Guild Wars 2

Behellagh.1468:

Calae.1738:

That income stream is quite low for an MMO. Come March 2014 with 3 huge online RPG titles set to release; Arenanet better have a Hail Mary.

$22.1 million in sales (I used the average exchange rate for 3rd quarter Vs today’s rate) for a quarter would translate into 490,000 $15 a month subscriptions. And you think that’s low?

We don’t know what their cost of operations are, but there’s quite a few things to consider. As a comparison, World of Warcraft’s costs of operations is in the 50 million per year ballpark and I’m not certain if they have reduced it since 2008.

Even if Arenanet’s costs are half WoW’s costs, GW2 would have to keeping rolling in that kind of money for at least another year or 2 before they can take on another big project.

Competition is going to be very fierce in the online RPG space in 2014. I can tell you for certain that, for the RPG fan, it’s going to be a very interesting year.

That income stream is quite low for an MMO. Come March 2014 with 3 huge online RPG titles set to release; Arenanet better have a Hail Mary.

Thief.

Mixture of 3 Gem store medium armor sets.

Krytan Chest.
Magitech Shoulders and Gloves.
Viper Boots and Legs.

Nretep.2564:

You just found the most expensive infusion … which isn’t even needed in 71% of the cases.

You mean 100% of the cases.

I was looking around in the wiki for infusions and found recipes for versatile infusions.

5 Agony resistance and 5 of any stat.

100 Philosopher’s Stones (10 skill points)
50 Mystic coins
100 Passion Flower
250 Tier 6 (Fangs, Blood, Venom, Scales ect..)

The cost of this infusion is….. rofl…. how would you put it?

In order for the zerg to be less effective you have to cripple it. Hard.

Disable Waypoints
Reduces zerg mobility severely. I understand that casuals will be very annoyed for having to walk across the map so that won’t happen.

Zerg Mines
A mine that only activates when X players are within the radius. Immobilize + damage, cannot be cleansed.

Ballista’s that don’t suck
This siege weapon should be the zerg killer weapon of choice, unfortunately it ends up being a siege sniper. The Ballista shot should be much faster, travel much farther and have a much wider hit box. It should also be a mobile siege weapon. Carefully placed, these siege weapons should completely destroy a zerg passing through bottlenecks.

Revive
Only 1 player can revive another player and ANY damage interrupts this action. A downed player and a defeated player can be revived, but a stomped player gets automatically sent back to the starter waypoint.

These are simple rules, but remember who this game is for. Casuals. If there’s one thing a casual player hates the most is inconvenience.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Calae.1738:

The exchange rate will probably never swing the other way. I’m convinced Mr. Smith will make sure it doesn’t.

It’ll have swings, because there are people willing to exchange Gems for Gold when the rates are delicious enough. John doesn’t ever have to touch the Exchange’s formula.

Luckily for us, we don’t have to deal with interest rates in GW2 like we have to in the real world.

In a virtual world like GW2 however, there is a theoretical, unlimited supply of gems. If these gems are to remain valuable, they need to be expensive to buy via virtual currency (gold). The system must also make it so that players cannot stockpile too much gold too quickly via in game mechanics.

The system, in its current state, promotes gem sales to convert to gold for players with disposable income who do not wish to spend all that time farming for the materials needed to create ascended/legendary weapons/armor. It also acts as a gold sink for people with too much gold who wishes to buy items that are only sold via gems.

Mr. Smith is definitely doing a better job now then when the game launched. If I would have been in his position, I’d probably do something very similar.

Keeping constant demand for items in ANY tier promotes economic activity; which is what a bank chairman is supposed to do.

How do you expect to balance this exactly?

You have hundreds of people PvDoor’ing when the opposition is sleeping.

It’s obviously a joke more than a league.

Sean.8274:

Calae.1738:

Dungeons are the fastest way of obtaining fragments. With his stacks you’re looking 240 dungeon runs.

WvW is the fastest way to get EmpFrag in my opinion…I have a ton. Dragonite hard to get in WvW though.

For a small team of people hitting camps, I can see that returning quite a few fragments. COF path 1 can be run in 10 minutes for 20 fragments. Which is about 120 fragments per hour.

The Empyreal Fragments and Dragonite requirements alone turns this into quite a grind. Amazing feature for a game that was sold on the idea that there would not be grinds.

Sarathor.2409:

Lightrayne.7829:

LordByron.8369:

Calae.1738:

Fractals don’t get harder the higher level you go. Agony is a gating system. You can dodge all agony attacks except for Jade Maw. Agony is a complete waste of space and time.

you can’t evade 15 mob focusing on you….
You need tactic…

Since the damage is higher as you advance fractals are actually harder the more you advance, until you get to the point everything oneshots you.

He said agony attacks not mob attacks. Regular mobs do not have agony attacks. (see bolded text above)

Anyways, I think agony and increased statistics (increased HP, bodies, and damage) are artificial difficulty. Sure, I’d have to change strategies a little bit, but really, it feels like same thing as you’re climbing the scale levels. I was expecting there to be different mechanics at higher thresholds (i.e. harpies gaining the knockback shot starting at scale 10), but everything was felt pretty much the same after scale 10.

I noticed the same thing as well, and quite honestly, as I climbed to 20, and then 30, I didn’t notice anything different from any of the mobs, except they hit harder.

I hope there are new mechanics at 50+, once they officially open it up to do.

I applaud the attempt at a dungeon that scales in difficulty, but what I don’t agree with is the implementation. They know that they can’t keep increasing stats and levels indefinitely. Besides, that’s not real difficulty, it’s fake.

Fractals don’t get harder the higher level you go. Agony is a gating system. You can dodge all agony attacks except for Jade Maw. Agony is a complete waste of space and time.

Besides this type of dungeon design is so flawed that new players wouldn’t even want to step foot in it. Even if the rewards were good at 50+; who in there right state of mind would want to grind the same fractals 200 times?

Vol.5241:

They don’t manually remove or add items to the TP. That’s just shady.

What they will do is influence the game enough so that the players themselves will remove/add items to the TP when they see fit.

Yes.

They do this by creating demand for items that have very high supply and very low demand. Getting rid of 10 million thick leather sections will be interesting but, I’m sure they will make it lucrative for people to buy them at some point.

Instead of the linear difficulty curve design which will eventually hit a brick wall at some point, might I suggest something more practical.

Easy, Normal, Hard.

Easy: Very forgiving on player mistakes, low rewards, quick runs.

Normal: Somewhat forgiving on player mistakes, adequate rewards for difficulty level.

Hard: Not forgiving on player mistakes, assumes players using consumables, extremely punishing, high risk high reward.

Scrap agony resistance completely.

The exchange rate will probably never swing the other way. I’m convinced Mr. Smith will make sure it doesn’t.

Dungeons are the fastest way of obtaining fragments. With his stacks you’re looking 240 dungeon runs.

So their changes to promote build diversity and spend less points in Arcane and Water is to move the good traits over to master to make Elementalists spend more points in Arcane and Water?

Where do they find these people?

Pandemoniac.4739:

Calae.1738:

I’m not insinuating that their purpose is nefarious. I look at Jon Smith the same way I look at a central bank chairman. He has to create the conditions that promote economic activity. It would make sense to steer the consumer towards the gem store to purchase gems and convert them to gold.

Why would that make more sense than encouraging folks to buy gems with gold to get gem store items? By having really desirable items in the gem store, ANet both encourages folks to spend real cash and encourages folks to flush gold out of the economy by buying gems.

If gold is too easy to get via farming and or grinding then it reduces the demand for gems. Gem sales is how they make money.

8000 gems for 100$ wasn’t available for awhile; at least not until they made changes toward farming and grinding. It’s more time consuming to farm for the materials you need now than it ever was when the game launched. I think that created a market for people with disposable income and they saw an increase in people buying gems to convert to gold.

Pandemoniac.4739:

Calae.1738:

What if converting gems to gold didn’t swing the exchange rate as far as converting gold to gems? Wouldn’t it make more sense to make the conversion of gems to gold more lucrative from an economists stand point?

They don’t have to nefariously manipulate the exchange rate. The current situation seems like a pretty clear representation of supply and demand. GW2 is the one game I’ve found where I, as a player that has more cash than time, don’t need to buy gold to enjoy all the content. I spend my money on cosmetic and convenience stuff (and toys!) in the gem store for the most part, and just buy what I can afford off the TP.

I’m not insinuating that their purpose is nefarious. I look at Jon Smith the same way I look at a central bank chairman. He has to create the conditions that promote economic activity. It would make sense to steer the consumer towards the gem store to purchase gems and convert them to gold. The gold gets dumped into the TP multiple times by exchanging hands and destroying a percentage on every transaction. The gold that gets created eventually gets flushed over time.

As long as they can keep a steady demand for items on the TP, the artificial exchange rate will be used to create a market for consumers to buy gems.

Maybe they’re still trying this esport thing. That might explain a few things.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Calae.1738:

What if converting gems to gold didn’t swing the exchange rate as far as converting gold to gems? Wouldn’t it make more sense to make the conversion of gems to gold more lucrative from an economists stand point?

They do have to find ways to entice people to buy gems with real money no? This game isn’t exactly supporting itself from charity donations.

In my opinion, the exchange rate is artificially manipulated at the rate they want it to be. I can see it as clear as daylight.

1) It’s already been explained that Anet doesn’t control the exchange rates. We players do through our own transactions. The more Gems people buy with Gold, the more Gold will be needed for the same amount. Please stop with the tin foil conspiracies.

2) Making Gem -> Gold exchange more lucrative would hurt the in game economy. The influx of Gold would destabilize prices, and result in out of control inflation. Short term revenue from Gems sales would not be worth the long term damage to the value of the currency. This is why Anet has a dedicated team that goes after RMT company accounts selling Gold in game.

I’m sure they control the exchange rates. Most of what I’ve seen wouldn’t make sense if they didn’t.

Buying gems to exchange to gold does create inflation but, runaway inflation? I don’t think so. That gold is only really useful to purchase items on the TP. The TP takes a cut out of that gold and when it falls into someone else’s hands it’ll be used again on that same TP.

It would make sense for them to control the exchange rate in order to make it lucrative for people to buy gems to convert to gold. They want us to buy stuff on the TP. When that money goes into someone else’s hands, they’ll use it on the TP again.

Every TP transaction curbs inflation. They could swing the exchange rate in any direction they want and artificially keep it where they want it.

What if converting gems to gold didn’t swing the exchange rate as far as converting gold to gems? Wouldn’t it make more sense to make the conversion of gems to gold more lucrative from an economists stand point?

They do have to find ways to entice people to buy gems with real money no? This game isn’t exactly supporting itself from charity donations.

In my opinion, the exchange rate is artificially manipulated at the rate they want it to be. I can see it as clear as daylight.

My issue with many of these changes is that they are unnecessarily counteracting changes that are meant to increase versatility.

I don’t think they fully understand the problem they’re trying to fix.

They’re trying to promote build diversity on a class with the lowest possible base defenses in the game by making the 2 best defensive trait lines a “worse” investment than the other 3.

They’re also making changes to “traits” without taking into account that spending points in a trait line not only provides them with traits but also STATS. These STATS are just as important if not more than the traits themselves because it effects gear choice.

In my opinion, they’re showing quite a poor understanding of their own system.

I would make base attunment swap cooldown 10 seconds. Arcane traits would just increase boon duration. There should be a hard cap on boon duration and condition duration increases but, that’s another discussion for another topic.

If condition removal tools, healing, vigor and protection were available in other trees then Arcane and Water wouldn’t be getting this much attention.

The Elementalist has the lowest HP and Armor in the game. I don’t see how playing a class with 12K HP and 1800 armor is even remotely viable. Elementalists augment their weaknesses for a reason, if they don’t, they get squashed like a bug.

Without a huge investment in Water, they don’t have the HP, healing and condition removal tools. Arcane gives them fast attunment swaps which also increases the rate of healing, condition removal and protection.

What’s the alternative? Dealing insane damage and dying in 2 hits? Is that even fun?

Lucky for me to have dumped my Elementalist in the garbage in favor for my Thief. It seems the more they touch this profession the worse it gets.

I noticed a trend with these developers…

No balance testing.

They will test in order to make sure it works but, they won’t spend 1 second of testing to find out if it makes sense. The last time I heard them say why they don’t test balancing changes was due to how much time it would take for the meta to adapt to their changes.

Try to wrap your head around that logic for a moment.

Any change they make will eventually force them to make more changes in the future due to how the meta adapted to the previous change. This is what I’d like to call the infinite waste of development time loop. Due to the way they make changes; they will be stuck making changes forever due to the structural imbalances of the previous change. Any problem they solve will create another problem.

Arenanet are probably banking on the idea that the 2 underdog servers will team up against the favored server.

Maybe Arenanet didn’t get the memo that WvW wins are determined by coverage.

You want to run an experiment?

Remove all the rewards from the game. Then you’ll find out if people really like it or not.

What’s that?

You don’t like jumping puzzles and dungeons? What kind of game do you think this is?

You think you can just run around and do what YOU want?

Scrap the personal story and you’ll see exactly how much more freedom of creativity you’ll have. It’s not even funny. The only obstacle in your way will be the resources you allocate to it.

If you scrap the personal story you’ll have carte blanche on virtually anything…

-A meteor could strike at the center of Divinities Reach turning it into a huge creator and nesting place of a new threat.

-Invaders from the Ring of Fire islands torch The Grove making Sylvari an endangered species and no longer selectable as a playable race.

-Pirates turn Lion’s Arch into a hostile fortress of pirate invaders and actually STEAL player items and gold.

I could go on forever, there is no limit to what you can do, only what you want to do.

Nothing better at the moment. I haven’t logged into GW2 in over a month. Between Wildtstar, TESO and Dark Souls 2; I think Arenanet is going to be in trouble.

I think The Living World will have a very difficult time being impactful to the player base and to the game in general. Arena net’s hands are tied because of the personal story. The Living World can’t change the world in significant ways and can’t kill important characters. Doing so would create a conflict with the personal story.

Scrap the personal story and create a true Living World. Remove the chains that shackles you from unleashing your creativity. Create something impactful to the world and design interesting characters to tell the story.

Its a casual friendly feature that minimizes inconveniences.

To the casual, death is often viewed with frustration. After all they’re supposed to be a hero right? How many hero’s do you see die? Death is also an obstacle to their rewards. The reward is why they’re even logged in.

Death makes it take longer to get the reward and that is inconvenient.

As to the reasons why this feature in its current state even exists in a PVP environment is beyond me.

If I was arena net I would strongly consider switching to an expansion pack model. I would just focus on creating new skills, new abilities, new dynamic events in conjunction with a living story.

Scrap the whole personal story. The personal story is preventing arena net from designing impactful living world content that changes the face of Tyria.

-Imagine an expansion pack where the Sylvari get invaded, their home burnt to a crisp and become an endangered species. Entire forests burning from invaders coming out of the Ring of Fire islands.

-Imagine an expansion where Lion’s Arch pirates steal player’s items and gold from their vaults. Players and guilds would have to hunt down the pirates to recover their lost wealth. Think of an epic treasure hunt with traps and pirates.

When it gets this bad it usually means they have a very small development team working on content. They’re trying to stretch it out as long as possible.

For a game that was marketed to not be grindy like the others; this is actually quite hilarious.

Sandpit.3467:

free stuff = “please please play a game format we want you to play rather than a game format you want to play”

I do partially agree with this statement.

Developers sometimes try to bribe people to do certain things in their game by providing free rewards. If they want more of these rewards they would have to repeat those certain things.

This tactic is known to work well. Unfortunately, one side effect is that players abandon the content completely after they have received the desired reward.

Mistakes and failure is how we learn. That’s how we improve and get better at what we do.

Compliments are OK once in awhile but those are few and far between. When there are no more complaints that’s when developers should be afraid, very afraid. That’s when their most passionate players don’t care anymore and have left completely.

ASB.4295:

Calae.1738:

Leveling has always been meaningless.

At the very least it’s an indicator of how long a person has been playing the game.
It’s also a cheap and easy way to give your average player a little “high” whenever they level up, although that feeling drastically reduces in intensity the more you experience it.
Lastly, a generation of gamers has been conditioned to expect long term stat progression through conditioning by pretty much every modern multiplayer game, be it PvE or PvP. Designing a game without an easily identifiable progress meter for players would make a large portion of potential customers feel like the game is not rewarding enough, even if other, less direct methods of progression are available.

I agree 100%.

We have many gaming stuidos to thank for the operant behavioral conditioning of an entire genre. It’s going to take some genius game design to un-brainwash these people. Then again, it may be no longer possible to do so.

Nothing is free.

If you’re farming and grinding for materials and would rather do something else with your time; that means that the game designers have forced you to do something you don’t want to.

If your time is that worthless to you then you are their ideal customer.

Leveling has always been meaningless.

I’ve always argued that leveling is a cheap gimmick used to prolong boring gameplay systems. Most developers don’t even question the leveling systems. They just assume that it’s a normal part of game design and is expected from the genre. Some people even attribute leveling to RPG and argue that if it has no leveling it’s not an RPG.

I don’t think you fully appreciate the benefits of anonymity. The day we lose it will create the foundation required for someone in power to abuse everyone’s private information.

You trust everyone with your private information? What if the very people who have to protect you from malicious use of this information betrays your trust? Who will protect you then?

Astralporing.1957:

Idanaeris.5723:

I completely agree with this. Time and effort make it more valuable when accomplished.

Only when that time and effort is interesting, instead of tedious and boring. And only up to a point. Beyond that, it only makes it more annoying.

I think you’ll find out that “interesting” means different things to some people. Believe me when I say this… some people BELIEVE it is interesting to go fishing in a video game. Watering plants, chopping trees and cutting grass.

This unfortunately creates a negative feedback loop.

Developers see that their players like this type of content and make more of it. What’s worse is that developers realize that it doesn’t require much thought, resources and manpower to design it. Eventually developers become so lazy that their content quality suffers to the point where they end up chasing away their entire player base.

Casual players expect to be resurrected because their mistakes are swept under the rug. Other people cover their mistakes.

In the absence of in-combat resurrection systems; players are held accountable for their performance and their value to the group.

Casual players cannot stand failure. They expect to be rewarded with a medal just for participating.

What ever costs them less money and consumes less time is what will be approved. How many people and time do you think it takes to create a weapon model, paint it and put bigger numbers on it?

I bet it’s one guy on his lunch breaks.

Mesket.5728:

Calae.1738:

We’ve known about this since the game was released. The only response we received from developers is that they are working on a solution. We haven’t heard anything for concerning this for over a year.

What this usually means is they probably haven’t decided what to do and how to do it.

They said that condition damage is going to be summed up and pop as one big number every X seconds instead of multiple smaller numbers.

Then again… that fixes absolutely nothing but its not like we believe they play their own game.

Their engine can barely handle the calculations right now. Every condition has to be broadcasted to all players in the vicinity. This also includes boons. Stack amount and duration on all boons and conditions broadcasted to all players.

I don’t know why arena net engineers agreed to program this computational power consuming non sense.

We’ve known about this since the game was released. The only response we received from developers is that they are working on a solution. We haven’t heard anything concerning this for over a year.

What this usually means is they probably haven’t decided what to do and how to do it.

Most gamers can’t handle failure. Or stat optimization for that matter. Most games that are sold as “RPGs” are little more than Action games with costumes.

If you want to play a real RPG, you still have to go back to pen and paper because games where you can fail don’t sell, and games that don’t sell don’t get made.

Yup.

The new generation of gamers have got to be by far the most spoiled and half brain dead zombies I have ever seen. Rewards are expected for doing tasks that require ZERO cognitive functions.

60$ is too much for an expansion.

Besides, I believe they would much rather have an artist create a glowing stick and have their player base gamble on a chance to get it for 10$ a ticket.

I thought this game would be funded entirely by gems and expansions. If gems are sufficient to fund the whole game; I can understand why the quality of the content is low. It is my opinion that low quality content at high prices may be a better business strategy.