I have my own theory, which is based on my personal experience: the RNG/chance to salvage Ecto from rares was reduced. Prior to Lost Shores, I was getting an Ecto on every single salvage (100% for over 50 salvages) using a Black Lion Salvage Kit.
Now, it’s more like 70%. This would explain why the price has nearly doubled.
ArenaNet, can we get any kind of acknowledge of the problem here? I would just like to know if it is something that is planned to be addressed in the near future.
Agree 100% that a finishing move should be considered a Offensive Combat Action and not allow a player to remain stealthed.
Something isn’t right with the Badges of Honor — the drop rate either needs to be adjusted or the gear costs need to be cut in half (at least). When you consider the cost of obtaining end-game gear through other means, it’s not balanced in terms of time investment.
The last three zones appear to have been designed around the idea that random players would band together to complete these areas, given the extremely difficulty. But that vision was flawed in that very few people actually reside in these zones.
Karma Jugs and Mystic Coins — casual players need them too!
We live in a material world …
If you’re going to put dungeons in the monthly achievement, you need to create dungeons that are more accessible to casual players. Dungeons in GW2 are designed for hardcore players so this alienates the casual player base.
I really enjoy playing Guild Wars 2, but the November Monthly Achievement is not something myself, or many other casual players will be able to complete.
The single chunk of time to complete 1 dungeon is more than I am able to invest. Dungeons aren’t designed for casual players from the perspective of time investment and difficulty. I saw an interview near launch that stated the Daily and Monthly Achievements were design to help casual players keep up by getting fast experience every day — this is no longer true .
This change alienates a significant portion of your player base so you should strongly consider the time investment task you put into the Monthly Achievement for December.
FotM was a good idea, but the lack of a robust, cross-server LFG tool has created more problems than it solved.
I have to question the decision-makers at ArenaNet to launch the game without a cross-server matchmaking/LFG tool … SWTOR didn’t have one and look at what happened to it … FAIL!
Monthly Achievement calls for the completion of 5 Dungeons. I’ve played MMOs for nearly 15 years and Guild Wars 2 wins the award for creating the most inaccessible, frustrating PUG dungeon content ever.
Your ill-conceived definition of challenging is forcing players to die frequently. There’s a fine line between challenging and frustrating and you’ve crossed it with casual gamers.
Yes, I’m tired of spamming /map chat like I had to do in MMOs 5 years ago … get with the times!
Prior to this dungeon, getting a dungeon group wasn’t so bad … players were either looking for Story or Explorable (sometimes further divided by path #).
With FotM, the ability to find a group is incredible difficult given the variation of levels.
I’ve played MMOs for over 10 years and GW2 takes the prize for the game with the most frustrating access to PUG dungeons!
At this point, the silly string is already out of the can so you can’t really remove FotM — the only way I see to fix it is to introduce cross-world a cross-world matchmaking system. I’d rather be spending my time playing the game instead of (trying) to spam /map chat for a group.
Please make this a priority.
I don’t think a Matchmaking system is needed, but with the current anti-spam filters, it’s frustratingly slow to find a FotM group. You either need to decide that you’re going to be a community tool for dungeons or loosen the spam filters … because right now a lot of people have given up on dungeons because it’s a tedious task just to find a PUG.
The initial phases were a complete failure due to blocking bugs. These are the most frustrating part of GW2 in Personal Story, Dungeons and now Special Events. I do not know the architecture, but I highly recommend analyzing it determine how to better handle these things because player frustration is very high when this happens (which is frequently).
The one-time event itself was worth the two and a half hours of effort invested only because I was one of the VERY lucky individuals to get a precursor that I could sell for a very large profit on the TP. Had I not received this drop, I would have been a bit disappointed.
The scale of this event brought to light a big problem with Guild Wars 2 that usually only manifests itself in WvWvW: culling. We had so many people in our overflow that we frequently wiped because we kept running into huge crowds of invisible NPCs when moving up and down the ramps in the mountain.
I understand the desire to make something “huge and epic” … but 100+ people all beating on the same monster for several minutes isn’t epic; it’s a performance problem even with a high-end machine. I would argue that a smaller group of say, 20 – 30 people will feel more epic since players will actually be able to see what’s going on instead of particle effects from thousands of attacks at the same time.
GW2 is a fun game, but the frequency of bugged NPCs in Personal Story, Dungeons and Special Events is unacceptable. There are few games that have frustrated me as much as this one when it comes to buggy content.
I’m not talking about story mode there champ, i’m talking about exploration.
The addition of this requirement to the monthly achievement is absurd. Instead of forcing players into activities designed to drain the economy of gold, give them options!
Based on the Halloween event, we know the ability exists to have an array of achievements that can count toward a larger one … so give players the option to complete Task A or Task B or a combination of each.
This new achievement requirement is going to steer a lot of the general/casual population into hardcore content that is brutal and unforgiving — it is going to rob casual players of what little coin they have and likely cause a lot of frustration.
I did my first non-Arah dungeon run this weekend and I have to say that there needs to be a curve to them. They are all extremely frustrating for anyone who hasn’t mastered the mechanics yet — there’s no introduction that teaches players the mechanics other than pure trial and error corpse runs.
For those of that don’t buy stolen gold or spend 12 hours a day playing the game, that makes this content somewhat inaccessible because 50 silver for repairs to learn how to complete one path of one dungeon is poor game design.
Oh, and the last boss encounter in Path 2 of AC bugged out so we basically spent an hour and 50s to get nothing. Yay.
There are few things in this game as frustrating as investing hours into an instance, only to discover it is bugged. GW2’s lack of rewards for PROGRESS in an instance make this extremely frustrating and the game isn’t even worth playing when these types of problems are encountered.
So, the occurrence of this bug tonight cost me nearly 50 silver in repairs and over an hour of my time.
This game has a big, big problem with scripted events in instances … the personal story quests encounter the exact same problem very frequently.
If the root cause of these problems cannot be found and fixed, you may want to reconsider dungeon instance design because right now it is not worth the risk of even trying to play.
I completely disagree with this — XP from crafting is a great alternative to exploration/heart/kill XP. After 20 or 30 levels on a character, I usually wait until Thursday when the WvW Artisan bonus is the highest … then I pop a Crafting Booster and power my way from 0 – 250ish and gain 6 levels in the process.
Now let’s break down WHY this is in the game:
– crafting is alternate source of leveling progression
– no XP means less incentive, meaning a lot less people will do it
– crafting puts demand on player-gathered resources, which sucks A LOT of money out of the economy via TP (keep it strong)
TLDR: XP from crafting is fun and necessary.
7 page forum thread on Clock Tower. Conclusion: design fail.
Conclusion: To many whinners wanting things handed ot them on silver platter
Nope. People want to be able to participate in SPECIAL EVENT content without spending their entire weekend trying to complete one activity.
7 page forum thread on Clock Tower. Conclusion: design fail.
Then the simple, blunt answer is that you just won’t be able to complete it. All content does not come with a pre requisite that it must be able to be done by anyone no matter what. As others have noted in this thread, it’s very doable. Nerfing it would make it trivial. This is a learning process, but if after 5 hours you aren’t nearly completing it, or progressing, then it just isn’t for you.
This is a really really really bad attitude to take. Sorry, but, uh, yeah, everything should be able to be completed by 100% of the playerbase. If you cater to a small crowd of blowhards who insist everything must be difficult and can only be achieved through hours of grinding, a huge majority of players become disillusioned with the game.
If they don’t find the game fun, they stop playing. When they stop playing, they aren’t supporting the game through expansion purchases or gem store goods. And what should be more relaxed and fun than a simple holiday event?
Agree 100%.
Fact: the number of pissed off players will only increase if the puzzle isn’t changed to a psuedo-solo or solo instance. This is the PRIMARY reason why everyone is mad.
The amount of blocking issues with personal story quests is completely unacceptable. In my own experience, more than half of the personal story quests above level 40 have the potential to create some form of blocking where it will not progress and we have to completely start over.
On my first level 80, I did not encounter as much blocking as I do now on my other three level 60+ toons … which means I was really lucky or they introduced a lot of breakage since then.
In any case, the current state of personal story quests is unacceptable. In fact, I got so frustrated that I quit doing them altogether.
The Clock Tower is a design fail from multiple aspects:
1) the game camera is flaky
2) large groups of players and huge player models make an extremely challenging puzzle nearly impossible
3) even if the first two problems were eliminated, the vast majority of players probably wont complete the puzzle before the event because it’s too hard/requires too much time investment to complete. Special Event content is supposed to be FUN, not frustrating … that is why this is an epic fail by ArenaNet.
Or we could get a factual report from ArenaNet.
Please post these stats because numbers don’t lie:
Number of players that have attempted the puzzle
Number of players that have completed puzzle
Average number of attempts per player
Average number of attempts to complete puzzle
Number breakdown of races that completed the puzzle
Yeah, the first back item has the same problem … there’s no level for it so no upgrade can be applied.
The problem with this isn’t the puzzle, it’s the camera and other player models getting in the way.
Make it a solo challenge and the kittening will stop.
I agree, I can’t even see where my feet are landing because there are like 15 Charr in my way blocking my view.
So far, it’s an epic fail in terms of design.
I also just found that I get perpetually stuck in combat while underwater with no apparent NPC aggro.
I absolutely loathe underwater combat in this game because it’s riddled with problems like NPC invulnerability at random times during EVERY battle. Not some battles … EVERY BATTLE.
Add this to the list of things that need to be fixed sooner rather than later.
Can we get more specifics on what was changed? Which achievements and what were the old vs new counts.
Thanks!
This story quest is far, far, far too hard. In fact, I made a huge mistake in choosing to do this quest over another for the sheer fact that it takes 5 or 6 deaths to complete solo … I don’t care which class you are or what gear you have … there is no way to complete the quest without dying multiple times with any strategy.
Enemy difficulty/numbers are far too much for one player.
Agreed. Free transfers are the biggest problem in GW2 right now.
Gave up after 3.5 hour queue.
When is the queue system going to be fixed? It’s been at least six weeks now and the queue system is extremely flaky — some people get in, some dont. There doesn’t seem to be any ORDER to the queue (which means it isn’t really a queue, more like a lottery).
Please fix this because I’ve been waiting in the queue for 3+ hours and other guild members got in after 10 minutes for the same borderland!
This suggestion is for when free transfers are over because right now they are the biggest contributing factor to WvW imbalance.
In an effort to balance out WvW populations, I suggest creating incentives for players willing to transfer to under-populated worlds. For example, perhaps a week-long buff to experience gain and badges of honor in WvW combat.
Unfortunately, the free transfers do not appear to be allowing the populations to balance out — they are actually doing the opposite.
I disagree that WvW is dead, but I think server transfers have significantly tainted the spirit of WvW.
I hope that soon they will give the “world transfers will no longer be free in x days” warning … but I don’t see that happening until Guesting is in.
I agree, but until they stop bots and stolen accounts … gem-purchased gold will never be cheaper than stolen gold, which means there will always be a market for it.
Then he dodgerolls away from one of my attacks…And rolls right off a cliff we had drifted over to during the fight. A second later a loot bag pops up at my feet and I get exp for the kill.
Hehe … dodge-rolling to your falling-death in WvW is a right of passage!
Something Good: WvW siege on Stonemist and actually taking it.
Something Bad: Bots — it’s so, so, so bad right now. I’ve seen the same bots farming in the same spot for more than two weeks after I originally reported it.
We know you’re working on the Bot problem, but the main thread is locked … so just let me just update you on the player-facing status — it’s getting worse every day. I report at least 100 bots per day … and that’s just me … and just the FRACTION of the world I am able to cover during my limited playtime.
This bot problem is gone from a simple nuisance to a massive problem. There are hundreds of bots occupying valuable WvW slots. There are dozens (or more) bots on every zone farming materials (wrecking the economy) and killing spawns (interfering with genuine players).
This needs to be fixed — simply banning accounts isn’t going to cut it …. I don’t know where botters are getting their accounts from, but they seem to have an unlimited supply.
To the original poster, you describe a short-term problem that is solved by a long-term solution: server rankings.
My suggestion: move to a more active world because any WvW population that quits just because the score isn’t their favor isn’t worth sticking with.
Last week Yak’s was a competitive world … what has happened since then? Did a bunch of big WvW guilds leave?
Yup, I’m on SoR and I saw this as well! My observations this week is that the bot problem has become more prevalent than ever before. There are PACKS of bots everywhere in the world — even PvE.