Guild Wars 2

Staff ele dominates hotjoin spvp (or should). But as you say, it is still difficult for a staff user to win 1v1 against decent player. But with practice I think a staff ele can fare well in any 1v1 except maybe against the really ridiculous spike attacks (even then you may be able to avoid/mitigate those if you are experienced enough).

^ I’ve been playing staff ele pvp for months, don’t seem to see really any more (maybe a couple here or there). Still stuck in the d/d and s/d mindset

Wings, 100,000 of an item needed, now Sky Pirate Dungeon. Welcome to Aion.

Some of it sounds good. But is this the right time to introduce ‘torment’…I really dont think so.

I’m pretty sure ryston is being sarcastic.

I think the hardest to play is anything that doesn’t have too many auto-facing/easy-spam damage abilities, and isn’t helped too much by powerful AI.

Also, whatever I am playing is hardest and whatever you are playing is easiest.

GW1 had “Guild Halls”, earned by winning a worldwide tournament (Heroes’ Ascent), or by purchasing Celestial Sigils supplied by winners of the Heroes’ Ascent tournament.

GW2 has “custom arenas”…how fun.

This is trash. How effective or ineffective a build is will be evident by the player’s scores and performance over time. The player will know how they are doing, as will their opponents. If the player wants to do further research for their build, there are plenty of resources already available (on this forum and the official /wiki). If you want to help players, talk to them in-game or make a guide (video or written) to address the issues you want to discuss (which are likely recurring in your criticism of gearing/etc.). Making critical videos of unsuspecting players seems like harassment to me, and shouldn’t be encouraged here. Maybe you just want to make yourself “famous” by making these videos?

Tolmos.8395:

What I don’t understand is why, out of the 50+ servers that they have, they couldn’t spare a single server for open world. 49+ servers to be just like it is now, with 1 “omg everyone is out to get me” server to guest to for open world PvP fun.

It would be like a PvP vacation land.

Would be great fun. Probably can’t have players drop loot (generate loot out of nowhere, at least) like in WvW. So people wouldnt exploit farm it (2 naked characters killing each other over and over, etc).

Still I think a server like that would definitely entertain alot of people.

I’ve lagged out every time I’ve been on Spirit Watch today… reminds me of the lag issue with Capricorn from some time ago.

An anchor guardian strikes fear into the hearts of his enemies by wielding a large anchor.

Just had a problem with this too. Just calling out strategies, incs, etc as needed. Then suppressed for over a minute, unable to communicate with the team. This is ridiculous and unacceptable for a “competitive” pvp game.

Also related to team communication. Something needs to be done about the party UI and players disappearing from it when too far away on the map. And furthermore, we should be able to see all of our team mates on the map at all times AND they should have their names labeled somehow on map (or mouseover names popup). Too many things common-sense that need to be done to make communication more feasible, especially with pugs.

Am I the only person who thought GW1’s separation of PvP/PvE balance was a bad move? It caused rampant over-buffing of PvE skills, some of which spilled over into PvP. Besides that, I do not seem to recall any great balancing achievements in PvP or PvE caused by the skill split, I do feel that the quality of the game declined though (especially the challenge of PvE and diversity of PvP builds).

And I believe the gap between “PvP players” and “PvE players” was widened…

Too busy remaking Nintendo to care.

Sorry if someone else has mentioned this. The titles should be tiered. Most every title in the game would benefit from tiering like in GW1. Have 10-15 levels to a title, so that anyone can have some form of it. But the more extreme players can reach the “unreachable” tier that everyone else thinks will take years to complete. Just like the titles in guild wars 1 (especially the PvP ones, after many people spent years grinding PvP, only a few people reached the highest tier of the titles).

I preferred the way it was setup in GW1. You could make PvP only character to take to PvP, or you could bring your PvE character. Ofc the available stats for gear were the same in GW1 for PvE and PvP. Here we have the overly complicated system with all of the jewelry/mods in pve and not pvp and now Ascended gear. I guess they were never intended to be balanced. But still I think it is better if a game is made with PvP first and PvE is made/balanced around the combat balance that is established in PvP.

The only downside I recall for the system in GW1 was that there would occasionally be some new player in PvP on a PvE character without maxed gear. But this was not too often, usually just in very new players who didn’t know better. Also the PvP-only characters did not have as much gear appearance diversity available (unless participating in the very complex tournament gear system).

Staff isn’t that bad, stop being so dramatic. Some of the abilities could use adjustments (making gust more user friendly would be nice), but it’s still more viable than a lot of the weapons in the game.

Yes, it should be made harder. I support any measures which would increase the diversity of activities in the game. No, I don’t care how much the farmers will cry.

Yes, I think the return of the district system (in some form) would solve so many problems with the game. 1-2 months into the game, the amount of players we see in many areas is imo just not good enough usually. I would like to see districts brought not only to spvp, but to as many aspects of the game as possible (wvw probably out of the question).

Their decision to move to a ‘home-server’ system hasn’t seemed to create any community. It just makes you stuck with certain players. For experienced GW1 players, can you imagine how much sooner that game would have died if not for the district system? It is a frightening thought. Split the gw1 population 40 different ways, and thats basically what we have in gw2 (of course some more purchases here maybe). And this game needs other players more (no more heroes,henches, solo builds, etc).

Great game, terrible organization compared to guild wars 1. I used to brag to people in other games about how great the GW1 population was. Add districts (with ability to cross-region) and dead hours go away, population problems go away, players will keep playing because they will have more people to play with.

The “List” would be great, I absolutely agree. But let’s not limit it to dungeons only. We could see listings for spvp, wvw, keg brawl, vistas, random adventuring, roleplaying, etc, in addition to dungeons. This would instantly make the game better and help people easily find friends to play with. I do think such a list could be server wide, or even bigger.

As for the LFG chat channel, I happen to think it would just become /map chat part 2. So not too helpful really.

Gray.9650:

well, the people that actual ran dungeons in gw1 probably liked them because they wanted to do them, there was no “force” or progression-stop if you didn’t. you could just buy or trade the drops. not so much in gw2, and that’s probably why a lot of people are annoyed by the current state – to progress you HAVE to do them, and for some they’re simply no fun. this would not be an issue to progress otherwise (like in gw1).

Yes this is true. I can’t help but feel like GW1 was much more in line with anet’s “manifesto” than GW2 is. Everything was for fun, maxed gear was extremely easy to get, all drops tradeable, etc.

Yeah, people loved to target themselves and admire their titles in GW1. But judging from the way everything else has been going here (and recent gw1 years), it seems the GW2 devs hate GW1.

Agreed. As you have all said very well, the system is horrible and shouldn’t have been released like this.

I recommend the system used by Aion. It was a server wide ‘board’ accessible from the UI where players could post small messages to help form and join groups of any purpose. I think this is appropriate because Aion had nearly the same structure as GW2, it was an “open” world divided up into zones. Gw1 also had this sort of party board feature, but it was zone restricted. GW2 and Aion are published by the same company so there must be some connection/sharing of resources possible.

Whatever the case, something needs to be done. I am in disgust and disbelief if its true that Anet has no intention of fixing this.

Something needs to be done. The system is terrible as it is, and I’m astonished that they don’t seem to realize it.

Great game, held back by so many poor choices.

My idea for stronger server community: Remove home servers, return to gw1 district system = Game is 100x better and everyone has more people to play with and never any server dead hours. They cant seriously expect to have a strong server community if they wont even give us proper tools to form groups.

Why would an extra chat channel be a good idea? It will just be yet another chat channel to keep track of, and your post would quickly be lost/drowned out by other posters/spammers. And most people probably wouldnt keep their eyes on the channel.

If you played GW1, you know that the “trade” channel was the same thing. It was impossible to keep up with all the spam in trade chat, but quite easy to navigate the “board” of postings (where all the posts from trade chat would also be placed).

Milennin.4825:

Group Finder
Current situation: The only way to effectively find a party is by using /map chat. This clutters /map chat with unnecessary LFG messages. The spam filter doesn’t help making life easier for those who have trouble finding people to play with as it starts filtering out entire sentences after a few times.
What we “need”: (I don’t like using the word “need”, “want” might be a better word choice) is a more effective way to find groups.

Solution: The solution is pretty obvious. Have a tool similar to the one that we had in the original Guild Wars. Let us choose what we search a group for, let us write a line for more details for what we are looking for and that’s it. It doesn’t have to be anything mega fancy, just something good enough to find people to play with without constantly having to advertise LFG in /map chat.

Absolutely.

Also refer to the system in AION, I think it is closer to what we want. As AION was an open world/zone based game just like GW2, its party search tool was SERVER-WIDE, not zone restricted like GW1. And you could post for various things, not just “x” dungeon or “x” pvp thing.

To everyone who thinks this is anything like WoW’s system of pushing the button and getting teleported into a random dungeon with a random group: you are all wrong. The tool proposed by Milennin and I would simply allow for people to better organize themselves and find players to play with. It would not diminish the mmo experience by letting people stand in one place while being randomly teleported/grouped all over the world for dungeon speed runs. Absolutely not.

Just made a similar topic before reading this. Oh well I guess the issue can’t get enough exposure, it is absolutely hurting the game by limiting players ability to find like minded players to group with.

bump, this issue needs attention

TLDR: The party system is severely lacking and inefficient. Add a group posting board similar to the ones in GW1 or AION.

I propose a simple party board similar to the one in GW1/Aion. This could be zone-wide or world-wide and would allow players to make small postings which would allow them to find players to group with. I know there are players out there who would be willing to/want to group for certain things, but we are too spread out across zones that it becomes hard to connect and form groups for dungeons or any activity.

I know alot of people have been suggesting a WoW style dungeon finder. I think this would be terrible as it would randomly match players up and teleport them to the dungeon, stripping away an important part of the mmo experience, which I think a party board would be able to retain.

It takes way too long to form dungeon groups/any groups currently. The LFG tool in place is not effective, I think I’ve only ever seen 1 other player in it, AND you are removed from the tool as soon as you’re in a group (cant do “GLF more”). I’m confident that a party board system would significantly reduce wait times while allowing more types of groups to be formed. It would go beyond just dungeon finding, players would be able to find like-minded people to group for WvW, random adventuring, vistas, keg brawls, and so on.

Spamming map chat for groups is not good design. Our group postings only reach a limited audience and are likely to be missed in the flood of chat spam. Many players also turn map chat off because of all the immature chatting and spamming.

Whatever your opinion, I think we can all agree that something needs to be done ASAP about this inadequate party-forming system.

Edit: Aion’s system is the best example I can think of. They have the same kind of somewhat “open” world as GW2, while also being divided up into zones. Yet the group posting board/Lfg system there is server-wide. When you make a post, anyone can read it on the whole server via the tool available through UI.

General Options > Combat> “Disable Area of Effect Rings” (on/off)

Players are essentially required to have this option turned “on” to avoid the many dangers of AoE effects in the game. Personally I think they hurt the overall game experience, at times devolving gameplay into an exercise of jumping out of red rings and into white rings. I offer two proposals to lessen this problem.

First, as my title suggests, remove the white rings around friendly player AoE skills. This way players will only need to look for the red rings, and any effect without a ring around it will easily be recognized as being a friendly one.

Or, I suggest reducing the difference between having rings on/off. I seem to have particularly noticed a big difference in how quickly I could identify hostile effects with this setting turned on. If my memory serves correctly, things like incoming trebuchet fire or traps that were about to trigger, can be detected early with the ‘red rings’ turned on. So, I would suggest that the difference be reduced so that it may become a viable option to play without the rings turned on.

The game world is beautiful and carefully made, it should not be cluttered with ugly ring labels. I do think my first suggestion is reasonable and would make some difference to making the game look better while becoming easier to read and less cluttered. The second suggestion I would also like to see, but I think that would be too hard to remedy this late into the game.

Same, this is after weeks of ‘preparation’ to give better long term matches. CANT WAIT for those 2 week matches. No motivation for anyone to participate now when one server controls 99% of the map. Players on the winning server won’t bother continuing, and most players on the other 2 servers will be discouraged and not bother entering.

THE SOLUTION as I keep saying, is to completely discard the home server system and bring in something new. This system is doing nothing positive for anyone, and only causing obstructions to play with friends, wvw imbalances, and population dead hours. Return to the guild wars 1 server structure, or something inspired by it. Change teams in WvW to be based on something else, or even make them more like the Kurzick/Luxon system in GW1, make matches shorter, whatever. In its current form, the system is an utter failure and disappointment. We all expected and hoped for much more from Guild Wars 2, especially after seeing Guild Wars 1 abandoned to work on this.

Lets please stop focusing only on WoW arenas. Guild Wars 1 also had team deathmatch arenas (4v4), since its launch. I personally played thousands of hours, tens of thousands of matches in these arenas, as did many of my friends. These arenas weren’t on a ladder system or MLG hosted, but they were still fun and competitive for many players.

Additionally, we had the 24/7 global tournament of Heroes’ Ascent (Tombs/Hall of Heroes/ Whatever). A reiteration of this format seems like it would work great in GW2 (minus needing to heal a ghostly hero).

I seem to recall Guild Wars 1 having competitive/ranked play at launch. The ladder/rankings for guild vs guild were in place as well as the ongoing global tournament for the Hall of Heroes (via Heroes Ascent or Tombs, whichever you prefer).

Knowing this, it would be reasonable to expect that Arenanet would make some effort to even come close to how good the competitive system was back then. Sure, we have a sort of world vs world ladder, but that doesn’t count, at all. For many many reasons…

Please bring back the system of saving and loading templates from Guild Wars 1. I have seen many players asking for dual specs (like in WoW). Well, they may not be aware that GW1 allowed players to save and load an unlimited amount of skill templates (traits/utilities would be equivalent here). And in PvP (on pvp characters, i.e. sPvP), players could load save and load an unlimited amount of equipment setups. This system should return in some form.

In pve and world vs world, allow skills/traits to be saved and loaded. Loading a different trait allocation could charge the player the appropriate cost through the UI, instead of going back to the NPC trainer. After all, don’t we always ask the question “is it fun?”

In sPvP, allow equipment, skills and traits to be saved and loaded. Obviously there should still be limitations on doing it during/between matches. Nobody likes waiting around to remake a setup that they know by heart (and it just becomes an annoying game of navigating the UI, visiting vendors, etc). Further, I advocate the removal of the ‘vendors’ (at least of basic items) in the mists. It feels very private server-esque to me and is not nearly as convenient as the system in GW1. In Guild Wars 1 we had a single UI window in pvp to create/modify basic gear in pvp with ease. So why do we need to run around ‘buying’ items for free? It just adds unnecessary complication and takes more time to get into the actual pvp or training stuff.

Also ADD A BANK TO THE MISTS!!!

I believe the solution to so many problems the game is facing would be to discard the ‘home server’ idea, and return to the server structure from Guild Wars 1. Players would be able to play with their friends anywhere, at anytime. The amounts of zones (or ‘worlds’) would expand or contract depending on how many players are online in that area. Then players would be able to move freely between the zones, just like they move between overflows and ‘join in’ today. It would work out a lot better (disregarding technical problems which I’m not aware of) as players would always be able to enjoy well populated zones, instead of being stuck in the ‘dead hours’ of their own world or an overflow.

As for how we that would work in World Vs World, simply change the system so that we pick to join teams, or factions, or something like that. Changing teams could be a paid transaction through the gem shop, and could be put on a cool down if necessary. So in this case, WvW games could just expand/contract depending on how many players are in them (would need to be modified to fit the current model of these 2 week battles).

To those that think this would be illogical, look at the Luxon/Kurzick battles of Guild Wars 1. Players choose sides and compete for their chosen faction in a variety of battlegrounds (AB, JQ, FA). It seems no more silly to me than fighting other ‘worlds’ in identical maps which seems to have absolutely no purpose in lore or otherwise.

I really do think the design choice to use ‘home servers’ in this game has been a huge step back from the great system in Guild Wars 1. I, and many other players, enjoyed the global community that Guild Wars 1 offered. We made friends from around the world and never really experienced a ‘dead hour’ or a queue to enter an area. Until much later in the game’s life when some of the less popular areas/pvp formats became hard to fill. But I am afraid that will happen much much sooner to this game if it retains its current model.

Another thing, I know many people in the past have defended the ‘home world’ idea by saying it will help build stronger communities, compared to (what they perceived) as a lack of one in Guild Wars 1. I completely disagree, I am very upset to report that I’ve noticed absolutely no sense of server community here. The only thing semblance of a ‘community’ I’ve noticed has been seeing the same trolls in certain areas or in World vs World. On the other hand, in GW1 you had a much larger pool of potential friends/guild mates to meet, which I think worked out to form a much higher quality community experience for people once they eventually met their ‘type’ of players to go adventuring/pvping with.

Sorry I have strayed from the original topic a bit, but I think it is relevant to the many issues that we are see arising from the home world design.

Admittedly I am only up to level 60, but it does feel like the “personal” story ends at level 20. I am utterly disappointed by this, after experiencing a few stories in the beta and having such high hopes for what may come in the 21-80 story for my characters. We were teased with that ever-present notification that “personal story will continue at release.”

Well, it didn’t, it just spun into, in my opinion, a boring story about dealing with the dragon and mindless undead. And I call them mindless undead because they were much less interesting for me to fight than some of the characters built up in the 1-20 story, such as Julius Zamon, the bandits, the complex sylvari guardian of the nightmare court who remains a very honorable character despite his evil allegiance, and the list goes on. I thought all that was great, but am quite bored by the “main” story (though there are some great characters like Tybalt).

I was hoping your idea of a hotzone would be designating random zones each day for free-for-all pvp (outside of groups). Oh well. Your idea sounds good too.

Why limit it to a couple specs? As mentioned by an earlier poster, in GW1 we were able to save gear and skill (traits/utilitys in the case of gw2) templates separately. And I do not think there was a limit to how many of these could be saved. The pre-saved gear setups could only be loaded in the pvp lobbies, but the skill builds could be loaded anywhere (in outposts). Just another great feature of GW1 that is missing from GW2.

Agreed. In Guild Wars 1 we only had our capes change color, and I doubt anyone was seriously looking at player capes to see which team they were on. I don’t think I ever did, after earning some 18 million balthazar faction. Now the argument can be made that players now have more options to hide and make themselves more difficult to see than in GW1, but as this thread makes it clear, most players still seem to refer to the name colors to differentiate between allies and enemies.

Obviously GW2 is a better looking game than GW1, and the armor/dyeing system has been greatly expanded upon. Further, the main reward of sPvP (besides glory, the in game currency and the idea of it) is to unlock rarer, more visually impressive pieces of gear. By reducing these rewards to full red/blue dye in matches I am sure many players will lose the desire to pursue the rewards at all, thus damaging the appeal and potential of sPvP.

Shanaeri Rynale.6897:

6. and finally ( and most important to me anyway) why they did away with an (invisible to the user) serverless system and replaced it with a more limiting server based one(I get the server pride thing, but there were other ways of doing the same thing)

Absolutely agree about the servers. This is probably the biggest disappointment to me and feels like an extreme step back and a big degradation to the overall game experience. Can you people imagine how long Guild Wars 1 would have lasted without its superior server system? It would have been dead years before. Now we are left with this new “home world” system where we constantly need to jump through hurdles to play with our friends and the population of zones rarely feels correct to me.

This may not bother those who are new to the Guild Wars franchise, but for many of us who have, as yourself, spent thousands of hours in the original, to now find that we are using a more restrictive server system and we are unable to play with the dozens of friends we made all over the world (in some cases we can, only after jumping through many hurdles and facing “error” messages in the process).

As for World vs. World, I agree it seems possible to have been designed around team selection rather than home worlds, and simply limiting how often one can switch teams. This idea would certainly need some more work, but it sounds reasonable.

Of course, there may be more potential profit foreseen with the current system (having players pay every time to switch home world), which I won’t argue but if that is the reason for the design flaw, it is disappointing as well.