I’ve been out of WvW for a couple of weeks due to exams, what happened? Did someone !Gandara win last week’s matchup?
I notice that the blogger doesn’t specify whether (during working hours) he uses his Twitter account to communicate with his employer’s customers, or to talk about his employer’s products. If he does, then he can’t really complain if some people on a worldwide service don’t adhere to his personal office hours.
Although, that actually just makes me more disappointed in anet that they let this go live in the first place.
Spot on, but it’s even worse than that. They had almost exactly the same system for the first GW1 campaign (‘Prophecies’). Despite being fairer than the GW2 version (you could bypass the skill quests for a very reasonable cost), it was so unpopular that they abandoned it (when the ‘Factions’ campaign was released).
Isn’t the definition of sanity doing the same thing again and expecting a different result?
The two servers we (Gandara) were up against last week did it right: ganging up on us at peak time in EBG to stop us from holding on to Anza/Durios for longer than 5-10 minutes at a time. They didn’t win many of the resulting fights at Wildcreek/Klovan/Aldons (so… many… lootbags) but it was a viable and well-executed ‘defence by offense’ strategy.
Gandara turned any “competitive” spirit in Silver League into a farce. Biggest joke since Desolation in Season 1.
Gandara didn’t, Anet did with their insane idea of giving free transfers to the second-ranked server. We Gandarans are no more fond of the outcome than the rest of the Silver league: our EB queues have gone from 40-60 to 150-200.
If you want forced small group combat, SPvP is thataway →
We ask for trait/skill unlocks like in GW1 and we get the same five events for all the 40 different traits. Hilarious!
The weirdest thing is that the “unlock skills by grinding quests” was so unpopular in Guild Wars 1 that they abolished it for Factions, in favour of skill points and skill traders. I really can’t fathom why Anet thought that a system that failed in Guild Wars 1 would be acceptable to Guild Wars 2 players in an even more grind-laden form.
@OP
The waypoint system isn’t broke. It’s doing exactly what its suppose to do.
“Waypoints—All contestable waypoints on any map you’re not currently playing in will always appear contested. When you arrive in the map, you will be able to travel to these waypoints pending their local status.” -https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/the-megaserver-system-world-bosses-and-events/
Yes, it’s kind of a pain. But it’s an additional gold sink to, so it does serve a purpose.
From a game stand point it does make sense though. Until you are actually in the area you shouldn’t automagically know which spots, outside of “protected zones” (i.e. cities, towns, forts, etc.), are safe to travel to.
But the waypoint outside Ascalonian Catacombs isn’t contestable. There is no event which, if failed, results in that waypoint being contested. It’s a bug.
If someone quits your group why not just replace them with… oh I don’t know… the LFG system?
And for Carzors point of the LA-convenience, that’s exactly what it is, convenience. I can still go to any of the Major Cities (I’m a big fan of Rata Sum) for any of the things that used to be in LA, for the Mystic Forge I quickly hope into PvP or the Vigil Keep, so I once again don’t see the issue with them offering those Airship passes. I still get the exact same services, I just have to walk a tiny bit further. Now if they locked the Mystic Forge, Laurel Vendors and Crafting stations behind a gem-store purchase with no other way of accessing them, we’d have a point.
It’s the principle which is the problem though: they took a feature out of the game we paid for and want us to buy it as a microtransaction, despite the fact that we already paid for it when we bought the game.
Engineers (especially Flamethrower Engineers) got the shaft on this one as well. So much for ‘build diversity’.
There are plenty of gem store ‘promotions’ that are borderline scams (taking out the convenience of Lion’s Arch and trying to sell it back to us as a microtransaction, taking out the convenience of choosing your traits and imposing a gems-to-gold price on bypassing the grind), but I really don’t think the wardrobe is one of them.
They’ve made it easier for people to transmute, and made people more likely to want to transmute (account-bound rather than soul-bound skins), in order to sell more transmutation crystals? Sure. But the game is better than it was before, so even if it is just to sell more gemstore stuff I don’t mind it.
They are working on this. It will be implemented very soon.
Like the ascended drops in WvW which eventually turned up nine months late with no apology?
What the hell is this? To unlock a minor trait I have to get a zone to 100% completion???!!! This is complete kitten! I shouldn’t be forced to do something that has always been optional just for people who wanted legendaries, It’s like Arenanet can’t stop making this game worse and worse with each update, what the flying kitten!
You can also just buy the trait.
Here’s the cost for the traits if you buy them.
That’s the fundamental problem: not the option of unlocking by grinding, but the fact that the cost of doing it in the grind-free way is so ludicrous. If the purchase cost was about 1/10 of its current level (ie 5g total to buy all traits except the new ones) then that would be fine: enough of an incentive for those who like grinding, without this “You look like you’re trying to have fun, please insert your credit card now” stuff for the rest of us.
Lots asked for the transfers as well… you can’t make everyone happy.
Some win and some lose. It was going to be stale anyway but at least now a few servers get to rise up and we get to watch them either break or succeed which is fun too.
Transfers aren’t the problem. Free transfers to high-ranked, already-full servers (in one case the second-ranked server in the league!) are the problem.
As do immobilize and other crowd control affects. The end.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Stability
The end.
To each their own….and 2 shotting someone is anything but fluid.
I like the change.
My Guardian’s WvW build ate a 42% reduction in Crit Damage. I think it’s asinine and does nothing but encourage the further abuse of condi-based builds.
Well given the amount of condi-hate in WvW (my warrior alone can remove 5 conditions on 5 players every 20 seconds) it was about time that condition builds got a bit of a buff.
EDIT: Oh, and it REALLY doesn’t make people want to play together when an upleveled individual can rally a bunch of enemies just by being near you. That also makes ZERO sense.
So if you think that makes no sense why would you want to abolish downed state, which would make it happen much more frequently?
And they are not banned. They get a “capacity exceeded” message and they are offered to play IMMEDIATELY somewhere else.
They are banned from playing on the server they chose, and which (if they transferred) they paid to use.
A: Just make ascended stuffs.
/end_of_thread
Where does a WvW player get the gold to do that? Vicious Claws (of which you need a stack for some Ascended recipes) are 0.5g each for example.
Only Anet’s stubbornness and refusal to admit wrong kept it soulbound for so long.
See also trait reset costs. They tried the same thing in Guild Wars 1 (it was called ‘attribute refund points’ then) and it was so universally unpopular that they withdrew it within six months of the game’s release. Why on earth anyone thought that the same system would be any less of a failure in Guild Wars 2 is beyond me.
Why not just offer free transfers to low-ranked servers (rather than Anet’s bizarre pre-season idea of offering free transfers to the second-ranked Silver EU server!)? Banning people from playing the game they paid for just because they didn’t click ‘enter’ in the first 0.5s of reset night isn’t something even Anet would do.
Was just about to post a thread about this. The new renown heart UI is gorgeous – the ‘receiving an email from Farmer Bob’ was always a bit immersion-breaking.
4) WvW never lived up to its potential. Was a huge selling point pre-launch but didn’t receive enough support post-launch to make it a viable endgame activity in its own right. I played DAoC for years and this is no DAoC. Not even close.
Other than a couple of minor issues with the new season (free transfers → server stacking), WvW is one of the major success stories in this game.
Any gold that you buy with gems comes from other players buying gems with gold. So I don’t see how altering the gold drop rate necessarily means more gem money for Anet.
This was just an attempt (far too late IMO) to resolve the issue of massive trading post inflation (caused by people champ training) making basic items prohibitively expensive for people who play the game ‘normally’ (in Anet’s view at least). Put it this way: if you don’t regularly champ train then this nerf doesn’t directly affect you at all.
Unlocking every trait on a character is no longer just “get to 80”. You have to work for it now, which is awesome.
I have to disagree – a game shouldn’t be ‘work’, and grinding through ‘work’ to get to the fun parts isn’t what most of us bought the game for and isn’t what the game is supposed to be about:
Guild Wars 2 Design ManifestoGW2 doesn’t fall into the traps of traditional MMORPGs. It doesn’t suck your life away and force you onto a grinding treadmill; it doesn’t make you spend hours preparing to have fun rather than just having fun
I like how 1-15 map are still empty. Megaserver?
No, a couple of days after the megaserver announcement they decided to test it on low-population maps rather than low-level maps – after people pointed out that testing it out on 1-15 maps would mean including Queensdale, the most populated map in the whole game (which is rarely empty, and thus wouldn’t make a very good test).
I don’t really see the big problem here. Leveling is easy and fast enough and the mob has been nerfed to compensate. The new traits may cost some gold and skill points but even if you don’t get them you can still use the old traits.
Nope, the old traits are locked as well (even on characters created before the update). Either the statement that “existing traits will be available on existing characters” was an outright lie, or nobody in the implementation team was told about it.
And god forbid anyone spend some real money on a f2p game.
Guild Wars 2 is not a f2p game. It costs $60 to play.
Also, what makes you think that patches are supposed to be approved by the community first? This is not some kind of democracy, lol.
Of course not, but it is a free market. Annoyed customers = less gem sales, and lower sales of future games.
Only new characters were supposed to be subject to the new trait grinding system. Why are existing characters being subjected to it? Is this a bug or intended behaviour?
Transmutation stones can be converted to the new ‘Transmutation Charges’ (ie the old ‘Transmutation Crystals’/‘Fine Transmutation Stones’) at a 3:1 ratio, but what do people do if they end up with 1 or 2 left? Will there be a solution for using these in some way or will there be a gem refund at a later date?
Not personally affected by this (I had 39, and 39 % 3 = 0), but it’s an issue that has come up for a few guildies.
This happens every patch, and could be avoided by putting the release timezone in the release announcement. Type three characters, ‘PDT’ and all is solved. If someone accesses the German version of the website and sees “April 15th” then (if timezone is omitted) it isn’t unreasonable for them to assume that it means April 15th in their timezone.
(edited by Carzor Stelatis.9435)
Its funny because every patch has actually nerfed the rate of gold income, people can farm less and less over time, yet inflation continues to skyrocket as if gold was easier to get. I can only imagine after champ bag nerf what silk/t6 mats will be.
The only nerf to champ bags is in how much coin/gold they drop. They’ll still drop just as many mats as they previously did.
It isn’t so much a case of it being ‘short for cartoon’, as a play on words. The short form of character is ‘char’, and ‘toon’ is in reference to that. A weird sort of rhyming slang if you like.
Or how about just fix skill lag, how does ESO do it? Get tips from them, zero lag with 200+ man battles.
Never mind that, I regularly play Mount & Blade Warband: Napoleonic Wars (a game from 2009 with probably <1/10 the budget of GW2) online with 150 v 150 battles – cannons, mortars, all the stuff that WvW has – and zero lag. None.
It depends on how many zerg fights are in your tier. I know some of my guilies get round 100 heavy loot bags a night with blue/greens. If you are just roaming it is not very profitable.
An enemy commander yesterday morning kindly got his 40+ zerg wiped by four arrow carts at Quentin Lake. So many loot bags…
this map is what you get when bring only wvw guilds to Beta-test it
Any guild could have been chosen, it was not limited to WvW guilds, but if only WvW guilds did apply, not Anet’s fault…
It is 100% Anet’s fault, because they beta-tested a PUG/overflow game mode by asking highly-organised guild groups (only!) to apply for the beta.
Can’t wait for this farce of a League to end. This matchup against Gandara seriously kittened me off.
Is this what ANet considers competitive? A server that has more than double the WvW population of all the other competitors.
You can’t even roam decently because EVERYWHERE there are dozens of Gandara running around and even if you catch the odd player his savior is just around the corner.
Gunnar duking it out with Drakkar in an epic Siege? Nevermind, here comes Gandara with 4 times the people and rolls over everyone.
What a joke.
Doesn’t each server have the same limit for each map? I have a feeling it’s 100 players from each server per map, but I could be wrong. To put it another way: if your server has a queue for the map you’re playing in, then Gandara doesn’t outnumber you.
Edit: We do however have unmatched early-morning (midnight – 3am) coverage, due to people being displaced from late evenings by Anet’s hellish queues
no way.
I don’t expect everyone (or even most people) to agree with this. But why do you think this is a bad idea specifically?
Because there are already tier 2 servers with hour-long queues on every map. This change would effectively kill off WvW as a game mode.
List of incorrect scores EU:
Jade Sea
Baruch Bay
Kodash
Augury Rock
Gandara
Far Shiverpeaks
Ring of Fire
Piken Square
Looks like it hasn’t credited those servers with even playing a match last week (Gandara has only one match recorded for example).
I really enjoyed WvW for the first week of new season, but now against Gandara, there is pretty much nothing to do. You can try hard during the day just to wake up tomorrow and see everything in green color. No fun, no motivation… thank you for free transfers before season 2 I guess?
For what it’s worth, most of the existing Gandarans dislike the bandwagoners just as much as you do. Our queues are now beyond ridiculous and all-green maps with nobody to fight aren’t much fun for us either.
What I’m hoping will happen is that at the end of the season we’ll temporarily go up to gold. We’ll then get roflstomped, meaning hopefully the bandwagon guilds will go away, and drop back down to silver again for more balanced competition with the servers we used to enjoy playing against.
(edited by Carzor Stelatis.9435)
This, x100. Why Arenanet thought it would be a good idea to give free transfers to the second-ranked (last time) EU Silver server is utterly beyond me. We’ve gone from 50/10/0/0 queues to 200/150/100/100 – thanks a lot Anet.
You seriously think Blobaddon will finish sixth in EU Silver? Have they lost loads of guilds or something?
Anet just needs to realize that we don’t want to play their low level game cause it sucks. The Trahearne"s sidekick story isn’t interesting enough to warrant another revisit The dynamic events are really meh,for the most part and the leveling process is nothing but a chore to get done. It will be even less interesting after the feature patch. where you get nothing during to first 30 levels. Just let us buy our way to 80 using an item from the gemstore and enjoy the extra revenue.
The whole of PvE is very weak, with the exception of the World Bosses. The personal story gets worse (rather than better) as it goes on. Some of the early stuff is really good, and even most of the Order missions are fun and have a coherent narrative running through them, but the Trahearne/Pact/Orr stuff?
If someone told you that this is the same company which made four of the best MMO stories around (Guild Wars, Factions, Nightfall, Eye of the North) you’d laugh at them.
Megaservers will work fine: people have been telling Anet since beta that splitting the PvE population up would result in 95+% of maps being totally deserted. They finally listened – better late than never.
The trait hunting is just dumb. It was a pain in the neck in GW1, so much so that they abolished it for Factions. Why they’ve seen fit to bring it back escapes me I’m afraid.
Why not just keybind AoE loot to a different key then set up a macro on your keyboard to spam it continuously?
Because with Anet’s insane definition of a ‘macro’ you’re only allowed to use macros when they aren’t actually macros. And yes, this is the Anet which licenses an official macro keyboard.
My storage is already full of the stuff, and that’s with additional Collection Slots! There needs to be some other use for it besides gear grinding.
Does anyone know what the new trait guides will cost? I want to reroll my Guardian as a human, but I’m going to wait until after the update (due to having a couple of rare dyes that I want in my account store), but I really don’t fancy the idea of grinding through “collect ten bear pelts” quests for each major trait. (I didn’t enjoy it in GW1 Prophecies, the system that the announcement post specifically compared the new unlocking system to).