Guild Wars 2

That’s amazing, please send that to me when it’s coloured so I can wallpaper it

If you want to support the game, please stop putting money into RNG boxes.

These are stopping them from putting real straightforward skins into the store, and are consistently forcing you through this abusive gambling side of the game if you want something like fused weapon skins (outside of gold)

Eridani.8317:

Charak.9761:

Because 90% of the original designers of GW2 haven’t already been laid off… (you do realize your dungeon designer is gone right?)

Any source for that or are you just making kitten up?

Robert Hrouda was your dungeon designer, and ranger advocate, he left a couple months ago.

2 of 3 of GW2 founders have long since left.

Your voice actors are unionized, so that’s why there hasn’t been much new cutscenes with voiceovers. The only need addition is Tara Strong for scarlet.

the 90% is the large team made to create the game, then they slim them off until only a couple of developers are left to keep the game in check. Right now I’m a bit worried for Josh Foreman atm.

The following things are cuasing disruption in gameplay

1. Those of us with hours to kill into this game (5-7+hrs), have done the same content over and over, so we’re always looking for something new

2. The Extrinsic values of the game are tied to gold, not skill progression

3. Skinners Box Theory, we’re not getting the rewards we want no matter how many times we hit that button

4. Storytelling, we haven’t advanced after zaithan

5. The intrinsic value of the game have long since been gone. We’ve got a new villian that has no internal background, you have to go to blogs and officials post to learn about scarlet. We still don’t understand where she’s recruiting these massive numbers of people for her agenda.

Jordo.5913:

Charak.9761:

Mahaedros.7085:

I wanted to help the game and Anet out

Please don’t follow that belief, all gem store purchases are given to NCSoft

1. Developer makes a gem shop to bring in income.

there are two ways this plays out:

2a. No one buys gems thus creating no income.
2b. NCsoft sees gw2 as a failure, and slowly limits how much money Anet gets each month leading to layoffs and no more content updates

3a. A lot of people buy gems to support gw2.
3b. NCsoft sees gw2 as a moneymaker success, gives Anet more money to keep content coming out at a regular pace to keep people spending money in the gem shop.

i’m thinking the latter already happened and is why we saw Living Story updates go from every month to every two weeks

so yes, gem shop purchases do help support Anet

Because 90% of the original designers of GW2 haven’t already been laid off… (you do realize your dungeon designer is gone right?)

Mahaedros.7085:

I wanted to help the game and Anet out

Please don’t follow that belief, all gem store purchases are given to NCSoft

you mean a zerker mesmar right?

These are abusive fillers, they aren’t generating for immersion or fun into the game, its the false likely hood of keeping the user around longer.

Did anyone enjoy finding all those teeths/claws/scales?
Did anyone enjoy the kill x aetherblades in y maps?
Did anyone enjoy go to x balloon in y maps?
Did anyone enjoy smash x pinatas?

These are nothing but chore checklists, that don’t work towards real character progression.

My only response, seeing as it’s no longer September 17-18th

outside of rings, these are useless, which kills furthur desire to keep doing fotms

Jasher.6580:

milo.6942:

just wanted to point out how players have been trained so well to expect microtransactions, they willingly propose to give money for nearly anything. 5 years ago you would have been asking for this feature to be included in the box price.

I don’t think it’s an unreasonable microtransaction though.

Please buy our pick for $10.
Please buy our item to un-soulbound pick for $10.

Yeah, that doesn’t sound crazy at all.

It appears people haven’t bothered to look into the definition of skinner box

http://youtu.be/tWtvrPTbQ_c

Yeah, I wouldn’t assume otherwise. I think it’s only for 1 account, multiple ips that they would have a problem with.

colesy.8490:

Charak.9761:

Go into a dungeon with that kind of playstyle and you will be destroyed.

Guardian 1h sword build, press 1 for highest dps

Because apparently every fight is just a boss punching bag that does nothing and they aren’t expected to use utility skills. Hmm?

Actually yes, you can ignore every mechanic in dungeons.

chemiclord.3978:

There was so much complaining and whining about Atiesh and Thunderfury being so tedious and drawn out (for example) in vanilla WoW that Blizzard actually went to the complete OPPOSITE extreme and made some legendaries in Burning Crusade straight up drop from final raid bosses (like Illidan).

I raided BT for 6 months trying to get that sword and never saw it drop once. You can imagine the soul-crashing feeling of never owning it on my rogue when LK came out

The skinner box theory, however the rewards dont condition you enough to want to keep pushing the button. You can literally click that button a million times and turn out blues/greens, and just get bored. Or be a new player hit the button once and get rewarded with a precursor, which latches your game time more to the button, hoping that click will ultimately yeild another precursor.

At the moment, for people who are able to put alot of time (ie 7+ hrs/day), they can rush through content and be left feeling that the extrinsic values dont match up to their expectation of the MMOs carrot chasing.

They need to unlatch rewards from gold progression and attach more to skill progression.

Go into a dungeon with that kind of playstyle and you will be destroyed.

Guardian 1h sword build, press 1 for highest dps

Dikeido.8436:

Then ask yourself would you still be here if you were bored of this game.

Player investment

In GW2, you can literally spam #1 for loot. True story.

Nah, someone will always give up when they see no turn around coming.

You either have to play with those people or leave yourself.

I think it would be interesting concept to try it out at least, I know its part of the game but it doesn’t help with your esport vendetta. I’d highly recommend a soft release, and get real player feedback on it.

Then there are people who’s argument is “Don’t play”

You’re forgetting when a person invests into a game, they want to see that their time isn’t ultimately wasted, most of us are simply waiting for anet to make a good update that starts slowly saving the game. It’s an unrealistic dream, but the game is only a year old, WoW got its good turning point after 2 years. They just need to realize what is and what isn’t working.

Teege.4623:

Hule.8794:

Because there will be WvW Leagues starting 4th of October. So devs are focusing on Leagues.

Didn’t the e-sport/sPvP event thing turn out to be a little clusterF, I wonder if this league thing will as well.

its not an esport league, it just gives the server better rewards for actively winning. However, bad matchups will sour this design quickly

The people still defending/enjoying the game are trapped inside the skinner box

For Guardian supporty abilities:

Save yourselves – condition wipe
hold the line
stand your ground
wall of reflection
shield of avenger
staff 2/4
boons on virtues

But you can use all of that and still wear full dps gear, 0/15/30/20/5

I don’t see warriors as much support but having more warbanners help a lot, it just comes down to which class you can play for hundreds of hours at a time.

Everyone hates rangers in their dungeon, just fyi.

maddoctor.2738:

Charak.9761:

Nope, they built their engine on DX9, they can’t change that without making a new game.

You mean all those games that changed DX version during their run time were re-created from scratch?

MMOs are seperate from single player games like Crysis. There’s alot more revolving around the design code for the sandbox version of an MMO than a linear path of other games. In cost effectiveness, it’s just easier for ncsoft to just pass on this upgrade.

Nope, they built their engine on DX9, they can’t change that without making a new game.

For some players, the carrot chasing is the goal
For others its just the aesthetics.

I’m 1,200 hours into the game, that’s about the time spent for MW2+BOPs+BF2 multiplayers according to my steam. But I’m at the end of my ropes now for this game, for the past week I just show up for dailies and log right back off. I have nothing to work for, nothing to work towards. The game focused so much on gold instead of actual progression, that it ruined it for me. I would love to use a foefire shield because it matches my guardian’s avenger shield, but I can’t work towards it outside of gold farming.

In varying levels it’d be nice to be able to use more of the gear available instead of seeing on type that’s unreliable. It’s the same process of when WoW turned spells into spell power. You just re-work all the coefficient values and/or add in a trait line in the condition/healing that boosts one over the other.

Yeah but w/o one-shot mechanics, the encounter becomes a tank-spank

How do you balance around a non-trinty dungeon?

The problem is there was no limitation on facebook accounts getting codes, so people just made a whole mess of codes for themselves, so they took it down.

There hasn’t been any mention of a level cap increase. Why all the tinfoil hats suddenly?

It worked. But it worked to well, so they removed it.

GSSBlunaspike.4153:

tigirius.9014:

What makes it even worse is not all classes are created equal in the scaling. Some classes (cough guardian cough) allow scaling like crazy in every skill, while others like engineer hardly have any skills that scale healing properly. It makes for a really really poor system in which they don’t even have the Arenanet trinity. Right now they just have burst damage zerker builds that are the most effective in PVE.

I’m curious, can you point out the skills that guardian has that scale so well compared to other professions?

it’s mostly the dodge roll its a 1:1 ratio +250

colesy.8490:

OP, what makes Arah p4 poorly designed besides the fact that you quite obviously just can’t do it?

arah p4 is the longest dungeon design in the game, but at the end, the rewards are no greater. A good dungeon design means it can be cleared in under 20mins, any longer and you bypass time vs. reward card and itself becomes useless. Most people only run it once for the AP, but other than that, there isn’t an value for doing it. It’s not hard, it’s just time consuming.

Nilkemia.8507:

Can you even sell them? Most (if not all) of the ascended materials seem to be account bound.

Deldrimor steel ingots and spiritwood planks

It was under the guise that it would let players craft them and make a profit.

You know what ultimately happened? It cost more to make these items, then it cost to sell on TP.

Henge.3907:

Weapon dying was never in the game at any stage.

They were hoping for weapon dying system from GW1

Raiding
One of the key design of pass MMOs, taking down large bosses with coordinated efforts with lots of other people for gear progression. Many people see these as challenging content, and only the best of the best will complete it. So they decided to add a new encounter, that incorporates different design features.

Tequatl, the new raid content.

But what happens when you ask for to many players. Most raid content only required 10-25 players because it really is that difficult to seek out more people. So what happens when you ask people to fight content that requires 80+ people, things fall apart, fast. I’m not saying the encounter is bad by all mean, it’s the requirement around the encounter that you have to fight that makes it hard.

AFKs, troll turrets, Disconnects/Server lags, Overflows, Graphical hitbox detection, 3rd-party program requirements (TS3).

The other issue is the amount of effort you put in doesn’t mean equal rewards. If you had 150 people raiding ONE boss, you can’t give them all expensive loot, not everyone can get the top loot, the teq weapon skins, as it would devalue that loot.

In a raid environment, a boss usually drops 3-5 loot that splits across the guild, but that was okay because as you geared up the players equally in your guild, everyone was stronger in the end. So what happens when you fight with randoms? You can’t justify putting your effort in and having no value in return. For many of us, who have managed to beat him, we see blue/green loot and a lucky few get a pet/weapon. So, the extrinsic value of this encounter is based solely on RNG and being able to be on at the right time, even earlier to avoid overflow, and really, that just sucks. A simple solution is to obtain tokens based on teq kills to build towards his loot table and still have a chance for it to drop at the same time, we saw this with the watchwork shoulders, you either got tokens to build towards one or rolled the rng on the chests, that in the heart was good design because you had a choice of progression.

Rewards

Whether you want to believe it or not, the primary goal of MMOs is rewards for the player, you work through difficult challenges to gain epic loot to display for your work. So why is the reward system so little in this game, why is most items obtained through either RNG or Gold. There’s nothing epic about buying the best item in the game outright, it doesn’t show you overcame obstacles, it just shows you either had a lot of time to kill gold-farming, or purely bought the gold itself outright. What happened to risk-rewards-time structures, why did everything become gold-based rewards? There’s no extrinsic value progression other than repeating gold-farming functions for hours on end that eventually stops you in place and ask why? why am I do this? why am I working like a chinese gold farmer for loot that doesn’t make me any better then anyone else?

conclusion
So, what do you do when you hit a wall, and you’ve basically can’t make any progression in the game. What happens when you’ve done everything and yet, feel like you’ve done nothing, most people just log in for their dailies and then log right back off. And really, that’s whats killing the playerbase, you might of sold the games to tons of players but how are you keeping those players in the game longer if they’ve done everything, and essentially only log in for the LS updates for the new AP stuff for 3 hours and then wait 13 days for the next update. Re-evaluate the time vs. reward vs. challenge structure. Don’t make the most difficult content in the game so overwhelmingly un-rewarding, and then make the easiest part of the game the most rewarding (ie champ farming, p1 rushing, etc).

It’s been a year, and although there’s been a lot of changes over the course of that year, what happens when you’ve pretty done them all, and you just kind of ask yourself what do I do now?

fotm
I’ve run the same fotm content over/over, there’s no new element here and no reward carrot to chase, so the nessecity for continuing is depleted. Hopefully the newer additions, such as molten facility, aether, and the reactor will pick up the pace, but for now, this content is dull/boring/repetitive. It also needs a reward upgrade, the loot falls short for the amount of teamwork/time spent in higher levels.

sPvP
This is a basic drop in and out content, but the gameplay is all the same, cap or defend 3 bases, some have different variables like skyhammer and boss/tower buffs, but that’s just it, you just make punching bags of everyone or try to back door around the enemy, the only reward is cosmetic upgrades inside the spvp realm only, so there’s no purpose for PvEr’s outside of AP.

WvW
You essentially get 2 maps to play with, EB or the large server maps, but that’s just it, the maps are large, so when you die in the server maps, that’s a long walk back into the fight. EB has a little more adventure to it since most content is nearby and you can play against the other 2 servers all you like, but what happens when you play the same map over/over/over? It becomes predictable, you know where to cap in specific routes and can easily pinpoint enemy movements, the content is PvDoor or ZvZ, so after several hours you can do the same content again and again just aiming for more and more rankups, but really the rewards are also non-existant and there’s no realistic AP value outside of daily/monthly, so why exactly am I doing this content again? Hopefully the season revision fixes the issue with this.

Dungeons
The standard of MMOs taking you and a group of friends/guildies/randoms, through challenging encounters to acquire loot. But what happens when you’ve done them all, you realize some have poor design and you ignore them completely (Arah p4), and some have the fastest routes (CoF p1), so you essentially only run those to limit down the time vs. reward, why work harder when the rewards round out the same. If you’ve been here for a year, these dungeons are essentially dead for most of us now, I thought the gold revision for completing the dungeon would make me want to re-run them, but 1g for 30mins? That’s a pass for my book, the standard is 7-10g/hr in open world, so why limit myself here, when really, I’ve done the content so the intrinsic/extrinsic values are gone.

Open World
This was suppose to be the big picture of Guild Wars new design, where you can play anywhere and play with anyone else in open world, no mob tagging, shared loots, and tons of dynamic events working with others. So what happened? Most maps are deserted now, and only a couple of stragglers remain leveling up a new character. So when you walk pass a dynamic event that requires a group effort, how do you complete it when there’s no one nearby, how do you enjoy one of the key element of the game when everyone else left the maps? how did the fundamental design of the game fall so flat? Answer? Everyone rushed to 80, because nothing in those maps were rewarding, and if you stay there you lose out on your time vs. reward scale. Why do an event that may take 10-20mins when the end result is 1s and 200 karma, and it doesn’t change the world and will be back up again in 10mins, so it was ditched. Now that everyone is lvl80, they are asking for harder content, and that’s where the next section came in…

Heinel.6548:

They did make some new gemstore armor sets. I guess it’s fair for full sets to be on there. They could always put tradeable rewards on the content so people who don’t want to pay money can instead pay gold. I do think it would be nice if more armors are released more often (as long as quality does not suffer, some of the stuff we got on the store are not up to standard IMO).

The power creep pushed boosters to 7g a piece, it does need some revamps

I’d like to be rewarded with ancient wood logs

Meglobob.8620:

Yep level 80 only.

Also, expect this dungeon path to be hard, REALLY HARD…

Ideally, ALL 5 members in the party should have ascended weapons and complete ascended trinkets. With builds completely tweaked for running this dungeon path. Expect beyond level 50+ fractals type of HARD…

timidobserver.7925:

Yeh the skins are pretty terrible. I’ll probably only go in there to try to quickly get some and get them sold while the demand is high.

in before account bound

ah but you see some people still buy these RNG stuff.

That’s why they still exist.

Yea was wondering if its worth switching from 60% might rune setup to 6/6 travelers for PvE (knight armour/zerker trinkets)

0/15/30/20/5

VI
IV-V-XI
II- (IX or VIII)

Then be 80, it takes 30 hours to be lvl80

TA Explorable Level requirement: 55