuable. It assumes that trades will remain the same and that people are willing to buy the buy prices of the item. The reality is much different: People will undercut you constantly, and sometimes nobody will bother to buy the item. The worst trade I had made me lose 200 gold.

The raining numbers vs. big blob of damage comes down to your user interface settings. In the options there is a way to change the damage indicators for conditions. I can’t remember the exact settings, but one option uses the old version where little white numbers rain from your enemy. The newer setting tells you how much damage the sum of this little numbers is every second.

There’s no operational difference between the two, really. The fountain of little white numbers shows how much damage is done by each individual stack each second, while the big blob just shows the total damage for all the stacks of that particular condition. Conditions work the same either way.

Now, to answer the other questions:

2.1-2.3: Asrat got it.

2.4: This is technical. The short answer is they benefit. The long answer is, the more conditions you lay down, the harder it is for the enemy to cleanse them all. Condition cleansing skills tend to affect a limited number of conditions, so the more unique conditions you put on an enemy, the less likely and less frequently they’ll be able to cleanse a really damaging one. So while your conditions don’t do much damage, they do help other condition builds out. Also, necromancers with epidemic spread conditions using their condition damage stat, so they benefit from it as well.

The technical thing is, that unless you’re running a condition build, damaging conditions aren’t worth that much. They do very little damage compared to the power damage you can output. Disabling or inhibiting conditions like weakness, blind, cripple, and vulnerability are good no matter your build, but laying out as many conditions as possible on a non-condition build isn’t an effective strategy in the least. Your teammates would probably benefit better if you used power tactics on your power build.

3: Already answered

4: Well, this is one of those great debates among condition cleanses. The truth is, no one is sure. There are many camps of people:
FILO: First in, last out. The idea that only the most recent condition is cleansed, so if you apply a burn and then a cripple, the cripple will be cleansed.
FIFO: First in, first out. This is the opposite of the above.
Random: The order in which conditions are cleansed is random, and any trends are just anomalies in the RNG.
Global Hierarchy: This is the theory that each condition has a hidden priority ranking, and so the cleanses will always go in the order of this ranking. The ranking is unknown to players, and is not public knowledge.
Personally, I’m in the camp that each cleansing skill has its own set of priorities. That is, from one cleanse to another, there is no set order, but each individual cleanse does have an order. This is one of those subjects where there has been no explanation by the devs, and even if there was an explanation there’s a good chance it would be wrong. It is due to how GW2’s code is a gigantic knot of spaghetti.

4.2 Condition removal should never “miss”. There’s a chance that it appears the removal hasn’t worked because the enemy you are fighting applies conditions so rapidly that it looks like nothing happened.

I’d be fine with this. Right now I’m sitting on top of so many spirit shards, and I have absolutely no use for them. I keep getting more, and yet I’m not sure where or how. I’d like to pawn most of them and be done with it.

Only problem I see with this suggestion is that spirit shards are a currency. In order to be tradeable, they’d have to be converted into items, which would take a lot of time and effort to do. Also, many players will awake to find their inventories full of stacks and stacks of shards out of nowhere.

In all likelyhood, this thread was the first result that popped up via a google search, and the poster posted without noticing its age or other similar topics. That said, unless the topic somehow becomes irrelevant I’m not bothered by necroposting.

Agemnon.4608:

You got a free 500g dye and it’s your worst day?

Missed opportunities are more painful than ones you never get.

It isn’t something that was decided as much as it is something that just happened.

I wrote about this once before. But basically the bags and boxes in bags is a programming shortcut to manipulate loot drops.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I knew it felt like the forums were abandoned. There were literally 3x as many posts when HoT was released.

Personally I’m a fan of Occams Razor. The simplest explanation is that, yes, forum activity reflects in-game activity, because to arrive at the contrary you have to take some very special and unusual circumstances and extrapolate them to the entire population with little evidence. At least, for purchasing players. F2P doesn’t have forum access, so forum activity becomes less representative of in-game activity at that point.

The simple explanation is that the sun rotates around the earth served people well for a long time. Occam’s Razor says if there are multiple theories that are equally compelling explanations of the facts, choose the simplest because it’s easier to use. In this case, the competing theories offer different sorts of explanations of the facts.

You have no idea what you’re talking about. The heliocentric model was adopted because it was simpler. Before, the geocentric model had to come up with a endless series of epicycles to explain the motion of the planets and stars. The heliocentric model didn’t need these epicycles, making it far simpler overall.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

There’s no question that forum activity correlates with game population. But that’s entirely different from saying they move up and down together.

Um, no. It is pretty much the same.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

For example, we got a lot of forum activity when the CDIs were ongoing. That didn’t relate to anything new in the game or anything new about to be in the game. Just a naive look at the graphs above show that there were times when participation peaked outside of major updates, suggesting that forums and the game draw different types of people.

Where are the CDIs on this graph? And what evidence do you have that the presence of CDI’s didn’t increase player attention as much as it did forum attention?

The forums can only draw people who have both purchased the game and are actively interested in the game. Therefore, the forums and the game can only draw from the same type of people. Yes, not every player goes on to the forums, but as you get a larger gaming population you are going to get a larger forum population, and a shrinking population is going to get a shrinking forum population.

You also need better data interpretation skills. Particularly, the ability to pull the general trend of the graph aside from the spikes. The information of note is the proceeding weeks after any sort of big update, and not just how high of a spike it is in one week.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Since ANet doesn’t provide us with the actual numbers about in-game participation, concurrency, etc, it’s really tempting to try to draw conclusions from the sparse details we can see. But, it’s a mistake to rely solely on inferences from one or two merely-correlated data sets. (Although to be fair: you’re in good company doing so — tons of social scientists, economists, and especially politicians stake their careers on doing just that.)

tl;dr the data above is really interesting. However, all it tells us is that forum participation has declined a lot.

It’s really not a mistake. It’s common sense. You have to come up with special exceptions to disprove it, and even then you don’t actually have any contrary evidence. The best explanation is that the general forum trends and the general purchased player trends are going in the same direction.

I knew it felt like the forums were abandoned. There were literally 3x as many posts when HoT was released.

Personally I’m a fan of Occams Razor. The simplest explanation is that, yes, forum activity reflects in-game activity, because to arrive at the contrary you have to take some very special and unusual circumstances and extrapolate them to the entire population with little evidence. At least, for purchasing players. F2P doesn’t have forum access, so forum activity becomes less representative of in-game activity at that point.

Vayne.8563:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

rebellion.2473:

Hello.
As i noticed,some use forums as a tool for negative speech,unconstructive “feedback”,and worst of all,political and ideological beliefs

Please try not to post such stuff,it hurts us as community and Anet devs.

I can’t help but think that this itself is an ideological belief Particularly an extension of the moral relativistic duty that sees expression of “ideology” of any kind (though usually it is targeted against one side) as wrong. So wrong, in fact, that it should be censured. Therein lies a cruel irony. Telling other people not to express their beliefs is itself a belief that is being expressed.

Lesson of the day: nobody who actually believes something will call it a “belief”. They refer to it, both outwardly and inwardly, as fact. So really, you’re telling everybody not to express facts that are inconvenient for Anet, and likely yourself.

I refer to my beliefs as beliefs all the time.

You stated that as a matter of fact. >.>

Anyway, as much as I’d hate to say it, social issues make it into GW2 all of the time. It is actually quite rare for a work of fiction to not be some type of allegory or metaphor or platform for the ideals of the person making it. This is because the beliefs of a person are not “beliefs”, they are the facts to that person. So when they write the story, the evils of an overarching government play out as seamlessly as gravity.

The world created by Anet in itself expresses a set of worldviews, and often times acts as a platform for which to express their views. This isn’t just true on a story level, but on a mechanical level:

#1: GW2 classes were designed initially so that any class could fulfill any role, letting you play how you want. Every player was their own tank/heal/dps.
#2: The reward structure for most of the game was initially designed to be equally rewarding regardless of what level you were, where you played, and what you did. Drops and rewards were largely homogenized throughout the game to make sure whatever you do is equally rewarding.
#3: PVP was standardized to prevent inequality outside gains through any method.
#4: The gear prefixes were balanced in such a way that you could complete content wearing any kind of tier appropriate armor you wanted.
#5: The content was initially designed so that any grouping of 5 classes could complete it, letting you play with whomever you want.
#6: Exotic gear, the maximum gear, was set as both the standard and the cap, and made easily obtainable, making it so vast disparities in wealth didn’t matter.

Now, lets break it down to the ideals that found these decisions:

#1: Everyone should get to be who they want
#2: Because all “who’s” are (or should) end up equal
#3: You cannot be unequal in any way
#4: No matter how it is that you play
#5: And everybody should play with everybody else, no judgements.
#6: And it doesn’t matter how rich you are or where you come from (cash to gem conversion), everyone peaks at the same place in the end.

Basically the game was initially designed to be a hippy dream. It both embodied a lot of far-left ideals, as well as was made to be counter-culturally designed against the current MMO establishment. Now, these design decisions have some failings, of which only a few I elaborate on in that link, so GW2 has moved mechanically away from how it was at launch, but the people working there haven’t moved ideologically.

Never forget: Arenanet is an ideal driven company.

Honestly, I’m not sure how well it would transfer. In PVP you need to simultaneously move your character, move your camera, and move a cursor to use ground targeted abilities in order to be competitive. Looking at most controllers, I’m not sure how you could accomplish that without fixing the camera or rooting yourself.

Not really. Compared to what City of Heroes would do, I don’t feel that strong at all.

rebellion.2473:

Hello.
As i noticed,some use forums as a tool for negative speech,unconstructive “feedback”,and worst of all,political and ideological beliefs

Please try not to post such stuff,it hurts us as community and Anet devs.

I can’t help but think that this itself is an ideological belief Particularly an extension of the moral relativistic duty that sees expression of “ideology” of any kind (though usually it is targeted against one side) as wrong. So wrong, in fact, that it should be censured. Therein lies a cruel irony. Telling other people not to express their beliefs is itself a belief that is being expressed.

Lesson of the day: nobody who actually believes something will call it a “belief”. They refer to it, both outwardly and inwardly, as fact. So really, you’re telling everybody not to express facts that are inconvenient for Anet, and likely yourself.

Dante.1508:

Henry.5713:

I’d be surprised if the majority of the players running events actually have detailed knowledge on how the breakbars work. That even includes something as basic as when to use your CC. Not even talking about the values of soft CC, the damage increase or anything else.

I’d be more surprised if most players know what CC is and what skills actually CC.

I know what CC is… but my skills are… well what ever i have set when the boss pops. Honestly thinking in a game is playing a game totally wrong imo..

Maybe I’m unique in this regard, but I’m always altering my utilities and traits for an encounter. If there’s a boss coming up that needs to be disabled, I put a few disables on my bar.

Sird.4536:

Manasa Devi.7958:

Dav.9152:

Also, for a lot of casual players in big boss events, so long as the boss is losing health, and they are winning, they are probably not aware of doing anything wrong by not CCing. “Was the event successful? Then I must’ve been doing it right.” That also furthrs the “I don’t care about CC” attitude b/c they didn’t need it last time. They end up getting carried by everyone else and don’t realize there’s more to learn. Only by repeated failure will they finally stop to figure out what’s going wrong.

The vast majority of the time, people are actually right when they think they don’t need to break that bar. Most encounters are easily winnable without ever putting even a slight dent in the bar. That sure doesn’t do anything to educate people, and after fighting dozens of enemies with useless break bars, running into one where not breaking it has major consequences, they’re still clueless.

I agree. The only place where breaking the break bar is even relevant is in raids.

I disagree with you as well. I’ve found breaking bars to be immensely useful in fractals, too. In particular, high level mossman an either be really easy or really hard, depending on whether you have a chrono to break his bar or not.

DoctorDing.5890:

So, a summary of this thread might be:

1. The game does nothing to help players learn about CC and break bars.

2. The skill descriptions do nothing to help players work out what skills count as CC (be they soft, hard or, um, tweenie).

3. But it’s OK, because you mostly don’t need CC to kill stuff.

It’s not exactly a compelling argument in favour of players changing their habits.

You really don’t need a compelling argument for “players should know the game and play better”. That in itself is self sufficiently good.

Honestly, it doesn’t seem that much different than from before elite specs. In PVP there was usually only one or two builds you could run on a class anyway.

Good news is, as more elite specs get released there will (hopefully) be more build diversity.

XxsdgxX.8109:

Tutorial? Wow and I thought I took too much time when I realized how the CC bars worked after 1 hour of playing.

You’d be surprised. The inquisitive mind will, upon seeing something for the first time, will seek to experiment. Break Bars are pretty easy to figure out.

Enemy has a Breakbar
Enemies is not affected by stuns or cripples
Bar goes down when using stuns and cripples
= stuns and cripples move the bar down
When bar goes down, enemy gets stunned for 5 seconds and my attacks do more damage
= breaking bar is good
Certain bosses only have a bar for several seconds during a big telegraph animation
= break bar as fast as possible in that time

But… there’s an issue. For some reason, countless players just don’t get it. I’m not sure why, as the following logic above comes as easily to me as breathing, but the game is full of players who do nothing but spam every ranged attack and utility skill when it is off cooldown.

It is something I’ve said for years now. The game is more complicated than your standard MMO, and there’s a dozen ways to get into a mindset that refuses to learn. There needs to be better tutorials for things.

Berelious.3290:

I believe there is an old saying about looking a gift horse in the mouth…

I think there should be a saying about what kind of horse you gift.

Anyway, what I did was use the boost on an empty character slot to get my key farmer for the week. Then I deleted the after getting a black lion key.

Congratulations. I hate you now. You understand why.