Anet has said that the have made Southsun and Orr “interesting” for hardcore players who are looking for “challenge”. While this group appears to be highly vocal, they are largely non-existent in the game. If they were to return CS to the January update there would be many happy players in GW2; and, these players would be actual existent players. It would be great to have the old CS back.
What are you talking about?
They increased the difficulty which is a good thing. Unfortunately these very weird developers thought it would be a good idea to decrease the frequency of the events to make the zone boring and keep the rewards terrible in order to prevent people from actually going there.
I can go to Queensdale and chop down a tree and get better rewards than a lvl 83 champion in Orr.
This game design is so bad I even wonder how they got this job.
Condition spamming and cleansing is going to get old and boring VERY fast believe me.
Never mind that fact that it’ll be boring to play; it’ll be even more boring to watch. Who would want to watch a game were “icons on a UI” are the main source of damage?
As more time passes I’m increasingly convinced arenanet will kill and bury spvp.
First, there is no risk in the game. The value being used up is our time. In that time, it’s how we feel about our experience that’s important. Obviously, we want to feel good about it. Earning a shiny at the end doesn’t replace an annoying or agitating experience. That is the biggest problem I see, the agitation. Because the only way the developers appear to be making things take longer, is to make them more annoying.
They need to stop all the thoughts of difficulty and make it fun. As soon as a Dev begins to think of “Risk v Reward” they need to slap themselves. Then start thinking about the experience. Because a good experience becomes the reward.
Can you explain what a good experience is? I’m sure the developers believe what they’re creating is a good experience. The problem with your argument is that it’s too subjective.
Can you entertain a grown adult with Saturday morning cartoons? If you can then why aren’t they targeted to adults? In trying to target all age groups you only end up pleasing the youngest most ignorant market. Which is what GW2 is going for with their abusive lottery system.
Hahaha… I get more for chopping a tree in this game…. in a level 10 zone, then I get for soloing a level 80 Champion in this game….
This needs to be plasted on a wall where Anet holds their morning meetings. I cant +1 this enough.
I anxiously await this reward revamp I keep hearing about.
Yup.
I can exit Lion’s Arch through the south gate and go scuba diving in the waters of Bloodtide Coast for Gold Ore and Platinum Ore. More rewarding that facing a champion that’ll take me 10 minutes to kill solo.
I understand the dynamics of risk/reward. It is the underlying dynamic of magic find, i.e., putting yourself at greater risk to increase your chance of reward. All well and good. But, perhaps I am getting old. These days I think more in terms of reward for play. We play games to have fun and we all have dramatically different playstyles. Rather than double down on one motivator/dynamic why not expand it to reward for investment in the game through play, recognizing there are many ways to play the game.
That works short term only. There is very little long term returns for the investment. Arenanet has changed from updating once every 30 days to once every 15 days.
Why do you think that is?
Because people are bored of easy content. You do it once and that’s it. You’re done. You don’t log in anymore.
If they designed something difficult and something easy; I guarantee you the difficult content would get more play time and for much longer duration. That’s a much smarter investment to make as a developer. Rolling out easy content more frequently is not only a more expensive business model but, the customer base would drop the game for another much faster. Thus making your business model much more risky.
It’s not so much the reward that needs work; it’s the risk.
There is no risk in GW2. This game is like an amusement park. When you get on the the rides you’ll get your candy. Because the ride is so easy they have to make the good candy very rare. This is the same way a lottery system works. We spend our money (time) in exchange for the chance to get good candy.
In other games; when you keep failing at something you have a big repair bill and spent resources on consumables.
In GW2 you still get candy when you fail. It’s like being on the short bus.
Lightning Flash doesn’t need to break stun. You can cast it while stunned to avoid damage. The whole point of stunning someone is to deal damage to them while they’re stunned. Lighting Flash will keep you stunned after the port but it helped you to avoid the damage.
Also with signet of air it doesn’t stack so the signet is better
Exactly. I don’t think these developers spend much time working on these traits.
You guys aren’t seeing the big picture. You potentially have a trait that frees up a utility spot. Mesmers would kill for what you’re complaining about.
It’s funny you mention that because the only reason I don’t play a Mesmer is due to not having access to a constant movement speed boost. Fighting an opponent that always moves 25% faster than you is like having a constant cripple effect applied to you.
I despise poor game play balancing decisions as much an anyone else does. Developers add game play mechanics without a fundamental understanding of it’s effects on the game. They’re just artists adding cool stuff. They’re not engineers that make sure what they build is structurally sound.
If you inflate the damage then you also have to inflate the health pools. The end result is just inflated numbers cluttering the whole screen. In WoW they do this to keep people addicted so that they can continue to fork out 15$ every month. Don’t need a grind if there is no subscription. It’s pointless.
Condition damage can be fixed by being forced to fight a mix of regular and higher armor mobs.
Doubling condition damage is just a bandaid. The root problem needs to be solved with either some type of overflow damage when a target is capped, or changing the way conditions deal damage (i.e. one person is responsible for 2-3 stacks, not potentially all 25).
I’m not sure why there would be support to promote a system where damage is dealt over time in an action based combat MMO. The intent is too keep the players eye’s on the action not on a user interface. Damage over time is displayed via the user interface with an icon.
There are technical limitations to conditions and boons in GW2. Conditions and boons can stack in intensity and are affected by duration. All this data has to be broadcast to all players in the area. In an open world with hundreds of players; their servers would grow a pair of legs and run out the building.
It just goes to show that the game was designed by artists and not engineers. An engineer would not have designed it like this. Due to resource limitations and infrastructure costs.
Hardcore gamers cannot destroy an MMO. Only developers can destroy an MMO. Build content for the easy and casual crowd and content for the hardcore crowd. It’s like an amusement park; the kids have their own rides. Or build your MMO to a niche market instead of the whole planet.
will be fun to pressure someone with the new and improved churning earth + flash combo :p I always thought they would increase the damage, since other teleports didn’t have damage it’d be more of a niche.
Lighting Flash hits a target for about the same damage as a Lightning Whip. You can get a nice 2k crit with it. Now it’s going to crit for over 3k easily.
I’m already starting to fool around with some interesting combos. Vapor Blades + Weak Spot is stacking vulnerability quite high and quite fast. Stack vulnerability to about 15; quick swap to Earth for a Churning Earth + Lightning Flash. Boom.
We spec survivability because of burst damage in the game. You can either deal with baseline Elementalist survivability or reduce overall burst of all classes.
Guess which one is more likely to happen? None. Because arena net just nerfs.
Downed State mechanics actually go a long way toward promoting skilled play, specifically by promoting more team oriented tactics.
What you call team oriented tactics I call bad players covering up the mistakes of bad players.
A more skillful approach to team play are tools that players use to prevent their allies from taking damage.
We can agree to disagree on this. It is my opinion that there are a limited number of tools available in this game to prevent allies from taking damage and a number of damage skills/combos that are near impossible to mitigate in this fasion by design. Furthermore, the mitigation tools that are useful in supporting allies are very highly concentrated in a relative few classes making it impractical to try to make it work that way (again my opinion). The core design of the game is based around downed state being there, and if you throw it out in favor of a system more like the one that you re advocating it either introduces far more imbalance than is currently present or necessitates a ground up re-design of pretty much the whole combat system.
A lot of skills would definitely have to change in the absence of the downed state. Damage values and base health/armor will have to be re-calculated.
Preventing someone from doing damage to your ally isn’t just about creating a shield. You can stun, cripple, immobilize, chill, blind, fear, pull, daze, knock back and knock down.
Downstate is awesome. Makes the battles more interesting and teamwork more rewarding.
Downstate is terrible. Makes the battle frustrating for skilled players by forcing them to watch unskilled noobs rubbing each other’s genitals.
actually, skilled players co operate and play together as a team.
unskilled players go solo rambo and wonders why they cannot perform well.
I like how you generalize teamwork in such a one dimensional angle.
What if players had tools to prevent their allies from taking damage? That would certainly require more skill than to “go down” on someone and rub them.
Why is a player allowed to heal themselves in a downed state? Why is it fun to stand on the ground; not being able to move and slowly healing yourself?
Why is a player allowed to interrupt a stomp? What does this do other than delay the inevitable in certain situations? Delay death long enough so that your friend can cover up your bad play?
Why is a player allowed to rally from a downed state when one of their targets that they hit is downed? Doesn’t this promote bad play by making players tag as many targets as possible to increase the chances of rallying? Some classes can abuse this more than others by delaying their death long enough.
Why is a mechanic that promotes unskilled play even allowed to exist in a competitive environment?
Making a build on gw2 takes about 2 minutes. Really would be cool if that wasn’t the case and there were hard decisions to make.
Exactly; there aren’t any hard choices to make. The traits are so poorly balanced that the best ones stand out far more than the rest. Their solution to balancing is nerfing the strong ones so that all the traits are terrible.
Orr was supposed to be a land free of hearts but with events firing all over the place so you’d never run out of stuff to do.
In reality, there’s only a few events if any going on at any time, and thus nobody cares about 80% of the map.
The solution is to simply load up the whole map with stuff to do, so that you don’t feel left out if you dare wander off and shelter/pertinent starts and you feel you just wanted your time.
That’s another problem I have with this “endgame” in GW2. The hardest zones are not only void of players but also void of any activities. There’s nothing going on. I could stroll around the map for 30 minutes without finding a single event anywhere. That’s basically Anet telling me to get out.
Orr isn’t even difficult. I’d like it to be much harder. Arena net has a hard time adjusting risk vs reward. Increasing difficulty without rewards will be a guaranteed failure.
Glad to know you guys are looking at the reward structure. Beware however that even if you increase rewards substantially; those rewards have to be worth going after.
