Guild Wars 2

I like this idea, and I can think of only one major counter-argument to it.

There are a few servers out there for which WvW is effectively not an option – the tier that Henge of Denravi is in, for example, has been a complete lockout by one of the servers for over a week, and possibly as long as two weeks. While, yes, server swapping is an option, it shouldn’t really be a necessity for the sake of completing a monthly.

Currently the only WvW participation required for monthlies is a simple kill count. This is achievable regardless of anyone’s server’s status in WvW (or lack thereof). It is even achievable for individuals not working in a seriously organized fashion. Capturing major objectives such as the castle would cut against this.

On the one hand, this is still actually a good thing, because with no WvW in the “normal” monthly, even casual PvE players stand a chance of completion. On the other hand, it could make the proposed WvW monthly effectively unattainable in a (very limited) number of brackets.

DreamOfACure.4382:

It’s only English when you’re looking.

Your GW2 client is seamlessly translating it from Krytan to English in real time. It’s a known function of the HUD.

Braxxis.7062:

On a more related note, if you had a lot of experience with raiding, you would not be saying you’ve never seen this. That or you had the greatest luck with drops and always got what you wanted from a raid boss.

Yes, but FotM isn’t a raid. It’s not even remotely structured like a raid. Furthermore, the way the difficulty tiers are designed, the dungeon unnecessarily divides the playerbase on arbitrary factors, such as – as we’re seeing here – one’s luck with RNG drops.

ANet’s Manifesto states that “our games aren’t about preparing to have fun, or about grinding for a future fun reward. Our games are designed to be fun from moment to moment.” If you have to grind FotM over and over at the mercy of an RNG in order to have a chance at a future fun reward, that’s a direct violation of ANet’s stated design policies. It’s also simply not fun.

This has one of the most frequently suggested features since game launch. I’d recommend finding one of the larger threads on the topic and posting your thoughts there.

drifter.8453:

If you find solid proof of how loot drops work in the whole game and show me statistics as this is how MF effects or does not effect loot drops, then maybe I will believe you, MAYBE.

There’s no statistics, but those are answers from the developers. Nobody’s loot “rolls” has any effect on anyone else’s. That’s straight from the horse’s mouth. If you still don’t believe it just because there’s no numbers in, your opinion was irrelevant anyway.

Goatjugsoup.8637:

I would say make it 3 votes for a 5 party group but 2 for a group sized any less than that.

Either this or a party leader system. As it stands it’s very easy for trolls to hijack a group.

I don’t think that’s particularly likely. Eliminating Adrenaline as a mechanic would require a decent amount of restructuring through the Warrior’s trait lines, and most of what’s in place in that regard isn’t easily transferable to weapon-swapping mechanics.

Additionally, this isn’t particularly necessary. The warrior already has the ability to use the highest number of weapon combinations, and already has a trait which enhances weapon swap, making this hands-down the fastest class to swap weapons in combat.

In contrast, the two classes that have fairly easy access to more than two skill-sets in combat (elementalist and engineer) have that ability mitigated in some way. Elementalists have a small number of possible weapon combinations (5 compared to the warrior’s 19), cannot swap weapons in combat, and takes longer to swap between attunements than other classes to to swap between weapons. Engineers also cannot swap weapons in combat, have a mere 3 possible weapons sets, and in order to have access to skill-swapping in combat must use a utility skill slot to do so.

TL;DR: This would pretty much wreck the warrior’s internal skill/trait balance, necessitating a near-total rework of the class, and wreck the balance of warriors against other classes.

EDIT: Another factor that I didn’t initially consider are weapon sigils. Some of these apply a quite long duration boon when you switch to the weapon in combat. Giving four weapons to a character would allow you to get some ridiculous boon chains going if you had a different sigil in every other weapon, or each weapon.

Tenicord.9803:

A.net tried to fix the fractal it appears but now when the person reconnects the entire party gets kicked! We couldn’t believe it after we had worked so hard.

Wow, that’s astonishingly bad. After over a week to work on the issue I’m very surprised that they wouldn’t have caught this, as it’s significantly worse than the situation they were hopefully trying to fix in the first place.

I’d like to have some confirmation that they did attempt (and fail) to fix it, though. I’m still not sure why we never see hotfix patch notes…

David.8426:

Really anything would be better than the current situation where i am forced to play only one type of content because of server demographics.

There is no reason for ANet to change something that isn’t broken (your having selected an incorrect server for your personal gameplay style does not qualify as a system-wide malfunction/disruption).

You are allotted one free server transfer per week. Do a bit of research and find a server that fits your particular tastes – in this case, I’d recommend examining some of the servers ranked highest in WvWvW.

Toast.6459:

You seem to be missing the point that the “amount intended” by the devs is much lower then you would find in a game that does not have a function such as MF. Why is that? Because the function is present. As I stated, if you even want a chance of getting a drop you can make money off of, you’re basically forced to use MF. The rest of us are stuck never being able to afford anything “rare” because we would rather use useful upgrades.

You seem to be missing the point that the devs are aware that not everyone is going to wear magic find gear, and have scaled the loot tables accordingly. Just because someone chooses to wear magic find gear and have a higher chance at getting valuable drops than you does not mean that you have been slighted. No MF gear is the baseline for drops. You have not been debuffed; those who chose to wear MF have been buffed. There is a huge difference.

How you come to the conclusion that the chance of getting valuable drops is “much lower” than it would be had the devs chosen not to implement Magic Find is unclear to me. Can you indicate a source for this information? If it is, as I suspect, supposition, then I’d suggest examining some of the many developer interviews on the subject of loot.

Toast.6459:

@Blueshield:
It makes perfect sense, the drop rate is going to be lower than what you would find in other games that don’t have a feature such as MF, in order to make people want to use it, this means the people that don’t use it essentially get screwed over on drops. In all likelihood we’ll never get a drop worth any money, a legendary is practically impossible for us, rare skins are out of the question unless the mystic toilet gives us something good, unless we give up and start being greedy like all the other selfish jerks that are slowly starting to take over this game.

What the poster I replied to stated was that one person using MF gear is having a direct impact on the drops of others – reducing their odds by increasing your own. That is empirically, provably, false.

Just because magic find is there and you aren’t using it doesn’t mean you’re somehow getting lower-value drops than ANet intended you to get. You’re getting exactly the amount that the devs intended. If you use MF gear, you’re getting more than intended.

Hycinthus.6483:

It should just be the whole thing, race/ gender makeover, everything. If there is one thing I would buy gems for, it’s for this.

Also on that note, can you please add more character customization options, such as new hairstyles, new facial hair, etc.

Race re-customization is definitely not going to happen. Tier 3 cultural armor is one of the largest gold investments in the game, and is soulbound on acquire. ANet definitely doesn’t want to allow people to re-select their race and turn 120G worth of armor into wasted bank space. It would also cause issues if racial re-customization was performed in the levels 1-30 bracket, while 100% of your character’s story missions are determined by your race and the biographical choices you made.

It would be far simpler for ANet to allow access only to the physical appearance menu than to try and prevent the myriad of issues caused by changing one’s race or biographical options. I wouldn’t bet too heavily on gender changes, either.

Heh, this seems like a great idea after playing a human thief. The entire 1-30 mission line for my thief, with the background choices I made, had me working in close concert with the Queen’s royal guard. At not one point did anyone comment on my profession or the wisdom of involving a thief in matters of the Crown, and that felt weird.
Unfortunately, this MMO like several other recent ones uses fully voiced-over storylines. While new storylines being added is definitely not out of the question, existing ones being modified is not at all likely.

Astralporing.1957:

The MF does not make your drops better – it makes others drops worse. Since it exists, drop tables are calculated with it in mind – which of course means that everyone without MF gets less.

That doesn’t make any sense at all. If nobody in the dungeon wears MF gear, all members will experience standard drops. If one person wears it, all members except for him will experience standard drops, and that one member will experience enhanced drops.

Somebody wearing MF gear doesn’t somehow make everyone else’s drops worse, that’s simply not how the loot system works. One player’s loot drops have no effect whatsoever on anyone else.

From an interview with Eric Flannum:

Loot is the same kind of thing. Instead of monsters dropping a bundle of loot and the players then having to divide it between themselves, you get the same roll on the loot table that everybody else gets – so long as you’ve got credit for the kill. That means a monster carrying a rare item can drop that item for every single person.

Magic find increases the chance that one player’s “loot roll” yields items from higher on the loot table. This has zero effect on anyone else’s rolls.

Lord Aargadon.4135:

Summing it up; sure this could work, but many mobs, areas, looting+death mechanics, and skills would need reworking, champs and those sort of things could not be knocked off while trash can go goodbye.

If I understand you correctly, skills wouldn’t really need reworking. There are plenty of knockback/blowout skills in place already which are scattered across all classes. World geometry wouldn’t need any editing. It’s already designed with plenty of cliffs and pitfalls which have served as environmental hazards to players. Champions and many elites are currently effected by the Unshakable buff which gives them immunity to knock effects, so any reworking in this area would be minimal, and would be the comparatively simple matter of assigning that buff to whatever Big Bads need it.

Malevil.2104:

I think we can agree that the problem are dungeons. In open world I dont care what ppl wear. In dungeons selfish ppl can be basicly caried by others and get better loot for it. Thats just stupid.

Precisely. So it’s pretty clear that the problem lies with specific players who make greedy choices which do not help the group, rather than with the gear that they choose.

This issue has been brought to the developers’ attention and received an ANet response. I’d recommend that, if you haven’t already, you post further questions or comments on the issue here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/DC-in-fractals-no-way-to-get-back-in/page/3#post854035

Shadowlancer.7102:

@ Blueshield.6291

I am going to reply to you once, you clearly have no idea how much work is involved when making games and before you start rudely putting someone down, that clearly has a better understanding and more knowledge than you, make sure you know what you are talking about.

Good Day.

I am not in fact the one rudely putting others down. I systematically went through and indicated why your claims were factually incorrect. I did this in a civil manner. I have not demeaned others’ knowledge or intelligence. Unfortunately, you seem to have confused my actions for your own.

Shadowlancer.7102:

This idea is stupid.

You are clearly pretending to have intimate knowledge of the game design process which you do not have. The next time you act like you have a better understanding and knowledge of something than others around you, make sure you do not contradict yourself, and do a bit of basic fact-checking within the system you’re talking about. Many of your points are irrelevant due to the current state of the game.

You make it appear that programming contingencies for mob knockback is a gargantuan task, yet it is a basic component of the vast majority of MMOs comparable to Guild Wars 2. It is, in other words, a design aspect which has been addressed and mastered.

I went through and attempted to explain why the items in your alleged developer’s workload were not necessary. Acting like you have intimate knowledge of the game design industry does not lend credence to your claims. I pointed out factors of the game’s design (such as the Unshakable buff which currently prevents critical NPCs from being knocked back) which you had evidently not accounted for in your post. I also indicated that some of your “necessary changes” were in fact internally contradictory.

Shadowlancer.7102:

- They would have to remove alot of barriers in the game for them to be push over the edge.
- They would have to make more safe barriers, so mobs do not get stuck.

In point of fact, the game world does not need any amount of redesign to facilitate players using knockback on mobs in a way that makes sense. Pathing does not need to be adjusted. Contingencies are already in place for non-aquatic enemies being moved into aquatic settings. Bringing up these issues confounds the topic unnecessarily.

Tolmos.8395:

Asking that there be NO skimpy armor, for either male or female, in the game is a bit unrealistic as well. It’s a fantasy game, and some players (including female players) may desire to have their character look that way. The option should and is available to them. That tier 3 armor is just one example. On the other hand, very conservative and completely covering armor is also available for those who wish it. A female warrior in this game can be covered from head to toe, not an inch of armor showing. In fact, the female heavy heritage armor covers MORE skin than the male armor.

Moriel.1843:

If people want to dress up their characters in cheesecake outfits, let it be an option, not the default!

mdoucet.8735:

Glad to know I’m not the only one eye-rolling over these dated designs. I agree that can certainly be an option, but by all means don’t make it the default.

I didn’t see anyone in the thread asking that all skimpy armour be removed. There seems to be universal agreement that there should be options in both directions of the skimpiness spectrum. What the OP and others are asking for are that non-skimpy options be provided at points they currently are not available – early game being the main example given.

Heritage armour is not available many players (a figure which I think is reasonable to assume is the majority). Many (I would go so far as to say “most”) of the current options available both during the leveling process and upon reaching level cap and seeking out snazzy-looking endgame gear can be categorized as “battle lingerie,” and there’s definite under-representation of more sensible, covered armor choices.

I agree with the OP and others that the staring gear cheerleader fetish outfit needs an alternative, and that sensible female armour should exist throughout.

Batlav.6318:

it is fine the way it is u can knock off players but not npcs
also ikittennow how to do it u won’t be throwed down a single time by mobs

Assuming you’re talking about stability effects, not all classes have access to them, not nearly all builds fit those skills, and in most cases the “active-stability-time” to “cooldown time” ratio is 1:6 or worse. All of that is a moot point, because the OP isn’t complaining about being knocked by mobs, he’s pointing out that it’s unreasonable that mobs can knock players, but not vice versa.

I think this is a fantastic idea. It’s a bit silly that mobs can knock players off of cliffs and platforms (a mechanic which is used to deliberate effect by the devs in some places), yet players cannot reciprocate.

Shadowlancer.7102:

Pushing NPCs off the cliff is a bad idea because people that are “Trolls/Rude/Mean” will knock your NPC off a cliff and what if that NPC has loot of them?

Critical NPCs are already immune to knockback, down, and most control effects anyway. Trolls couldn’t abuse knockback in the case of critical NPCs whether they wanted to or not. And the way loot tables work, if your NPC has loot, there’s a good chance it’s nothing important. Additionally, there are very few places in the game world that you could knock an NPC and not be able to recover the corpse. It would certainly be more of an issue in instances, but it would hardly be abuse-able.

Shadowlancer.7102:

- That would mean they would have to add swimming files to NPCs that dont have that.
- They would have to remove alot of barriers in the game for them to be push over the edge.
- They would have to add new pathing for pets to match this change to follow the mob.
- They would have to make more safe barriers, so mobs do not get stuck.
- They would have to add new pathings for the mob you pushed over to come to you.

-They would have to implement already-existing swimming files in NPCs that might not have them – which, if such a category exists, is populated by very few NPCs. You’d obviously be surprised just how many NPCs do in fact already have swimming files – animations and AI packages (in some cases the AI consists of “return to land as soon as possible,” but it’s there, and that’s all most knocked-into-water mobs would need anyway). Find a lake and try kiting various different mobs underwater, you might be surprised.
-They wouldn’t have to remove any barriers. Who said anything about that? There are plenty of places right now where NPCs can (and in some cases are designed to) knock players off of platforms. All the OP asks for is reciprocation, not an entire rework of world geometry.
-This indicates a somewhat limited understanding of the game’s current pathing systems. I don’t think anyone here wants to see pets try to follow a mob over a cliff; that would be absurd. For platforms where the pet can reasonably regroup with the mob, the pathing is already in place. For platforms where the pets can’t, they don’t need to path anywhere because the mob is probably either dead or de-aggro’ed anyway.
-They wouldn’t need to add or remove any barriers. You think that they need to first remove, then add barriers? That doesn’t even make sense, and I have no idea why you’re so fixated on world geometry. See above comments regarding removal of barriers, and above comments regarding critical NPCs which are already immune to knock effects.
-Okay, same thing as the pet pathing here. If a mob could get to you after being knocked off of a platform, the pathing is already sufficient. If a mob cannot get to you after being knocked, then it’s either 1) dead from fall damage (most likely), or 2) so far away that it’s no longer aggro’ed. In neither circumstance are changes to pathing necessary.

The only possible change necessary is a contingency for the mob being unable to return to its previous position once knocked out of combat and out of place, but upon surviving. In almost every circumstance the mob can return to its original position, because the player was able to get there in the first place, but there are some possibilities, particularly mobs placed partway through jumping puzzles, where return is not viable. This could be easily handled by having mobs go idle at their new position if they are unable to path to their previous location.

Shadowlancer.7102:

Not to be rude […]

This idea is stupid.

Epic fail.

TL;DR: Mobs can do it, players should be able to as well. It’s standard in MMOs with knockback effects to allow this, and it virtually never poses a problem. Vital NPCs are already protected from knock effects despite not being able to go over cliffs anyway. Little or no programming and/or animation changes would be needed.

Astralporing.1957:

4. city waypoints are always free.

This should definitely be the case due to some specific design choices with certain storylines. I just ran a new alt through the human 1-30 story missions, culminating in the player’s choice of an Order. In the 20-30 block, there were about 5-6 missions which sent the player into Kessex Hills and Gendarran Fields, both of which are two maps out past Divinity’s Reach.

Every single mission was turned in at a location inside Divinity’s Reach. This design forces the player to either spend an inordinate amount of gameplay time traveling on foot through zones which he or she is likely to already have completed, or use the waypoint system to complete the missions in a reasonable timeframe. I checked while I was doing this, and the mission rewards (including the sell price of gear rewards) were less than the one-way fast travel fee to merely turn in the missions.

With no reasonable alternatives to the waypoint system, it’s highly unfortunate that aspects of the game design push players towards using a system which is so grossly overpriced.

scarybandit.8179:

When it was announced that GW2 was employing a real economist to help manage the economy I have to say I was a little bemused.

Ah, well, that would explain it. Nobody better than an economist to ensure that no one can make a dime.

MilitiaMasterV.7216:

I don’t think it should be ‘removed’, but I also don’t get why most games make it into an ‘either/or’ situation. Why not just make a slotted section on armor specifically for MF stuff only (and increase the value as you get higher level up to a certain %) that doesn’t interfere with the other more valuable stats? This seems like a ‘no brainer’ to me. /shrug

The same effect, though would essentially be accomplished by simply upping the universal drop rates by between 1 and 5%. The system as it’s implemented does make sense; in order to ensure a higher drop rate you have to sacrifice some combat effectiveness. It’s a perfectly reasonable tradeoff. The only problem is that some people are so greedy or so lazy that they wear Magic Find gear into places they shouldn’t.

I’d like to propose another way of looking at the problem. Imagine a player who is entirely unconcerned with stats and combat effectiveness, and just wants to look good while he or she journeys through the world. This player finds a set of armor which (s)he thinks is the best-looking set (s)he’s seen yet. Unfortunately, it is a set of common armor with garbage for stats. This player could wear the set of junk armor into a high-level dungeon and ruin his/her combat effectiveness, or (s)he could choose to switch to an appropriate set.

So, because players could wear junk drops into a dungeon, should we remove all junk drops from the game? Or should we consider that the problem is really that the player chose to wear inappropriate gear?

THExMUFFINxMANx.1204:

I don’t know if it’s already been said or not, but maybe have different time zones divided across Tyria, so it’s half and half

Not a bad idea, but I for one would prefer to see an asymmetric server/real time clock, like Snoring suggested. One of the primary points of unifying the clocks across instances is to restore immersion, and the world map is certainly not large enough to be half in day and half in night at all times.

You lay out a solid argument for removing the magic find stat, but I disagree with a portion of your reasoning and your conclusion.

Toast.6459:

MF is a mechanic that for the most part replaces otherwise much more useful upgrades, and in essence, promotes being greedy.

That is absolutely true. However, it’s presented as one option for gear among many. The only force pushing players towards focusing on Magic Find as a stat is their own greed. Statting for Magic Find is not a gameplay imperative which gives anyone a tangible combat edge over one another, compared to the acquisition of maximum-tier gear for WvWvW, for example.

Toast.6459:

How can you call an economy balanced when people have massively higher (though still incredibly low) chances of getting a drop actually worth money than everyone else?

Magic Find doesn’t imbalance the economy in any way. Every player has the option of statting for Magic Find if (s)he chooses. It’s certainly possible that the market would look quite different without the option for Magic Find, but it is an option for everyone, and is therefore balanced. If there was some factor preventing certain players from acquiring Magic Find gear while allowing others, there might be some merit to claims of imbalance.

Do I support people wearing Magic Find gear into high-level Fractals, putting the success of the group at risk? No. But they can choose to stat however they want, just as I can choose not to run with people geared in such a manner. I don’t believe the answer is to restrict players’ gear choices, simply because some players don’t have the common sense to gear “properly” for a given endeavor.

CureForLiving.5360:

Another interesting thread (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Day-Night-Cycle/first) discussed this same topic and the possibility of making night more distinctly nocturnal. I agree with synchronizing the cycles, but I do feel that a lot more can be done ontop of it.

Thank you for that link. I had found an even older thread upon using the search function, but it had been inactive for at least two months and didn’t bring up the specific issue of cross-instance synchronization. Somehow I managed to miss the one you posted.

There are some excellent ideas in there, and I hope that some of them have by now made it to ANet’s ears.

Azulia.1745:

I have never played a game where its this difficult to make money, i travel alot via waypoints, not from dying, but from gathering materials for crafting and exploring.

Ah! Thank you, that points out another money sink I had forgotten: gathering.

Depending on the material tier, the cost per use for gathering tools actually outweighs the value of material collected. This becomes a significant factor if you (unwisely) just use high-level tools for every gathering interaction. However, even using tier-appropriate tools, especially in the lower tiers, the material gained is sometimes worth less than the cost per-use of the tool. This is probably another consequence of having a cross-servers Trading Post.

drkn.3429:

No, they were not obliged to foresee that their players may crash due to their hardware/software errors or bottlenecks caused by their ISP or elsewhere on the way (and i don’t have a high-end machine, playing on low/medium details most time to keep it all fluent, i’m not on optical fibers, just 20MB/s download with 1MB/s upload, which is rather standard in Central Europe, not to mention Western or America).

That’s just plain ludicrous. It’s an online game. It’s a given that among the vary wide array of possibilities which cause a player to lose connection to the server, some of them will occur some of the time. When you’re dealing with populations as large as the playerbase of GW2, that is an absolute certainty. Whether it’s a minority of players experiencing the problem is irrelevant.

All other dungeons are designed in such a way that they do not prevent a disconnected player from reentering. This one does not. In this case they have chosen to place “anti-exploitation” measures above a robust design that does not punish players for events (often) outside their control. That was a deliberate design choice and an irresponsible one.

Barionic.5904:

I do know he is not impossible, and I’m sure other people have beaten him with ease. The problem is if your party slips up, and a bunch of people go down, the boss will just heal right back up. Its crazy and requires too much coordination for Fractal Difficulty 1.

I can see how this boss would be a bit rough on a PUG if some of the members don’t really know what to do. This was a headache for me the first time running it because we had a thief on the team who refused to stop crippling him, which resulted in the Superheated debuff constantly wearing off before we could get him to the next bucket.

That said, the bombs are very easy to avoid (even without dodging), and his heal is interruptable with CC. Yeah, you need to be on your game, but no more so than, say, the dolphin segment of the Aquatic Ruins fractal.

Now, I have to point out that despite all of this, the elemental boss which you sometimes fight instead of the powersuit is much, much easier. Still, on the whole, I wouldn’t really say either need changing, and honestly I think the powersuit is, while a somewhat obnoxious (and very gimmicky – and an overused gimmick at that) boss fight, it’s not unbalanced.

drkn.3429:

You still haven’t even tried to understand why it’s harder to ‘fix’ than other dungeons, have you?

It’s a fair point, but the real question here is why has ANet taken a radically different direction in dungeon design which departs from their publicly stated design philosophies? The overzealous anti-exploitation measures which the dev team deemed “necessary” in this case would not be needed except for specific design choices for FotM (such as arbitrary difficulty settings which divide the playerbase).

drkn.3429:

Seems it’s mostly either on player’s end or somewhere on the way – our computers causing crashes (both hardware and software may be at fault), ISP screwing up, someone stealing our signal, our connection being too heavily used by downloaded stuff in the background, packet loss somewhere on the way (and that’s a LONG way). If it was purely ANet’s fault, everyone would get into issues from time to time.

Okay, so because crashes are caused by the player’s machine, and lost connections are caused by someone other than ANet, they’re off the hook? Negative, ghost rider. The problem here is that this dungeon is the only one which does not allow for disconnected players to re-enter. By failing to design the dungeon in a robust enough manner to allow for events which are certain to occur in an MMO (not always for everyone; sometimes for someone), ANet has failed to do its job properly.

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

Agreed. I’d go one step further and suggest that the full cycle fits exactly into a 23 hour period (eg an 11h 30 min cycle, or a 7h 40m one) so that people who can only log in at a specific time of day still have variation in what part of the cycle they play.

Good suggestion. I’ve heard that it’s currently on a two-hour timer with 80 minutes of day and 40 of night. Of course, with each instance running individually as they do currently, players presumably end up spending approximately 1/3 of their gameplay at night, regardless of actual real time. But yes, it would be a fantastic idea if we ever see time unified cross-instances.

Orion Templar.4589:

+1 for time synchronization across the server
Also would like to have a way to determine in-game time

I agree, it would be nice to be able to tell the server time. Possibly a variation on the /time command?

Loswaith.3829:

A good way to look at it is, how often do people (check yourself or your friends) change the colour of their armour? Yet most people still want a good selection of dyes (or even to collect the lot) even if they have the 3-4 colours they would typically use, likely because they know it is a one time thing per character to do.

That’s a fair point. Still, it illustrates another reason why we won’t likely see this implemented in the manner the OP suggests – specifically, the Skin Wardrobe being account-wide. Dyes are linked to characters rather than accounts presumably in order to keep the dye market robust, and encourage more game-time from players searching for their second and third copies of White or Abyss, or the money to buy said copies. Account-wide skins would be a step in the other direction.

Additionally, consider this. If a player rolls an alt and decides (s)he wants that alt to look snazzy from 1-80, (s)he will use 4-6 transmutation stones every 5 or 10 levels, for a total of around 40-80 stones, of which the vast majority will be Basic stones (which are rewarded free of cost via completion of maps). At level 80, (s)he is likely to spend somewhere between 6-12 Fine stones. The next alt rolled potentially uses as many stones. With an account-wide Skin Wardrobe, and assuming that the player rolls a character which uses the same armour class as a previous character, (s)he can use 0 stones of either type and have the appearance of a level 80 in tricked-out armour free of cost and as soon as level 1.

Heavenly.9102:

I wrote support about this and this the respond I got back: Thanks a lot for taking the time to suggest this to us. We really appreciate your thoughts and ideas. The best way for your feedback or suggestions to reach someone in development is for you to post your ideas within our Official Forums in the Suggestions sub-forum. That is why I posted in here.

I checked the CoC for these forums, and this is what I found:

You agree to the following guidelines, which will help cultivate a user-friendly environment in the Guild Wars 2 Forums:

Read the forum before asking a question. There’s a good chance your question has already been answered.

Use the search function before posting. This will focus the discussion and facilitate a response.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/DC-in-fractals-no-way-to-get-back-in/first#post765595

Lutharr.1035:

But since you can have unlimited toons in theory but your bank space cant ever go past a certain point people will be left having to make choices to save or destroy items. When that happens people will not be happy. better a good system now before it goes belly up.

I’m not saying that I’m against the idea of a skin wardrobe – I’m fully in favor of it. I’m just indicating that I don’t think it’s realistic to expect one, since there’s more money to be made by not implementing this.

scarybandit.8179:

Thirdly, for a casual, non farming player, it makes the use of waypoints a serious economical dilemma. […] However, in GW2, if one decides to, say, maintain a couple of crafts at a rate equal to level, and also save enough for training manuals, waypoint travel just isn’t in the budget anymore. In my case, I don’t even have the 1 gold right now to afford the middle manual for my main level 70. Did I mention repair costs?

This encapsulates the problem quite nicely. There are too many money sinks and not enough options for earning money.

Current money sinks:
Waypoint usage
Crafting (contingent on items only purchasable from vendors, etc)
Armour repair
Salvaging (cost of salvage kits; items yielded by salvaging have monetary values a tiny fraction of the original item’s value)
Use of the Trading Post (two taxes combined mean most TP transactions lose money compared to vendor cost (run of the mill items here people, not legendaries or rare dyes).

Combine this with the global, all-servers-wide trading post which seriously stifles raising money through the player economy (double taxation; supply vastly outstrips demand, which leads to the vast majority of player-crafted items being sold at cost), and you get a pretty clear picture.

While I agree with the sentiment, frankly it doesn’t seem like much of an issue, given that the first leg of a character’s story missions rewards a set of complete (for that level range) armor. It’s pretty easy (and quick) to run through that arc of the story and get the approximate appearance you’re looking for and complete a couple of the racial town maps for transmutation stones.

There’s already a quite large thread in the Dungeons sub-forum on the issue, in which an ANet representative has confirmed that this is a known issue and is being addressed. Please use the search function before creating new threads in the future.

tigirius.9014:

Not a big fan of capes. I replaced every cape with a backpack or cloak in LOTRO because i don’t my character to look like a comic book super hero in this setting it just doesn’t fit.

Capes fit just fine in fantasy settings – see below. They didn’t look out of place in GW1 (the fact that some were ugly is not the same as out of place) and there’s no reason they’d be out of place here.

As far as I can tell, they were planned to be implemented but removed at some point in beta. I’ve never seen an official ANet post confirming this, but the reason everyone cites for their removal was “clipping issues.”

We’re a long way from beta now, and the choices for guild representation remain very limited. Guild armor makes everyone in your guild look like clones, and guild weapons and shields limit you to a single appearance which, especially in the case of the guild shield, often seriously clash with a character’s armor. Capes can be far more versatile, and while they wouldn’t fit with every armor style – especially female medium and light armor which seems to have been borrowed from the nearest strip club – capes at least offer a lot more versatility than the current options.

In short, it’s because the “main” rewards of FotM are tied mostly to RNG.

matenzo.9518:

Problem is by now a lot of people have moved up the fractal scale a lot. As many players have moved on to fractal lvls 10+ it is getting progressively harder to create parties at lower scales. The longer this bug is present the more frustrating it will be for players most hit by this issue to catch up. It already takes well over an hour to create a low level fractal party.

This illustrates one of the most annoying aspects of the design of FotM; that it breaks the player base up into small groups unnecessarily. Coupled with the problem that losing a player to DC, CTD, or just plain quitting can mean derailing the entire enterprise, FotM really doesn’t look like a good direction for GW2 at all.

I think this is a fine idea, and can’t really offer any counterpoints. I would like to point out, though, that if this follows the standard mystic forge paradigm, the recipe would be 4 Basic stones → 98% chance for 1 Basic stone, 2% chance for 1 Fine stone. Which would still be fine, since basic stones are plentiful and mostly useless.

While I absolutely love this idea, I doubt it will happen for one simple reason – ANet stands to make more money from bank slot and bag slot expansions than it does from selling more transmutation stones. As long as people are using bank space for weapon and armor skins, ANet’s winning.

Humposaurus.5764:

Check to see if your computer is able to properly run Guild Wars 2. This is probally the reason for most of the crashes. I used to crash alot, then I got myself some new hardware and now I never crashed/dc;ed and have run over 100+ fractals.

Classic example of missing the point. Fractals is the only dungeon in the game that disallows players to re-enter if they disconnect or crash, and the only one that doesn’t allow teams to find new players if someone leaves and never comes back. Solving client crashes doesn’t solve the incredibly poor design, and won’t help with any potential connectivity issues.

I agree that the prices on the Tier 3 cultural sets are a bit ludicrous, especially when you compare the price differentials across the three tiers of cultural sets. The prices slightly more than double between Tier 1 and Tier 2 (2.88g to 7.10g) and then are multiplied by nearly 17 for the Tier 3 (7.10g to 119.00g, most of the individual Tier 3 pieces cost almost double the entire Tier 2 set).

That said, I’m pretty sure the reasoning here is to give players a long-term, grindy goal for the purpose of player retention. The fact that there’s a pretty slick title for purchasing every piece of cultural armor for every race is indicative of this (and a long-term, grindy goal it is indeed, costing 644.5 gold).

Long story short, I agree with you – the mathematical progression of cultural armor costs is nonsensical. But I don’t think it’s something ANet is likely to change.

Pretty much what it says on the tin. The way the day/night cycle is currently implemented (each individual zone has its own clock) is just plain silly and counter-intuitive. This is a far cry from a show-stopper, but that’s why I’m putting it into “Suggestions.”

For the people who care about immersion, it’s very jarring to, for example, walk through the Divinity’s Reach Asura Gate at high noon and find that it’s almost midnight in Lion’s Arch.

I haven’t been able to definitively verify this, but I’ve read and observed that certain events and mob spawns are tied to whether it is currently day or night. At least one entire weapon set changes appearance based on day/night status, and I’ve been told that the same set also has varying status effects based on whether it is day or night (though my own research seems to indicate that these effects were removed during beta). In any event, it’s clear that ANet wanted the day/night cycle to be more than just a moving skybox.

My suggestion is that day/night cycles across all zones an outdoors instances be tied to a single serverwide clock, rather than the individual instance-by-instance clocks in use currently.

Ohoni.6057:

There needs to be SOME progress for completing even a single fractal, even if you don’t get through all three.

There needs to be ways of rebuilding a party without completely abandoning the fractal sequence you’re on.

People who are disconnected need to be able to rejoin the party.

Well, the completing-three-in-a-row thing is a deliberate design choice that I can guarantee won’t change. If it helps at all to know the reason behind it, the “challenge” of fractals is getting through the chain of them without stopping to repair and rearm. I’m almost positive that the reasoning behind this development-side is to try and drum up sales for instant repair canisters, because slip-ups at higher difficulties often mean instant death, no downing.

There definitely needs to be a way to regroup, but the things preventing you from regrouping are also preventing people from leaving the instance, repairing, and returning. If you can invite a new player to the group to make up for the loss of a dropped player, then you could just kick a player whose armor was broken, let him repair in LA, and then re-invite. The same is true for players who disconnect – although this problem at least could be very, very easily solved by forcing them to reconnect back into the instance.

TL;DR: Most of the problems that you point out in FotM’s design are deliberate design choices to drum up gem store sales. ANet has made the classic mistake of designing content to fit their microtransactions shop, rather than vice versa.

Tulisin.6945:

Boxy.3824:

And lets face it; noone will ever do lvl 1 if they are paste it..noone.

I’ve run level 1 about 6~ times since I’ve been beyond it. It is a quick and easy run that can score first-tier materials and currency.

It’s not so much a problem of specific levels, it’s that the basic design of the dungeon divides players into different groups based on a (somewhat) arbitrary number.

You can have run any other dungeon in the game dozens of times, and there would be nothing on the game’s side barring you from running it with someone who’d only ever completed story mode. With fractals, it’s all about meta-scale progress, so running level 1 over and over again doesn’t give any kind of benefit compared to getting up to level 10.

The real problem doesn’t stem from the difficulty levels themselves, though, it originates in the way that gear necessary for completing later levels of FotM is intrinsically tied to running FotM at high levels. If the rest of your guild has agony resist rings and you don’t, you have not motivation to run level 1 – you want to run level 10+ to try and get your ring.

I myself have run level 1 a number of times, because I have guildmates who haven’t completed it yet. Once a few of us get into double digits, however, the motivation to run low-difficulty fractals will be minimal, since A) FotM are gimmicky and unfun compared to some of the other dungeon options, and I won’t get anything particularly useful out of low-level fractals.

striker.3704:

It goes against a lot of Anet’s philosophies.
-RNG item drop on extremely important items
-RNG drop chance for ascended gear (and it’s the only way to get the rings)
-Community gating mechanic (fractal levels)
-gear gating mechanic (agony)

It is a pretty big slap in the face now that I’ve looked it in the eyes.

I have to thank you for pointing this out. I hadn’t thought about FotM in this context before seeing this thread, and boy am I glad I did.

This seriously makes me concerned about where GW2 is going.

Eldiora.5836:

I have seen many guardians and the most horrible ones have been those that used GS only and refused to do anything else. I do not kick them from a group but I make sure to never play with them ever again when I encounter stupid players that refuse to adapt to the situation.

Well yeah, any player who refuses to switch from one specific weapon is generally not an asset. Weapon switching is a gameplay mechanic, and it’s intrinsically assumed in the game’s design that players are using it. I’d say that refusing to switch weapons is a WAAAY bigger problem with Rangers and the Longbow though, than with any Guardians, to the point that I avoid Rangers where possible when I’m not running with my static.

That said, when it comes to the weapon options for a guardian, the scepter is literally the only ranged DPS choice. The staff, while it is ranged, is very clearly not designed for DPS, at least not single target DPS. With only one ranged option (and a one-handed option at that, so only 3 skills) the potential for ranged versatility – or for that very specific weapon to fit every guardian’s playstyle – is staggeringly low.

TL;DR: There’s no excuse for not switching weapons, but a group shouldn’t require anyone to use one specific weapon (which they’re doing by demanding that a Guardian go ranged DPS).