Guild Wars 2

NoTrigger.8396:

Bri.8354:

Precise coordination in large scale content

this is part of raids.

Bri.8354:

is never a satisfying or skillful mechanic.

its called teamplay.

Bri.8354:

Getting players to do a specific task in a small window is hard enough in 5 player groups and expecting 15-25 players to do that would not be suited for anything

depends if the players are halfway decent and smart.
but this part makes you look like you havent experienced real raids in other games.

Would you support a mechanic that required every player to pick up and use a bundle on a boss within a 3 second window of each-other? This is type of precise coordination I’m talking about. It’s less about teamwork or smart and skillful play and more about herding, which is one of the core issues many players have with the way Tequalt and the three headed worm were designed.

There are far better ways to design content for teamwork and coordination than that.

NoTrigger.8396:

Bri.8354:

• mechanics that don’t require vocal communication or precise coordination.

can just as well join the cursed shore champ zerg and run in circles + spam 1 mindlessly.

raids are pretty much all about:

• mechanics that require vocal communication or precise coordination.

I was very specific in my wording with that one. Content should not require vocal communication to complete effectively and should not require precise coordination (of the group) to complete mechanics.

Rather the mechanics of the fights and roles the players take need to be clear enough that players should be able to view their surroundings and make the right decisions, not have to listen someone shout in their ear the entire fight to know what to do and what is going on.

Precise coordination in large scale content is never a satisfying or skillful mechanic. Getting players to do a specific task in a small window is hard enough in 5 player groups and expecting 15-25 players to do that would not be suited for anything but the most coordinated guilds.

After reading through the thread again, I’ve compiled a list of common things players want raids to be:

• 10-25 player instanced content (possibly multiple raids each with different party sizes).
• Less “do this at this time” mechanics.
• Clear objectives and mechanics that don’t require vocal communication or precise coordination.
• More importance given to defense, CC, and support mechanics and less about sheer damage.
• Multiple objectives and roles for players in the group.
• Condition stacking needs to be fixed.
• Appropriate monetary and exclusive rewards for the difficulty and scale.
• No vertical stat progression.

Can we all agree on this or is there something that should be added to or removed from this list?

That “praise the six!” line from the NPC after you started jumping around on the magic carpet made me laugh.

Wanze.8410:

At the moment, you can get 70c per bloodstone dust, if you use them crafting toxic sharpening stones.
At 20k dust thats a profit of 140g. IF you have to buy the recipe for 28g, you still make 112g profit.

That sounds pretty good if the market is active enough. I’ll try making a few and see how it turns out.

Goatjugsoup.8637:

have to ask op did you craft ascended gear yet because you need a lot of dust for that

I crafted all the armor and back pieces I need and bypassed crafting ascended weapons, going straight for legendary weapons instead.

What’s with all this hatred towards complex and challenging content? Are the people against raids even interested in the core game mechanics?

I for one would love to have raids if they are built properly. New activities, mechanics, and levels of challenge are always something I look forward to.

Zaxares.5419:

I used to have a huge stockpile of Ascended mats. Then I started getting to r500 across all the disciplines and now I’m completely out of everything except Bloodstone Dust (and after I craft Mawdrey, I’ll be out of that as well).

I was thinking about crafting Mawdrey to eat up the dust, but when I added up the cost it wasn’t worth it. I’d probably need over 50,000 bloodstone dust for it to pay for itself, which would also take over 6 months for it to consume.

People are always complaining about being overflowed with junk items, so how much do you have?

Here’s my collection of ascended items I have no use for:

They should have never added equipment stats to begin with and only included runes on equipment, which could possibly become more complex and powerful. Further modifications could come from traits which could also be made more complex and powerful.

It makes me wonder what they were thinking, adopting a traditional equipment stat (magic find being one of them) when its not suited for this game. At least they removed magic find on equipment (mostly).

Malediktus.9250:

Bri.8354:

They really need to improve these rewards.

Monetary rewards are very low, ascended chests mostly give you an inefficient stat you have no use for, you can’t do anything with your spare ascended rings/armor/weapons, tonic drop rate is so low its like winning the lottery, and once you get the fractal skins/tonic there’s no point of running it anymore because the non-exclusive rewards suck.

Thats why they a made the exclusive rewards extremly low chance, so you never stop having a reason to run them again :p

Unless you won the lottery as I have, getting the tonic while working towards level 50.

Without those exclusive rewards the place loses its appeal, fast. The only thing you can do with all those ascended rings and boot boxes is vendor them. Overall monetary rewards is less than that of normal dungeons.

If we could salvage ascended items it would be a nice step towards improving rewards, and the end reward needs to be increased, either by adding more drops to the completion chest or by increasing the gold amount.

Unfortunately all methods to deal with conditions require the ranger to give up something valuable. Unless you’re running a few specific builds you are put at a disadvantage, even against players who use conditions, by investing in condition removal.

This is one of the faults with this games PvP; you need to spec stun breaks to deal with certain enemies, condition removal to deal with others, and by doing so you make your build weaker overall. The counter-play system is very specific and dependent on builds more-so than player skill.

Its not what you would expect from an action based game where you should be able to counter the enemy, no matter what they are using, simply by knowing their build, available actions, and reacting accordingly. Instead its about picking your fights and running away from any you have a disadvantage against.

So basically, don’t bother with condition removal if your build doesn’t support it. Instead just don’t fight those who use conditions if you are having trouble against them. I know it sounds stupid, but that’s the way they designed the game.

I don’t believe complexity is the main issue, rather the direction, resources, and priorities of the game.

Of course the complexity of systems can cause initial problems, but these become clear with time, as are the solutions. However as I have witnessed time and time again, these “issues” often remain unacknowledged and unresolved, despite being blatantly clear.

The cause of this could be a lack of resources, priorities being elsewhere, technical issues with providing a solution, but more often in this game I believe it is the direction of the game and viewpoint of the developers.

As Elothar put it:

It is inevitable that something in a game that is spot on for one player will be “broken” for another player. One of the hardest lessons that I had to learn with MMOs was that just because I felt something was wrong did not make it wrong.

Take Edge of the Mists. When players like I try it out, we are disgusted. We have certain standards which must be met to enjoy a PvP format, few of which are present.

• Does it provide fair competition? No.
• Is the objective meaningful? No.
• Does it have interesting combat? No.
• Is the combat well designed and balanced for the objective and encounters? No.

Yet someone else could come in with a completely different goal in mind and enjoy it. They could not be looking for a PvP experience but rather to gain gold, levels, or run around shouting at people and enjoy it.

In the end it comes down to what you want to achieve with the content. If you look at EotM from a competitive PvP viewpoint, it is severely broken. Yet look at it from another viewpoint and its a perfect farming area. I bet the developers aren’t looking at it, or WvW for that matter, from a competitive PvP standpoint, that’s for sure. That’s where the “its not meant to be fair” stance came from; a completely casual viewpoint of WvW, not a competitively fair one.

In essence if you are playing this game for the game-play you’ll notice many issues and if not, you won’t. What this game seems to excel in isn’t the game-play, despite its potential to, but rather the social aspects. I suppose is why they focus so much on open world and large scale encounters, being the worst designed part of the game from a game-play viewpoint, but one of the best social aspects of the game.

Failing to appeal to both these groups is poor game design however. It is a good design practice to create something which is strong in both the social and game-play aspect, and that both the casual and hardcore player can enjoy.

But what is the cause of that? Complexity? I think not. Rather, their focus is too heavily shifted towards the casual and social aspect.

It seems like no matter what MMO I play, they are rife with issues. There is always something wrong with either the way they fund the game, way the game is maintained and updated, or core systems that ruin the game for me.

I came to GW2 expecting something better and thought it would finally be an MMO I could get invested in. Its gem store was fair, combat was the best I’ve seen, you could actually get the most prestigious items through normal play, and had a lot of good going for it.

However it also had a lot of issues, my main one having to do with how the game functioned in large scale combat. The enemies were not designed to deal with more than a small group of players and the combat started to fall apart the more players were around, making open world and WvW of little interest to me.

I thought “no problem, I’ll just stick to the better designed parts of the game and wait for them to add more content, new game modes, and hopefully fix the flaws with the game”.

Since then, over 2 years since release, they have not begin to address the core issue with the game, have added little new permanent content, have done little to improve current content, and have redirected their focus to the worst designed area of the game; open world and large scale content. They have said they have no plans to add new dungeons or rework the current ones. The only updates we seem to be receiving are 10 minutes of clicking through text bosses followed by a somewhat interesting boss fight that gives no incentive to replay after you finish the achievements.

And yet here I am, still waiting for that which will likely never happen, but with the current direction of this game, I won’t be around much longer.

They really need to improve these rewards.

Monetary rewards are very low, ascended chests mostly give you an inefficient stat you have no use for, you can’t do anything with your spare ascended rings/armor/weapons, tonic drop rate is so low its like winning the lottery, and once you get the fractal skins/tonic there’s no point of running it anymore because the non-exclusive rewards suck.

Having something like this for personal use wouldn’t hurt anyone and would only prove beneficial to the game.

I really hope these raids won’t use the low quality design seen in every large scale encounter thus far. They need to stop with the “artificial” forms of difficulty and mechanics and focus more on the core combat mechanics in these fights.

To go over some of the issues:

• Not one large scale boss that requires the group to have a strong knowledge of combat mechanics to succeed.

• Few of the objectives or mechanics in these fights expect the players to utilize their base profession skills to overcome the mechanic, instead they revolve around things like turrets and picked up items.

• Instead of failing through the combat itself with the entire group getting wiped out, loss conditions are instead based around boss timers, if you have enough players to deal enough damage in time, and how well the group preforms in the artificial coordination mechanics.

I miss the PvP formats.

GW1 had great PvP with a good amount of game formats. You had random arenas, guild vs guild, fort aspen wood, jade quarry, alliance battles, heroes ascent, and hero battles.

GW2 only has 2 game formats, one of which is intentionally broken yet they keep trying to make it competitive (WvW), and the other is very much unpopular (SPvP).

There’s just nothing in this game that begins to competes with the PvP from GW1 and its really disappointing.

The issue is with the way players are durable in this game. Its not through a massive amount of health or damage reduction, but from active mitigation such as dodging. Just try fighting any tough enemy without moving to avoid attacks, dodging, blocking, or anything of that nature. This is the situation pets are in.

Because its not possible to give pets the same sort of active defenses, the only route they can take is buffing them statistically. One of the more obvious issues with this is If they made pets able to survive in the toughest content, they would be too bulky everywhere else.

The core problem is really with the role of pets in this game. While having them as persistent damage dealers and tanks worked in GW1, it doesn’t in this game. They would have been much better suited as either a pure support or as a short duration and powerful summon with a specific role in mind.

Filovirus.6258:

The 24/7 and long term match ups IS what makes RvR and things like that interesting.

Now the 3way fight makes it a bit weirder, and a bit more imbalanced, but not that much.

The main problem is the segregation between NA and EU servers, and the fact Anet keeps artificially alive Servers that haven’t been able to sustain WvW decently (not even properly) for a year or so….

Your system doesn’t solve that at all, it removes EotM (a fun and relaxed game mode who allows to do boring stuff like leveling/grinding ranks/grinding gold/grindding badges/etc, that are important because despite what Anet promised this game is a giant grind like there seldom is in occidental games…) to replace it with something that has NOTHING to do with WvW/RvR but all to do with Battlegrounds.

Once again as i told Dayra and a few others multiple times, i have no problem with battlegrounds, it could even be a good idea, but (very) short, numbers balanced, terrain and side balanced game mode ISN’T what people like in WvW and EotM.

Ask for a NEW game mode all you want (more content and things to do is never a problem), but stop trying to get what you lack from other more “classic” games by destroying game modes that are quite popular (and for a reason).

Actually “battlegrounds” could be a nice addition since with a segregation randoms/full premades queues you could get the GvG community what they’ve been asking for over 2 years.

(after that, they’re free to play the game mode as “intended” or in frontal classes only, their choices)

The reason I suggested something like this to replace EotM is because we have 2 versions of the same thing, only one is so broken it has degraded into a farm. Sure some people enjoy farming it, and a group of people will enjoy it no matter what form it takes, but it is in no way a proper PvP format.

I get that some people wouldn’t like it being “instanced”, but that group already has WvW for that. Why do we need 2 open-world game formats when we could have EotM being an instanced, fair, and competitive game format while WvW could be the open-world, “its not meant to be fair” (as put by the developers), game format.

Thank you for removing the level restriction for pet and clone commands. It was ridiculous for those basic mechanics to be locked away until later levels.

And as some feedback about the overall changes, did you ever take into account the effect this has on the leveling experience of more experienced players? A new player might not mind their skills being locked away the first time around, but the second or third character you level up in the new system is nothing but frustrating to someone who is experienced with the game and used to playing with an entire set of skills.

nirvana.8245:

Anet have said they never intended for WvW to be balanced and have no intention of it ever being balanced.

All the more reason why people (both players and developers) should stop treating WvW competitively and realize what it actually is; an intentionally flawed PvP format that’s only strong point is the social aspect, not the game mechanics.

Of course they could have designed something that works well both mechanically and socially, but they didn’t.

But hey, who cares about deserted maps, unfair sides, and one-sided uninteresting fights?

Filovirus.6258:

What you want isn’t WvW nor close to what EotM was supposed to be.

What you want (and describe) is nothing new or anything it’s called…. a Battleground.
There is dozens of game with thoses already, and isn’t RvR or FvF or anything.

It’s battlegrounds with a random and premade queues.

(not saying it wouldn’t be nice to have battleground in WvW, it’s missing as far as i’m concerned, but it’s not something you should get by gutting EotM and removing it from the gate to be replaced).

I suppose my suggestion is more like a “battleground” and less like traditional WvW. But without systems that create equal teams and rewards players for the core objective, the game mode falls apart.

Jeff.5139:

I’d like to suggest that disabled golems also be immobilized for 20 seconds or that the pilot be forcibly ejected and the Golem unridable for the duration of the effect.

Agreed.

Golems already have a distinct advantage over other siege, being that they can run away while disabled and come back when they are back up. That on top of the reduced disable makes them have a large advantage over other siege weaponry. Forcing them to stay in place, possibly kicking the player out of it, would better allow players to take down the golem after a disable.

EotM ranks among the worst PvP of every game I’ve played. It has so many issues that prevent it from providing a real PvP experience, and functions more like a PvE farming area.

Teams are severely unbalanced.
In all my time farming EotM, I have seldom come across come across a fair or exciting fight. One team always steamrolls the other, and since everyone runs around in a giant group, combat is hopeless for 2 of the teams.

The objective doesn’t matter.
Players are given no incentives for holding objectives or increasing their score. The only rewards that are handed out are for taking objectives, so the only incentive is to take territory. It is more beneficial for a team to lose their entire side so they can recapture it, and that is nothing short of flawed design.

Players are not encouraged to split up.
Because of the rewards system it’s more beneficial if everyone bunches together. The objectives take too long to breach and capture, allowing a large group to go through and prevent smaller groups from taking anything.

Issues like those prevent the game mode from functioning as a healthy PvP format.

What EotM should have been was:

• There should be 2 types of EotM, 1 for guilds and 1 for hotjoins. In the guild version your guild would fight players from 2 other guilds, each team having equal size teams. Only 40(?) players from each guild could participate, and you could not join the queue with less than that. In hotjoin you would be placed in a queue with a random team until there were enough players on each side, or get thrown into a match already in progress that had unequal teams.

• Games should last far less time, around 15-30 minutes, and players should receive the bulk of their rewarded at the end of a battle based on their score.

• Walls are gates should be far easier to breach with siege and take less damage from normal attacks, encouraging players to split up and attack multiple objectives rather than bunch up and steamroll through everything.

In my opinion, something like this would have created a much more enjoyable and competitive PvP experience.

I’ve ran so many dungeons, but I’ve always used my tokens on weapons/armor to salvage or throw in the forge.

Looks like I have a lot of work to do, but with the current direction of the game being so stale, I’m not sure if I even have the interest to run all those dungeons again.

Why not just add a way to disable kicking completely, possibly by vote, until the party is shut down?

If its not to hard for them to program in, it sounds like the perfect solution to me.

If this was limited to utility skills and maybe traits, I think this would be an interesting idea. Right now the game is very much “build wars”, with the ability to adapt to and defeat the opponent being very limited. If we could switch utility sets while in combat, and perhaps traits as well, it might allow better counter-play.

Kaldrys.1978:

In my opinion Dry Top was the worst thing that could’ve happened to LS. Many people are forgetting that LS really hit its stride towards the end of Season 1 when Anet released quality patch after quality patch. Origins of Madness, Escape from LA, Battle for LA – these patches showcased what LS was capable of when done right: epic, large-scale group content that made you feel like part of a living, breathing world.

Unfortunately, outside of the improved story instances, Season 2 has been a complete disaster. By compromising with the outcry for permanent content I believe that Anet backed themselves into a corner. Dry Top is clearly designed to be permanent content, and it has all the limitations that prevent it from being engaging group content as a result. There’s just nothing at stake – no fail condition, no sense of urgency, no challenge, nothing. Dry Top is destined to become another Southsun Cove. Anet should stick what’s worked in the past, and that’s temporary content that requires high player turnout. The only place I’d like to see new permanent content is in instances.

While dry top isn’t perfect, it is a huge improvement over the previous open world map designs which expect you to wander around looking for events to complete for no greater objective.

But dry top still has the many problems that plague the open world, and will like you said, likely share the same fate as southsun cove, along with the many other maps that outside of world bosses and temple events, only serve as a place for leveling up and completing dailies.

Sadly the issues with the open world aren’t just limited to map and event design. I’d also argue that the design of every open world boss released thus far is poorly done, and this includes the ones in season 1.

No boss is mechanically designed to deal with more than a small group of players. They have trouble killing a few players, let alone a massive amount, and those who do die can quickly recover through revives or waypoints. This trivializes every piece of content which doesn’t resort to secondary means of difficulty.

That content which does resort to secondary means of difficulty, always does it poorly. We only see lower forms of difficulty, such as timers before an automatic defeat turning the fights into DPS races, and player coordination revolving around lower forms of mechanics, such as everyone standing in the same spot or doing some generic task at the same time. None of the higher forms of difficulty or mechanics are present in these fights, such as the utilization of player skills in reaction to the enemies actions.

The open world is fundamentally flawed, and their attempts at fixing it have all been poor. It is possible to address the issue, but if they keep sticking to low quality fixes, such as those seen in the open world bosses, you’re only going to get a low quality outcome.

Shortly after finishing up the core content of the game (world explore, getting level 80, ect), I remember thinking how great the future of the game would be if it was expanded upon in a scale similar to the first guild wars.

I was aware that the game wouldn’t be receiving “boxed” expansions, but that was only a good sign to me. I had played many other games that followed a similar incremental update system and was happy with the results, preferring them over the boxed expansion model.

The first living world update they released got me excited for the future. If a new map and an entirely new dungeon system is what we can expect, the future of the game is going to be great!

After that was only despair. A new update! What the heck, the only thing to do is help refugees and fiddle with sign posts? Yay another update! What’s this, a new dungeon?! Well I guess I don’t mind all that other dull stuff.

Wait, you’re telling me the new dungeon is temporary? What idiot came up with that? And so followed the direction of the rest of a wasted season, all content being temporary and adding little to nothing to the game in the long run.

Nearly 2 years after release they finally release some more permanent content, after a long break, followed by another long break until part 2. The content itself also has a good amount of problems. Its tedious to replay due to forced “stand and listen” segments and offer no reason to replay them after 3-4 times for the achievements. The new open-world design however is a step forward in open-world design.

But what’s this? No new dungeons are being designed and neither is SAB? What happened to content diversity?

In summary:

The update model they have chosen for this game has been very successful for other games, but ANet has failed miserably at it. Season 1 did little to make the game any stronger due to temporary content while season 2 content is slow, lacking in diversity, and has low replayability.

Now that they are focusing more on permanent additions the game will hopefully be better content-wise in a years time, but the lack of content diversity and interest sustainability is very concerning. It won’t matter if we have another few story instances and maps if nothing else is added and there’s little reason to go back and replay the content that has been added.

AngelDiscarnate.5489:

For every person here whining and complaining about all the changes and how they feel this update blows donkey honkers, there are 10 satisfied players in the game playing.
;D
Just sayin’…
Not toast.

And for every 10 satisfied players playing the game, there are 100 unsatisfied customers who have quit the game.

The update was never about making the game better for new players. It was to make our version closer to the Chinese version, which had inferior systems put in place by someone who doesn’t care about the quality of the game to make it “better suited” for that region.

Even if they see a drop in players because of this change they won’t do anything because the objective wasn’t to improve the game, neither for the Chinese or us.

gryph.8734:

Bri.8354:

I really hope they have been working on an expansion, or at least will start working on one.

The living story isn’t even close to being a substitute for an expansion. How can anyone even argue that? Heck, it doesn’t even begin to compete with what other games that follow a similar update schedule put out.

The update model can work, it has for many other games, but for whatever reason ANet does it poorly and I’d rather have a “boxed” expansion over this.

What about those of us that are perfectly happy without boxed expansions? Doesn’t our opinion count for jack?

Are you really happy with the pace, quality, and direction of the living story? Have you ever played another game that follows a similar model and seen what they can put out in comparison to GW2? I’m not saying we need a boxed expansion, but I doubt they will ever bring the current model up to a level that can match what one can put out there.

I really hope they have been working on an expansion, or at least will start working on one.

The living story isn’t even close to being a substitute for an expansion. How can anyone even argue that? Heck, it doesn’t even begin to compete with what other games that follow a similar update schedule put out.

The update model can work, it has for many other games, but for whatever reason ANet does it poorly and I’d rather have a “boxed” expansion over this.

I found leveling a new character tedious enough before the trait changes or this patch.

After the trait changes I started to level up my mesmer some more to try it out, and I was really put off by it.

And now they lock more things, making the experience all that more tedious? I don’t even need to try it out to realize the impact this will have. It was bad enough before any of these changes, but now? Forget leveling up those new characters!

An area this game has great potential for is large scale combat, but the current versions of it are low quality or broken.

In the open world large scale combat either comes down to being trivial or difficult for the wrong reasons.

Much of the content just isn’t designed to deal with the massive amount of players around. For the majority of content the enemies have trouble killing a single player, let alone the 50+ that can be around. The few players that do get killed can easily recover via revives or way pointing and running back.

When it comes to challenging content, the bulk of the difficulty comes not from the combat mechanics, but from lower forms of “artificial” difficulty, such as timers before an automatic defeat, and group coordination. Rather than the objective of the fight being how well players can utilize their given skills, respond to the enemy with them, and the ultimate objective being wiping out the group of players completely, the fights have degraded into DPS marching bands.

WvW fights are mostly one-sided and this issue is furthered by imbalanced populations.

EotM is the worst PvP format I’ve ever played. People just run around as a massive group, taking one building after another. You can do this for large periods of time without running into the opposing blob of players, and when you do it’s almost never a fair or even remotely interesting fight. Nobody cares about the core objective or to fight other players; they only go there to farm.

The borderland and battleground maps suffer from some of the same core issues. Players like to run around in massive groups creating one-sided uninteresting fights, one server is often much stronger than the other 2 ruining any fair competition, but that can only happen when people are actually playing it. In the low to mid tier servers you can’t even find people to play with much of the day and if you get enough people you can run around taking everything unopposed.

Both of these areas seem very poorly designed, which is a shame seeing how much of the game they make up, especially for veteran players.

I know some of you still enjoy this content, but even if you do, you can’t be blind to issues like these which push some of us away from the content completely.

/rant

It may not be a misuse of the word as much as players leaving out the second part of a sentence, leaving others to fill it in.

For instance, P/P thieves are not viable…
- for fighting? Incorrect.
- candidates for certain roles? Correct.
- for completing dungeons? Incorrect.
- for dealing a certain amount of damage in dungeons? Correct.

For all we know they could have had certain roles or conditions in mind when they said it wasn’t viable, not that it wasn’t capable of fighting.

I’ve noticed myself doing the same thing for simplification. In real life I’ll word it out completely, but in games its annoying to type out so much, so I’ll just say something like “its not viable” and leave out the “to complete this dungeon in X amount of time”.

I feel like this could backfire unless its kept up to date and communication stays open and frequent. I’ve seen other companies try similar things on their forums and if it is just left there to stagnate, it gives players an impression that those issues have been forgotten and nothing will be done.

For the game RuneScape this thread is a perfect example. It was a good idea that turned into a disaster. The thread is still pinned at the top of the forums despite being dead and not updates in years, and many of the issues are still being “considered/Is being implemented”.

We don’t need something like that, and unless you’re willing to truly maintain the thread and your communication in general, your brainstorming thread will share a similar fate. We can’t have things happen like long recent silence or for you to post that you are looking into something only for it to remain untouched for long periods without further comment on the status of the issue or if you are even still aware of it (soulbound dungeon runes anyone?!).

Welcome back to the game. As an advanced player who has played consistently since release and has experience in every area of the game, here are my experiences.

Thaon.6927:

Any who, jumping off of that tangent, I’m looking for some good direction on GW2 end-game pve. I remember hearing that the game carries hard mode dungeons at cap, and that there’s some armor to be earned therein. But, after acquiring, what does the game offer? Are there different tiers of end game content?

Unlike some other games, there is no “hard mode” for content. Almost all dungeons can be easily completed by any moderately skilled player. Only some Arah dungeon paths and high level fractals are harder, but are still only moderate in their difficulty.

The same goes for the rest of the game. The game has little that will challenge someone who has learned the basic mechanics of the game, and upon learning the more advanced stuff, nothing will challenge you as an individual. The only thing really “challenging” in the game are the “elite” world bosses like Tequalt, but the challenge there comes solely from coordination of the group which isn’t the type of thing advanced players crave.

For goals, everything past ascended gear is purely cosmetic and is obtained via gold or bad RNG, not through player skill. The only reason to run most content again is to get more gold or a chance at an exclusive cosmetic item.

Thaon.6927:

What has driven some of you to play since release? What do you do day after day that keeps the routine log fresh?

I look to the end-game of GW2 and I, at least for the moment, don’t see too much. Is there a sufficient amount to keep me on?

I’m going to give this game a level cap. As in, I will ride my guardian to 80, enjoy the zones, and take it from there. But really, outside of several dungeons to hop in to (and pvp), what’s there to do?

What has kept me playing is a combination of gaining wealth and just finding the game itself fun (smooth combat, jumping around, it just seems to have an appeal to it). I have 4 legendaries and the endless fractal tonic, yet going for further cosmetics hasn’t grown boring to me yet. I still find running dungeons fun, but open world content has grown very much dull as the challenge on the individual very rarely goes beyond casual, and there’s far too much waiting around for events to show up involved.

The living world releases and feature updates give something new to do which also helps keep my interest. Even though they aren’t very challenging, don’t seem to last long, and don’t offer much replayability, its still interesting to try them out, get the achievements, and go for the new items they add like the Mawdrey back piece.

ipan.4356:

“Rework huge portions of the game” is almost never in the agenda.

With the exception of FFXIV – the only MMO in my memory that was rebooted – I’ve never played it, so I have no idea how well that went.

That’s always an issue when they release a product that’s unfinished. They have put a lot of band-aids on it, like defiant and unshakable, but the issues are still there waiting to be healed.

Unless they are willing to live with countless issues in the game large changes are required, but understandably they don’t want to make them.

This has always been one of my top issues with MMOs. So many have fundamental issues that never get attention, and it ruins my ability to take the game seriously.

Amazing post by HHR LostProphet.

Another issue I feel is within the spirit of his post, is universal profession design and balance. Each game format has very different game-play mechanics and goals, yet the professions share the same skills between every format and balance patches are for the most part universal.

Building around 5v5 PvP scenarios and trying to throw it into large scale combat (open world PvE, WvW) and dungeons has created a vast multitude of issues in those areas.

And of course the developers are perfectly aware of the content being broken, so they respond with things like “WvW is not meant to be balanced”. An imbalanced game mode is nothing less than a flawed game mode, killing any serious competition from happening, which strangely they have been trying to encourage with the WvW tournaments despite these issues. You can’t have something be both unfair and seriously competitive at the same time.

This fits pretty well into the category HHR mentioned:
“Many of these flaws are so huge that they probably can’t be removed until ANet is willing to rework huge portions of the game to please players who have played this game a long time now, the non-casual gamers.
And I honetly don’t think this will ever happen.”

I fail to see how any non-casual player can take any of these areas seriously in their current state.

Personally I’d prefer a wider diversity of activities over more dungeons. The reason I run so many dungeons is that the game doesn’t offer much for me outside of them.

I know a lot of people don’t like comparisons to GW1, but they put a lot of work into making content have a lasting value. Missions were repeatable. Areas offered unique skins giving a purpose to every area. Hard mode gave incentives to do every area at the “end game” level. Vanquishing gave a reason to kill everything in a map. Locked chests were located around the map and in some missions that you could open for skins and other good items. Dungeons were rewarding and fun.

And what do we have in GW2 on the same scale of lasting value? Dungeons, world events, WvW, and PvP? Its not that I’m overly in love with dungeons, its that this game doesn’t have much variety in each format after you’ve experienced it once, for people like me.

My issue with most of the game is that they don’t give people like me a strong reason to go back. I’m not like Vayne; when I go into the open world I have a mental picture of everything that is there and everything I can do. I’ve already experienced enough of it to the point where exploration is no longer fun. Whats left are the activities which are largely unrewarding or tedious to do.

So what is causing this issue? You can break it down to three things which aren’t being met.

The content needs to be available to do, obviously, and that was the issue during season 1 of the living story where nearly everything was removed after the segment was over.

The content should still be enjoyable after completing it many times. In the case of living story season 2 you are forced to stand there and listen to the same conversations, lasting over a minute in some circumstances, which get very annoying. In the case of dynamic events there is too much waiting for timers or wandering around looking for an event involved. Both these things create a poor pace which ruins the feel of the content.

The content needs to give the player a reason to repeat it. This is most easily achieved by rewards, which is something a lot of content has an issue with. Why do a jumping puzzle when it hardly gives anything? Why do a dynamic event for a tiny bit of karma? Why do any of season 2 again when they give nothing?

A key part of online games, especially MMOs, is their ability to get players invested and keep them playing. One of the best ways to do this is create content with a lasting value that players will go back to many times. Content which does this well can allow players to enjoy it for dozens, if not hundreds, of hours.

A great example of this is dungeons. I’ve spent hundreds of hours running them and have achieved over 200 ranks of hobby dungeon explorer (5 dungeon runs per rank), not to mention how many fractals I’ve ran, and I still find them entertaining to do. It’s this sort of thing that keeps players interested in the game outside of living story releases.

However since release (nearly 2 years now) we have had very little content added with a lasting value and this is deeply concerning. For season 1 the only things added with a lasting value were guild missions, fractals, southsun cove, and a new WvW map. Everything in season 2 has been permanent so far, but sadly nothing in it has a lasting value.

As a result, players who are invested in this game have almost nothing new to do once they complete a living story chapter and the achievements when by now, a properly updated game should have enough content to double the amount of lasting value in the game!

Furthermore, many parts of the game that have been here since release also lack a lasting value. Look how few people go around and do dynamic events, jumping puzzles, and the countless other things this game has to offer on a regular basis. The open world, which was meant to serve as the core game experience, is pretty much dead outside of world bosses and daily achievement after you experience it a single time.

The way I see things, they have been focusing more on getting the game in order than they have on creating new content. Just look at how much has been reorganized since release and how many new features have been added to address issues with the game. By now we have probably gotten 2 “expansions worth” of that kind of thing, and they are still adding to the list.

The other issue is with the design of season 1 of the living story which was a disaster. There was absolutely no focus on creating content with a lasting value, so after it was over the game had no valuable content added to it, and players were left with little more than the content that had been there at launch.

Season 2 took a step in the right direction with permanent instances, but it still has an enormous issue with replayability. Once someone goes through the story and then 2-3 more times for the achievements, there’s no reason to go back. The pacing of the instances is also poor, forcing the player to stand there and wait for NPCs to repeat minutes of dialogue they’ve already heard before they can proceed with the mission objectives.

To improve upon the season 2 living story model what they need to do is focus more on replayability. Give players the ability to skip all the standing around and listening to the NPCs and let them get right into the action. Give daily rewards for completing the instances such as foxfire clusters and champion bags.

For me the SAB was the most memorable content they have released thus far and not seeing it in their priorities is very disappointing.

And what the heck do they mean it “doesn’t easily fit into the narrative structure of Living World”? Is the living story now limited to the adventures of the biconics who I’m sure many of us grew tired of before season 2 started? Focusing on more characters, including Motto and his adventure box project, would do nothing but improve the narrative of the living story.

When something grants an advantage, especially one that players rely on, it seems peoples rationality is clouded and will try to use anything they can to justify it.

This thread is a great example of this. Any rational person should be able to see that the FGS is out of line with the balance of other weapons.

Using portals to bypass a jumping puzzle and claim the reward is another good example. People were so attached to it when that aetherblade jumping puzzle was released that they couldn’t fathom the issue of players bypassing the content to claim the reward.

Noobix.3958:

“The commander tag is too cheap!”
“The commander tag is too expensive!”
“The commander tag is fine as it is now, functionality-wise.”
“The commander tag needs more functionality”
“sPvP needs its own unique rewards!”
“Why does sPvP get all its own unique rewards I want PvE rewards too!”
“WvW is a stagnant gamemode”
“Im having so much fun in WvW right now!”
“Weapons are too big!”
“Skill animations are too small and I can’t read them in sPvP!”
“Stop with the LS, We desperately need an expansion!”
“I cant wait for the next LS update and feature pack!”

I don’t envy the people that have to read the forums and get an actual bearing on community opinion and wants and needs :P

Of course anyone who looks at it in such a simple way is going to have trouble. You can’t just bunch everything together; the game is made up of many communities, each of which has different needs and desires. You also have to understand the spirit of what players are saying, not just the words.

I’m not going to go over you entire post, but I think just going over the commander tag can make my point.

For the commander tag the complaint about it being “too cheap” is saying that anyone with 100 gold can get commander status, not those who are experienced enough to lead. The complaints about it being “too expensive” are about how those who are experienced and want to lead, having to pay large sums in order to outfit all their characters with it, or pay massive amounts for the new color functionality.

While “too cheap” and “too expensive” may look conflicting, they actually aren’t when you get down to what the players really want done. You could solve both these complaints at the same time if you just understood what the players are really trying to get at, which has to do with them being obtained with gold, not unlocked by things which show experience like WvW rank.

It is the same for many of the complaints in these forums. If you simplify it, it may look like there’s a conflict in the community, but most of the time there isn’t, and when there is its not that hard finding a solution that both sides can agree on.

I’m not a fan of exclusive rewards for things like tournaments, but I’m glad they are adding a had to get armor set through the PvP tracks. We have plenty of hard to get weapon and back piece skins to work towards, but very few armor skins, so the more the better.

I might actually craft it now (didn’t really like the skin), although it can only eat 200 bloodstone dust a day.