Guild Wars 2

Wicked.5479:

saying gandara won by only doubleteamed is just silly, gandara has been the strongest in silver league by far, prolly mid gold range.
having fought against gandara probably 7/9 weeks i did have the feeling the hackershennanigans, which 99% of us cant do anything about and WILL NOT ABUSE, have been such a negative influence that they forget that we have 99% of the people that worked day and night to get to second place, and that hearing we do not deserve second place just because of a few stupid hackers (which every server has, ours just isnt been caught yet) really stings.
Gunnars has been a formidable foe this week so far and shows that it can compete in tier 1 from silver league. HOWEVER: they are at the same point total of FSP/PS/AM while only once being in tier 1, while the forementioned have been rotating the past 8 weeks.
im NOT blaming this on gunnars, im blaming it on anets stupid scoringsystem.

@Bloodstealer: “But that said you won, well done, but where were those double team tactics to save us???”

on the last day Abbadon was opening our towers on our BL and then moving on to let Gandara cap.
which was in their best interrest aswell for us to place second, and that it was most likely unplanned.
it DID happen however.

When a zerg multiple times captures a structure that has its gate open and there is no visible siege than yes you are abusing it. No siege is a dead giveaway as a defending side will not leave the gate open, yet destroy the siege. The first tower can forgiven as you can never be sure. The second tower can’t really be avoided, but after that you are just as guilty as the ones exploiting.

The rightful ranking would most likely see FSP disqualified. We all know why, so do you really want to go down that road.

I will not say what, but when instead. It was after the Orr makeover was done that made it the pleasant cc filled place it is now. Where every mob has way to many cc abilities. Feel free to extrapolate the what from that.

Herr der Friedhoefe.2490:

Nick.6972:

Already said it back when these CD threads started.
Nothing but a PR trick to make people think that Arena Net is actually listening.

The best bit is that people fell for it, even after Devon Carver posted that none of these ideas would become a work order. In other words, we can yack all we want about what we would like to see, but it isn’t going to happen.

It was obvious even when he was simply answering that he thought the whole CDI thing was a waste of time. His answers dripped with not caring one bit. This was extremely apparent when discussing long term projects.

CDI is not an anet project it is a Chris Whiteside project and only condoned so to keep the appearance of interacting with the community.

Mada.5319:

chronometria.3708:

Anet made decent loot appear so rarely that players became akin to starving people, desperately gorging on champion boxes in the faint hope that something appeared in them. The champ train was a symptom of player “reward starvation” and a large amount of learned helplessness. Why do complex events like tequatl and 3 headed wurm when those give next to nothing in return. Far better to simply run round in a boring circle while watching tv and to collect a hundred champ boxes in the hope of something by raw force of numbers.

GW2 is built around giving nothing and taking all our time and the culmination of this is events like the new queens gauntlet, which are the perfection of this punishing philosophy.

We learned that the mystic forge hates us. We learned that RNG hates us, but now we don’t event get drops in our events for the rng to happen in.

The game hates us – that’s how I feel at the moment and I don’t understand how it can have come to this. I want to play, but its as if I am being told to go play something else – why is this?

No, what anet has done is allowed the mindless, repetitive farming of champs to go on for so long that people have become reliant on such a broken system and have started to believe that what they were doing deserved rewards.

It seems evident that you do not even do Teq or Wurm. Teq/Wurm and Karka get completed within 15 minutes by a coordinated group and you’ll be swimming in rares and loot chests if you made the effort to get organized.

Oh the irony. So instead of the champtrain you are advocating the worldboss train. It’s the same bloody thing, but worse as it is on someone elses, read anet, timeschedule.
Killing worldbosses is also mindless and repetitive. The only hard thing about world bosses is that it requires someone with organisational skills for some of them. Teq certainly isn’t difficult. The wurm probably isn’t either, but both require someone telling people what to do.

It’s not all about information on new content. It’s about acknowledging mistakes. Anet has been blatantly ignoring their mistakes and even go so far as brushing them off as if they were nothing or worse intended. Successfully interacting with a customerbase is key to the longevity of any product. It is an integral part of making the product better and making it grow.

Sadly anet and the fanboys can’t seem to grasp this concept.

Well sadly this just makes me even less inclined to return. They effectively put a knife in what was left of a living world. Events on demand is absolutely counter to what a living world is. The timers and API’s were bad enough, but at least there still was some randomness. This just made GW2 the MMO equivalent of McDonalds.

Sorry, but The Brass at Anet is utterly clueless, as far as I’m concerned, to what makes a great MMO.

FenrirSlakt.3692:

Ohoni.6057:

Says you. I say you’re wrong. I say that GW2 should have content that appeals to players of all types, not just casuals and not just hardcore raiders.

So where does that leave us? Thankfully, the devs agree with me, not you, and the game is in a better place because of it.

I think that just ends up pleasing no one, because the raiders feel that there’s not enough content to justify their attention, and the non-raiders feel that the raiders are getting the best loot (which they are). Again, if they completely remove the chests from the Wurms and Teq, then they can leave the events in, but those types of enemies should not have superior loot.

Speak for yourself. Every piece of challenging content they’ve released has been a pleasant experience to me and others. It’s the [bad type of] casuals that cry about something they cannot get because they’re not willing to put any effort into it. Well, that’s how the world works, if you don’t work towards something, you won’t get it and will have to deal with it.
I am thankful that the devs release content for both casual and hardcore players and so should you. If not, well that’s too bad.

So will you also start calling out people who complain that there isn’t enough hard content. The crying for that has been going on for a while. You can’t put down one group and not the other as there is a name for that, hypocrisy.

Raine.1394:

Spicyhash.7605:

I don’t like playing with rangers because of point blank shot. They use this whenever it is off cooldown – knocking foes out of AoE or skills like hundred blades/other high burst skills. The only rangers I like playing with are sword/whatever because they have no skills that can really interrupt the flow of battle. Knockbacks should never be used in small group roaming or in PvE.

When you play with a lot of rangers you can count on someone moving a target around the battlefield with no thought as to the impact on other players. Actually, if it weren’t for the knockback I wouldn’t have a problem with rangers at all. I actually have two rangers and have no hate for the class—just one skill. Maybe you could have a skill unlock that requires training in using any knockback skill.

The same claim can be made for any other class. It’s just convenient for people to blame rangers.

The amount of bad cc I’ve seen is astounding and it usually doesn’t come from rangers at all.

While I don’t mind the set up for this event by itself. The dodge achievements for it are counter productive. On paper you will have 20-25 people for each lane. They do their respective events and stay put. In reality, due to the dodge achievement you have people who constantly jump lanes to the one they need. I’ve seen 10 people all leave a lane at the same time to run to the next one, because a lane failed their event. This tells me they want a certain boss. By doing so the success of the entire event comes into jeopardy. On top of that the dodge achievements only get rewarded if everyone succeeds in killing their champ. So people might have to repeat the behaviour of lane jumping many times before they succeed.
How do I know, because it’s how I did it. At first it didn’t matter, but the more I got done, the less choice in which boss I needed to face I got. until I only had one boss left. I needed the third boss last so if a lane failed I skipped to the next one. In the end I just stopped participating at all until I was certain which lane would get my boss.
3 Things stopped me from being able to finish the achievements sooner.
1. Loading screen. You load and bam, attack in the face.
2. Others failing the event.
3. Lag. I’ve gotten hit, but on my screen I wasn’t inside any of the aoe areas. This was both positioning lag and loading lag. Sometimes there simply wouldn’t be an aoe circle at all.

Fixes for these could be as followed
1. Shorten the portal timer by 5 seconds and at a 5-10 second wait before the actual fight starts.
2. Create individual events for each platform. Succeed your mini event and you get the achievement. If all 5 succeed the overall event succeeds and the chain gets cut.
3. not as easy to fix, but one of the causes simply is to many people nearby. Lanes where a good idea, but maybe they needed a bit more spreading.

Achievements shouldn’t have to depend on the success of others. they should also not be counter productive and jeopardize the event’s success it is attached to.

BillFreist.1527:

The fact that most of these items ever existed is just blatantly a bug. The decision to throw cooldowns on them were for server performance/stability as the patch notes said, not for balance. Period. This was something that was long overdue.

Think of it this way: Between the embers and whistle, those items were effectively doubling/tripling the amount of players active in a map.

As for the Charrzooka, I’m not sure what the reasoning behind that change was. That wasn’t part of the change to summons, or at least that I’m aware of.

The bringer of bad news,
-Bill

To the moderator team

Community member Note:
We expect all developers to be respectful of one another and that includes our community members. Do not engage in personal attacks against community members. Please note that abuse of community members in forum posts, private messages, or email appeals may result in negative reactions from the entire MMO community, which can result in game termination. You have been warned.

Hype and fluff piece without actually saying anything. Worst thing, people are getting excited by it…

There are people who know his and abuse it. Nothing short of exploiting in my book and puts a severe stain on this minigame.

It’s not just regen of course. Won’t mention which ones I’ve seen to not put others onto ideas

From the skritt getting hit point of view.

Ooohh long legs has shiny. Long legs let go of shiny. Shiny is coming closer. Come to me shiny. smacks shiny hit me ?!? Shiny is dripping from face. Don’t leave me shiny, don’t leave me smack oh shiny came back, me so lucky.

Shadow Blade.1324:

i remember you guys talking about endgame horizontal progression before maybe look at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIExN1GZK_Q
that lasted what 2 months? how long will anything from this cdi last? before you nerf it and promote gold farming for “economic reasons”

given the treatment of the vertical component of this discussion where inconvenient commonly discussed points were flat out ignored, and the most common dev posts were a variation of “im really busy with the holidays will read/reply later” its clear this will be marginalized with a token feature and “we listened to your feedback” when you introduce more unpopular changes.

many of the proposals in this thread have been discussed again and again over the last year
and you guys are always reading the forum’s right?, so its not like its new information, you have not taken action so far, we should believe you will now why exactly? your track record isn’t exactly good at this point, its not even average.

at this point i think this has degenerated into a PR exercise and you wont actually do anything substantial, so im no longer interested in taking you through game design basics you should already know.

Sadly this is how I see it at the moment. I do not feel this initiative is serious no matter how many times it is said to be taken serious. Simply because the actions do not reflect the words. Asking for a top 3 after 17 pages of ideas looks more like not wanting to go through it themselves and all that it accomplishes is rehashing the same old that has been talked about already without rhyme or reason.

Nike.2631:

Conner.4702:

I’m fully against all forms of hardmode, not because I dislike challenging content (when done well), but because it will take away people from an already desolate area.

Um, if you’re saying all future content has to take place within the maps we have now for fear of spreading things out… that’s pretty much the definition of Dead Game to me. And there were no more worlds to conquer – just maps to endlessly rehash.

While I have lobbied extensively for more Dynamic Events layering, refreshing and expanding the stories of the zones we have now, it was NEVER with the belief that what we have now should be the full measure of real estate the game shall ever present.

If the Living Story has taught us anything, it’s that the Devs can focus population where they want it for as long as they want it. Often to the detriment of any hint of challenge as the zerg consumes all.

I’m largely convinced a couple of zones designed for the hard core aren’t going to meaningfully deplete the population of open world zones… since there’s almost no one in them anyway except for the two champ trains. And if the rewards are chiefly the pleasure of exploration and the bragging rights of surviving in a harsh land rather than the never-ending search for the next most abusable farming loop, then I just don’t see it pulling a huge amount of population or of keeping them out of other area all that long.

If anything that’s the strongest argument against it: that it would be a lot of work for a very flashy, nicely promotable but ultimately not grindy enough piece of content .

Way to go and read things I never wrote or implied and utterly not understanding my real point. Every game with hardmodes I played got fractured into hardmode and non hardmode people. Yes even GW1 you just noticed it less there due to the set up of the game. On top of that I find hardmodes utterly cheap content.

Nike.2631:

Just out of curiosity, are people really committed to a hard mode existing as an overlay in already present zones?

Would a new set of 5 “Perilous Lands” (1-15, 15-30, 30-50, 50-70, & 70-80) covering the full leveling path where you are always 2-6 levels lower than the mobs scratch this itch? No mix-and-match modes, no cheap work-arounds… You set foot in here, you expect to get your hind-parts severed, cooked, and plated on fine silver unless you bring your best game. Let the map devs have fun and be deliberately MEAN in laying out spawn sites and vistas.

The new zones could have all the features that we see now, but since the Personal Story doesn’t go through them they would be completely optional. The hearts, places of interest, vistas, and way points could all contribute to a second separate world accomplishment track both to create a new meta-goal and to keep this frankly brutal new real estate outside of the current Legendary acquisition path.

And on the subject of risk and reward, I’d rather the reward for playing in perilous lands be more bragging rights than farming bait.

I’m fully against all forms of hardmode, not because I dislike challenging content (when done well), but because it will take away people from an already desolate area.

To me the most important thing that needs to be accomplished on top of everything else is make the world feel alive again. Spreading the population out even further will not accomplish this. A world that is alive will grow, where as a world that is empty will just die more.

Kulvar.1239:

If you can make every Order quest without being of the Order, you destroy the purpose of these Order Quests that is to make you involved in your Order plans/duties/plots. So the answer is : Yes, you need to have joined an Order.

You join an Order with the level 30 quest, It’s not hard. If people don’t want to join an Order/make their Personal Story, It’s a way to motivate them.
It’s a way to make our choices meaningful on long term !

And I disagree. Forcing people to do A so they can do B is rarely a good way to motivate people.

Now while Faction achievements/quests are a nice idea. There are quite a few problems with it.
First off, Do you need to be an active member from said faction by having done the personal story. Not everyone is keep on going through the personal story.
Are the rewards between factions the same or different. If there are armor sets involved than I can see issues with people having chosen a faction already but wanting an armor set from a rival faction. So unless switching factions is implemented I see this as an issue.
Some have noted wanting retroactive rewards. Personally I say no, let people start on an equal footing. The idea is to get people out there not to have some be able to skip most of it already from the start.

To facilitate people being in zones I would restructure the way dailies are currently done. I never understood why anet didn’t implement a hard cap on the dailies. Do 5 dailies and you should not be able to gain more points.
Instead of the current method I would put in a daily meta. The meta would award the achievement points when 5 dailies have been done. The dailies themselves can award small rewards. Not all of them, but those that require more specific tasks. Like the LS dailies can award LS related currency. WvW can award badges or for say the 2 rank achievement it can reward the least awarding wxp potion. Other options being small currency or karma. The Meta daily would award between 8-10 points to not offset current progress in total AP gain per day.

This can free up time for AP hunters do go out and do different things without losing out. More casual people would be able to gain points faster and not feel left behind to much when they miss one.

honeyjars.6590:

I would like to pose a challenge to the Guild Wars 2 Community: Achieve 100% World Completion on a single character — With this waypoint being your last item.

Watch your step, my friends

Impossible due to the vista above said waypoint.

The gate point plaza waypoint would be doable though, but still not that hard.

Region Achievement lines

People need a reason to spread out through the world. So give them a reason. Give each of the 5 regions their own long term achievement line. Filling up these lines will be done by doing events in their respective areas. Each finished tier will award the player with some sort of reward.

- Cheaper waypoint costs within the region
- Cheaper merchants
- Region exclusive titles
- Armor sets
- Cheaper waypoints within a zone
- Free waypoints within a zone
- Different dialog from npc’s when reaching certain tiers. ie being addressed with more respect for one.
- Final tier titles something along the line of: conqueror of orr, protector of kryta, sentinel of meguuma.

The achievements should not be cheaped, by being able to farm the same event over and over. So I would propose a limit of only counting unique events per day. On top of that make a high plateau limit on events per day. Making sure hardcore grinders can max it out per day if they so choose, but casuals not feel left behind to much.

New weapons sets.

Adding new weapon sets that are obtained and upgraded by class specific quests. Each class would get say 2 new weapons they can train, but instead of unlocking them one skill at a time by killing them. All skills are unlocked but at say 70% of their final strength. They are then upgraded by completing the class quests, until they reach their max potential.

Estriella Faerie.4029:

Carighan.6758:

Honestly I see that as quite balanced, though. You have multiple toons fully decked out at the end, which gives you a very very high amount of flexibility in regards to gameplay. You can always relog to a character with specialized gear and trait setup and just the fitting utility skills.

That flexibility has a cost, in that you needed to spend the time for each character.

Seems fine to me?

Depends on how alt-friendly you want the game to be.

Most games have a pretty high vertical progression, so it’s extremly hard to equip many character, therefore you have only one main character, and your other toons are alts.

Gw1, like gw2 before, wasn’t like that. Equiping a toon to BiS was quite easy (the first one required a bit of time, after that it was easy to farm the stuff for the alts). So you could switch toons to play with friends, to have a team composition that was correct.

With the introduction of ascended, gw2 is taking the path most other games are taking, and it’s kinda sad, as the versatility we had before was really nice, we could switch to a guardian if the team needed it, or stay on our dps, etc. Now, with a new tier, we’ll feel compelled to stay on our only equiped character.

This is especially true with fractals. With the fractured patch, fractal level became account based. But now, the required AR is much more than before, so I can’t use my alts there, even if I want to. Kinda bad to make, in the same patch, a change to help alts (account based level), and one making it impossible to use alts (more AR required).

You are forgetting that in other games with high vertical progression you still have the option to gear up alts alongside your main. Depending on how much time you have to spare. This option is not available in GW2 unless you have an extreme amount of gold. Even then some items are still time gated.

Other games do not limit gearing of alts, for those with time, as much as GW2 currently does.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Summary
Overall I think time gates are important for an MMO, while they have pro’s and con’s for sure, in my opinion the overall gains come out ahead. That said I think there is diminishing returns to the number of time gates in a game. This brings up a core design philosophy which is “it’s always easier to add to then it is to take away” (while in this example it is a bit inverse, as adding a time gate is “adding” but it’s really taking away the players ability to repeat the action as much as they want). Meaning, we error on the side of time gating as we can always remove a time gate if needed but it’s really hard to add one. One clarification I would like to make is there are two different time gates: One time and repeatable. I think most of the complaints about time gates are all on the repeatable end, so I’ll focus my thoughts on that one.

Con’s
snip, need more room for my message

Pro’s
snip, same

Reasons for time gating
- Exploits (Many time gates are there to avoid exploits)
- Overflow issues (the way our tech works without a time gate, you can use overflows to reset your timer)
- Reward Equalization (keep the time to do something more even between hardcore and causal)
- Character vs Account (some things we want to reward the account and thus an account time gated reward allows us to do that cleanly, which stops people from deleting characters and renaming in order to acquire a large number of things)

Overall I feel like time gating is important for an MMO because it’s important to close the gap between the causal and hardcore group so you can make sure your future rewards and content are useful for a wider variety of players. For example if there was no level cap and everyone could level as much as they want, hardcore players would be at level 4561 and a causal player would be at like 100. Once that happens, it would be very hard to make anything that both of those players would be happy about getting. MMO’s also have what I like to call “mass” to them, the more people playing and logging on, the more fun they are and systems which encourage people to log in often help create that mass. People see their friends regularly even just to say “hey there is an event this Sunday with the guild” or “hey lets set aside some time Friday so we can do fractals”. Now this doesn’t mean I feel like we can just add time gates everywhere. In fact I think you need either a very large amount of time gated stuff so a player can play for ever and never run out of things to do (which is a bit unrealistic) or you need non-time gated rewards and game play. This is why we create places for people to farm for all types of things. We like people who farm a lot, we are just always trying to make sure farming doesn’t blow out an item so much it’s no longer worth farming as it sort of defeats the whole reason to farm. A nice mix of time gates and non-gates is important. I think there are some valid complaints that we have over time gated some areas of the game and we should do some reviews of our time gates to see if adjustments should be made, but the game needs time gates for many reasons and if they were not there the game would be way less fun for any type of player.

Can’t disagree more on timegating being important. Only bad MMO need time gating. So from my perspective you think GW2 is a bad game with the amount of timegating you put in. Timegating only punishes players. It doesn’t put them on equal footing what so ever. In fact it forces them to do things at a time interval they themselves do not want. You want people logging in because they want to not because they need to do a chore. That’s what timegating is a chore.

You haven’t even mentioned the biggest con in regards to GW2. It utterly punishes anyone that likes to play alts. Dungeons are timegated by account instead of character, which in fact is very hurtful for the dungeon community, because less dungeons will get run. Crafting again account based so anyone with alts that wants ascended either needs to farm gold or wait so long they loose interest in the game in the end. World bosses again have been made account bound over character bound. All of this severely punishes people with alts and you just ignore it in your summery.

If people are farming one area to much in your opinion than that is because it isn’t rewarding to be elsewhere. Instead of timegating the game to hell fix that.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Ascended Gear
So then why did we add ascended gear, well the reason is we wanted sometime between the transition and what we shipped with was very little time turns out global trading post has a lot more effect on this then we had original thought which made us need a non-tradable gear step. We still have some progression to smooth out around the rare -> exotic area as mostly you just jump from leveling greens to exotics and rare is really only used for salvaging into ecto. We have been spacing out adding each slot of ascended gear to make sure we don’t make our original mistake again and I’m sure we’ll need to continue to evaluate the time to gain this gear like we do all things.

snip

Ascended creation time

We had a lot of discussion pre-releasing ascended armor to make sure the time to make ascended doesn’t blow out, We pull a lot of data and are watching how long it takes players and like we do with everything we will keep and eye on it but with anything with progression there are always a lot of tradeoffs when you make changes but we’re always looking at it.

Ok so that was a wall of text and clearly needs a cool story bro, but I wanted to get my thoughts out there before I head home for the day. Thanks everyone for posting we are reading it and maybe I’ll jump on after dinner if I get some free time.

To me the mistake wasn’t how easy it was to obtain Exotic gear. In fact so what. I geared my characters and was done. I could spend my time where I wanted without being pressured into doing things I do not want. A common reply to this is just don’t do it. you don’t need it for anything. Well if that is true than it is pointless to have it in game at all.
The mistake was implementing ascended gear. Ascended gear does not in fact have a reason to exist. It has only and still does polarize the community. The stats are not enough for the vertical gear grinders and to much for the horizontal ones. You can’t serve two masters and expect to be able to give both what they want. It isn’t possible. Coupled with how over the top bad the acquisition is through massive timegating.
I have 2 characters with full Ascended Trinkets, but only because I used both for fractals and needed the agony resistance. Due to that fact I have 9 characters with ascended rings, because they dropped anyway. I have laurels and commendation to buy more, but I won’t because I vehemently disagree with the need for the extra tier.

What I would like to know is why did you really think Ascended gear was needed. Simply saying people got decked out in exotics to easy really isn’t a good reason, because again so what. To me the introduction of ascended gear was an extreme panic attack from your side. Basically it was Corporal Jones shouting: Don’t Panic, don’t panic. On and on, google it if you don’t know the reference. I can only speculate what the reason to this panic was, but I suspect naivety being the most common reason. As most developers can’t seemingly grasp the fact that they need to cut their projecting playtime by 75%. Meaning if something is expected to take a 100 hours, it will be done in 25. Couple this with a shallow game and yes GW2 is a very shallow game. The Living Story basically prevents any depth to be added to the game. Nothing wrong with that unless you try and force depth that is unnatural into the game.

As for creation time, drop it down to Exotic level. Yes I’m saying to completely and utterly make Ascended gear untime gated and extremely easy to obtain. You say you are monitoring acquisition time, but metrics will tell you nothing other than some people are getting it and others not. You will never get the why the reason it is done or not from metrics. To be honest delete all metric related data and start over. The why is infinitely more important than the acquiring or non acquiring.

DevonCarver.5370:

Chidori.9483:

I fully expect major projects to spring from this initiative, in fact, I thought it was the point.

The point of this initiative is not to create major projects but to discuss the basic principles behind the design of our game with you all. That can mean explaining why we didn’t do something one way or explaining why we did do it a certain way. It also means that through that discussion we get a better sense of the best versions of many of the things we intend to work on at some point or ideas for changes that can be made to existing parts of the game. It is not a forum for making demands of what we absolutely must do, nor should the expectation be that whatever we are talking about right now is going to show up next month. If you are expecting to see any of the things we have discussed happening quickly, you should adjust that expectation. Some of it could, but the simple fact that we are discussing it here is not a promise to that effect.

If this is truly how you see this than you might as well shut the CDI down right now as it will be utterly pointless because you do not want to participate. Honestly most of your posts drip of unwillingness to actually do anything.

The CDI was set up to help developers make content better, which you seem extremely apprwhensive about.

To be honest the to busy to post excuse simply doesn’t fly. Anet controls the allocation of time. So if this initiative is really that important, than they can allocate time for people to post. Chris is spending an awful lot of time on it, but it feels like just chris is treating this as important and the rest couldn’t care less about it.

If arenanet as a company thinks this is truly important than they need to start treating it as such. What’s the point otherwise? Placating the forum mob?

The whole LW collaboration thread to me was just more of the same. Players making suggestions. That is NOT collaboration. Devs need to put in their concerns and ideas as well. Would the playerbase like this, would going in this direction be a good idea. You don’t have to disclose anything that is currently being worked on to do so. This brings me to another point. Don’t use “we can’t talk about this” as a way to shut down something when it isn’t an issue to begin with. You can talk about things without revealing details. I felt that a lot of posts were being to defensive as if you are trying to justify your actions. Among them the 2 week release schedule. Not wanting to discuss it now means nothing will change for the next 8 months and then it might as well be to late. Nothing should be off limits. Yes, you have a schedule for the next 4 months already. That does not mean you ignore things because you don’t want to think about it or change it right now.

In short devs need to bring more to this table than they have. You say it is important than treat it as such. Don’t merely ask questions or be defensive in your replies. Also try not to manipulate. Quite a few posts were pushing towards something you wanted. It might have been subconsciously, but that make it a good thing.

Now while the PVE thread had at least some interaction the WvW one was just sad. I really don’t feel Devon Carver is suited for the position as lead. As I don’t see him truly understanding the problems with WvW. To me it seems he’s in an ivory tower ignoring the masses below. WvW has a lot of problems. A lot of them boil down to bad implementation to begin with and I don’t see that changing even though redoing some of the things would greatly benefit things in the long run. What the WvW team does though is making a inherently bad situation worse and worse.

Solstice.1097:

Cribbage.2056:

Balefire.7592:

Solstice.1097:

MakubeC.3026:

Solstice.1097:

A simple concept that goes a really long way

Borderland structures can only give PPT to the native team to that BL. You cap stuff in enemy BL to deny enemy points, but you do not gain them for yourself.

This instantly makes the game more defensive-minded, forcing offensive pushes to be more strategic, which moves more towards rewarding coordination and skill and a little bit away from sheer numbers.

Strategies will quickly adapt. I imagine towers being much more sieged up, and therefore trebuchets and other longer, more drawn out sieges, resulting in more fighting and less of a musical chairs back-capping game.

See the thing is if server A caps all of server B’s borderlands, that sets server B back, but it does not give server A a point advantage over server C, so if server C sees that happening and goes after server A, forcing A to pull back off B, etc, you can quickly see how it would quickly become a more thought-out macro-strategic game.

Hmmm….interesting idea.

Can we discuss this?

Let’s say server A is the most populated one. So he goes to B and spends time taking B’s BL. He also has to protect EB and his own BL. B is not making points in his BL, and instead it goes to EB and try to stop A there. Since EB is the only place where the battle for points is. The one who domains EB, domains the game.

Now, what would be the balance between EB and a BL? Will a server with his entire BL producing points be enough to fight a server controlling EB?

Well after some thought I think EB could operate the same way, with SMC being the only structure that can give PPT to any server that owns it. Therefore whoever holds SMC becomes the target of the other 2 servers, and encouraging the 2v1 that was initially expected to happen in WvW naturally.

This is the best idea I’ve seen, as the concept in and of itself functions for every tier, it really stresses defense over offense, and it encourages more tactical usage of Borderland maps within the scope of all of WvW.
It also reduces the raw number of points available, which I think is better for the game, since having a 60k deficit breaks morale a lot more than something like 20k. If Server A has terrible coverage, as long as they can maintain their BL, they won’t fall as far behind, and can then try to rally to make up the smaller point gap.

It will seem like a lot less of a good idea once you see a single highly populated server hold it unbroken for days against two low pop servers. Those servers will in your proposed system have no way at all to score points and no meaningful objectives to head for.

And if by some chance the two smaller ones overpower the high pop server, as soon as one of them caps SMC, the fight becomes them vs high pop + the remaining low pop. So they get to hold SMC for all of 5 minutes.

At least as things stand, smaller groups can dodge about taking minor locations.

he didn’t quote the original idea.

go back and read the initial idea it will make more sense.

Doesn’t really matter with the original idea added or not. It will only work when servers are already balanced. If only one server is weaker than it will fall apart as the strongest server really only needs to focus on 2 borderlands. It’s own and the number 2 one. Hold your own and deny the number 2 points. The weaker server is of no consequence in this equation.

Without semi equal coverage no amount of point tampering will do anything to help the situation.

I’ve said it before there are only 2 ways to battle the imbalance. That’s by removing the imbalance through a restructuring of the servers to make them global. Or to make the imbalance irrelevant by removing the aoe cap. The latter of course won’t really make the match outcome that much different, but weaker server can start having fun again at least.

Galen Grey.4709:

I am currious as to why so many people feel say F&F didnt leave any impact behind it after it finished.

F&F created the refuges. Those refuges built quite a few structures in Southsun and were the reason for canachs actions that in turn generated new events that are there till this day. The refugees subsequently moved to cragstead which up until end of secrets of southsun was a burned down rubble. They have since then rebuild it and are now living there.

F&F not only changed the world directly while it was going on but also did so indirectly for 2 subsequent LW releases. Are people who say F&F didnt leave anything behind unaware of these changes or simply dont consider them changes for some reason. If so I would be curious to know those reasons.

The refugees where a plotdevice nothing more. Anet could have used baby orphan quaggans and made almost the same story. That is not having an impact or a lasting effect to me. Nothing in diessa and wayfarer tells you F&F was there. So no F&F did not leave a lasting effect on the world.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Conner.4702:

To me none of the LV felt like it truly impacted the WORLD. Sure zones got changed, but the world stayed the same. Just look at the current LV there is a huge tower in the middle of a lake, but the humans and centaurs still have their petty land disputes..

So how would you try and solve this? And a second question is how far would you like to see the impact of say a tower in Kessex be felt content wise? The balance here is of course total volume of work for those involved, to literally have the entire world react to what’s going on would take us 6+ months to build, which at that point isn’t actually meeting our goals of a regularly changing and evolving world.

A lot of people already pointed out things that could be different. Also please don’t take things to far by saying the entire world needs to react, but surely some areas DO need to reflect what is going and went on.

Flame and Frost: it came it went, it left nothing behind to show it was there really.
During the F&F it wasn’t all that bad to be honest. The zone had multiple things going on, but without a permanent threat it didn’t need any additional changes. The problem started after it ended and seemingly everyone has forgotten about a huge new threat.
Solution: some events by dredge and flame legion should have been replaced by new events by molten alliance.

Southsun: No comments on this one really. The zone needed to have life brought back to it and it failed. Southsun is simply unfinished. Go back and finish it.

Skypirates: Achieved some of it by the addition of the new JP

Clockwork: this is one of the worst due to how the invasions work. They aren’t truly invasions. but incursions. To top it off no one cared that their areas got invaded and there were no consequences for losing.
Thinking about it, key locations should have been invaded on a map and the enemy should have fortified them through various means, which then needed to be retaken by the players. Add some random patrol events and minor objectives and you have something you can actually call an invasion. Failing an invasion would mean the enemy can dig in. This is just a quick right of the top of my head idea.

Tower of nightmares: most people already pointed things out. like having the centaurs and humans at least have a cease fire, because the tower is a threat to everyone in the area. So stall any events between the 2 until a later point. You can add new events like the Centaur Overlord has gone crazy and is killing his own; slay him to stop the madness. Send out Centaur patrols towards the tower to investigate.

As it is the LS is inconsistent with the actual world. So when you have zones affected by something the direct area around it should at least acknowledge that it is there. This to me is Quality.

ColinJohanson.2394:

techjunkey.8253:

Wow, a lot of content in this thread already…

Temporary vs Permanent Content
LW content motivates players to log in to experience the content while it is fresh. The time limit on the content temporarily concentrates player activity, which smooths the open world experience (e.g. dynamic events). Once the LW cycle progresses, however, some great instanced content (dungeons, story arcs, …) is essentially lost. Rather than increasing the amount of content available to players, one piece of content is swapped for another. Essentially, this leaves players with the same number of content options they had before, which causes a feeling of stagnation. Though individually small, these portions of LW content would accrue if made permanently available, offering players a greater variety of choices when they have tired of other content.

I think this raises an interesting question, what do you consider to be “temporary” content, and what qualifies (in your mind) as content that occurs and drives the living story forward it makes sense to have go away, vs. that which remains?

There is a thin-line between content that drives the story forward, which if it lasts forever feels like the story never really progresses, vs. content that all goes away and ends up feeling like the world never actually progresses. Which releases, and more specifically what aspects of specific releases do you feel were successful balancing content that didn’t remain forever that progressed the story, while simultaneously leaving enough of a mark on the world to feel like the world is changing an evolving?

For me the original invasion of Southsun Cove was the best example of this, it had a lot of “story” style content that made sense to happen and then go away, and also left a lot of permanent experiences as a result of that storyline.

I also felt like the story content that came along with the Queens Jubilee and Clockwork Chaos did a good job of accomplishing this as well, though the outcome of the invasions don’t have enough impact on the world.

Another food for thought: Back when we invaded Southsun, we did a lot of “one time” events with the story content. Folks complained that one time wasn’t fair because they would miss it, so we extended the “story” style content so you now have 2-4 weeks to experience it. Does having it around this long take away from the sense of story progression, and make it feel like it should be permanent when it’s taken away? Or would simply having (using the TV analogy) something like TiVo that allows you to see the story you missed balance out this issue?

To me none of the LV felt like it truly impacted the WORLD. Sure zones got changed, but the world stayed the same. Just look at the current LV there is a huge tower in the middle of a lake, but the humans and centaurs still have their petty land disputes.
Scarlet’s invasions, enemies port in and stand there, no one cares that they are there or not.

You keep bringing up TV series as an example. Well currently I would compare GW2 to Dollhouse. A Joss Whedon show that failed to deliver a compelling story in its second season which let to its cancellation. It’s an apt comparison as the story flow was wrong and even though the viewers already knew some of the outcome, which was undoubtedly very interesting, they didn’t stick with it.
I feel like you seem to think you are onto the next Buffy, Stargate or Star Trek with the current format.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Keep in mind that weekends are a thing. Now that we’re all back in the office, caffeinated and ready to go, we’re gonna jump back in the threads.

Having said that, when you guys get going and are having good discussions, we sit back and make sure we give you guys room to debate/discuss. Just because there isn’t a dev response every X posts, it doesn’t mean we’re not watching the thread.

Except it isn’t supposed to be a thread with players discussing stuff it is supposed to be a discussion between players and devs. Collaboration requires 2 parties.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Also please also be aware that there is a lot of judgment around Scarlet when the arc has not completed yet. I agree with many of the points being made at a foundational level but please don’t assume that the direction of the arc is understood by all just yet.

Chris

When a book fails to pull you in within a 100 pages, being generous here, than the writer has failed regardless of how cool the ending might be.

It really doesn’t matter what the direction is when the road to it is lackluster. I think you need to step back and look at what has been released objectively without using further knowledge of what is up ahead. The story thus far has done nothing to further along the world of Tyria. The world is being corrupted by dragons and people are having minor disputes with random alliances or they are partying.

@BobbyStein

A story needs to have compelling characters both good and evil. A compelling plot line that gets people interested. And finally a good pace. I’m sure you know that

The LV has non of that where I’m concerned. The characters are flat and boring or massively illogical when compared to the game world, aka scarlet. The plot is very shallow. It has zero follow through and its outward appearance seems like a patchwork blanket with the hope that in the end it will look decent enough. We go from one alliance to the next to the next with a whole lot of festivals in between. All the while the dragons are apparently playing poker and relaxing.
The pacing while constant is constantly interrupted by non story items. On top of that at times it is to slow at other times to fast. This all comes down to the rigid 2 week schedule.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hi Cesmode,

You appear to be very combative in your responses and i would ask that you take a deep breath every so often and approach the initiative in the spirit it was created and take the time to actually read and think about what has been posted.

I say this because each of your points (aside from number 5 which was a request for more discussion and will be added to by me shortly) has actually had commentary on it.

1: I said we plan to move forward as we have been. I later said (and as with everything we do) we will continue to appraise quality of the releases as we continue to improve our deployment with the platform and that if through internal and external discussion we felt that the quality was not meeting the expected level then we would reappraise and evolve.

2: To this point i agreed in my main discussion post and talked about how we would solve this problem moving forward. Specifically by ensuring that LW was at the core of the majority of our releases and that we intend to ensure that arcs have little to no gaps in relation to the macro level story arc.

3: I also talked to this and made it clear that the platform is still in its infancy and that we have to move in a balanced development approach to ensure that we don’t start running before we can walk and that our main focus is ensuring quality and then moving up to the next level of sophistication in regard to what the platform is capable of. I also clearly stated that we want players to shape the world (physically and in terms of the evolving history) and that we needed to make the players more central to an epic story experience, where there needs to be more ‘meaningful’ connection to the world and what goes on within it.

4: Regarding Rewards i also spoke to this saying that we need to have more rewards that ‘celebrate’ the player’s accomplishments that are like rites of passage and that also meet the expectations of time vs. investment.

5: I will be posting on this discussion shortly now that i have had time to read and think about what the community has put forward.

Post like this Cesmode really don’t need to occur. Many of your questions can be answered by keeping up to date with the thread and understanding what the stated goals are of the initiative. I appreciate your feedback and some of your commentary but please understand that this slows the process down and can also derail extremely valuable discussion.

I hope you understand,

chris

I’d like to point out how aggressive people are or aren’t is in your own hands. Allocate time to post in this thread and people will be a lot more constructive. Regardless of that. Aggressive post shouldn’t be looked down upon or not replied to. People are passionate and tempers can fly high.
A lot of people start to feel ignored when the developers are not posting. You keep bringing up that you, anet, needs to be better at communicating back. Well that starts with making time to do so.
Furthermore do not dismiss items without giving a reason. The release schedule is a hot topic, but is being dismissed without giving a reason.

Nothing should be off the table. While you might not see it feasible to implement it right of the bat. A full discussion might spark ideas.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

gidorah.4960:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

We are committed to quality not quantity.

Chris

the hard adherance to the two week release schedule seems to indicate the opposite. there has clearly been releases that just seem unfinished. Cannach’s lair comes to mind of something that left the majority of players thinking the content was rushed out to meet a 2 week schedule. There have been others but that was the one that comes to mind first. I think its ok to just have a balance patch and delay content that clearly isnt ready so that our enjoyment of great content is merely delayed not ruined by clearly rushed release schedule.

Hi Gidorah,

To be clear we are absolutely focused on quality. We feel that we can have both this cadence and high quality and are continuing to work toward this. If we feel that we cannot reach this balance then of course like everything, we will evolve as necessary. This said there is a lot we can and are doing to meet concerns regarding the cadence and really polish the positives we have already achieved in this area.. My point is the current plan is to continue with this cadence.

Chris

Your post here outlines the problem for me I guess. Our views on quality vastly differ and I would say I put the bar higher than you. Quality to me means people enjoy it and repeat the content for the content itself. Most of the time now it is just AP chasing and when done they don’t come back. See tequatl and Aetherblade TA path. While from a developer standpoint you can claim it is quality work if no one does it after they get their AP it means you failed.

As for taking a hard stance on the 2 week cycle. That is just bad from the start and pretty much says you don’t want things to improve, because if you do than nothing is off limits. Everything needs to be up for discussion or this will simply be a futile effort.

The only fix I would consider worth while is the total removal of dps from the pet unless traited for them with beast mastery. Instead have pets be utility based.

News at 11: Developer ignores the problem areas and proclaimes nothing is wrong

There is a very easy solution to prevent people from having to go over all of the obelisks again. Place more obelisks than needed around the world. Why the rigid use of 24 needed out of 24 available at all.

There are only 2 ways to combat population imbalance and 2 ways alone. Neither is going to be implemented as one is to much work the other too costly.

1 Completely rewrite the server architecture to make the US and EU servers be able to communicate properly. Making WvW true 24/7 battle. Devon says impossible, but of course this is not true. It is just unwanted due to the amount of work involved and most likely no one is skilled enough for the task.

2 Remove the AOE cap to give small groups the ability to wipe zergs. Too costly due to processing power involved.

Every other solution involved will just be shuffling the problem around. Or to paint a more clear picture. It will be akin to putting a band-aid on a severely broken leg and say cured.

I’m going to be harsh and say: if you want the living story to succeed in the long run, than you need to completely scrap its current implementation.

The entire Living Story up to now has been short term content. Things have been changed but rarely did anything of substance get added. Even worse some of the “new” content meant ripping out content that was already there. As it is there really isn’t much more content than what the game launched with. Not when looking at how many updates the game has had.

The Living Story should focus not only on updating content short term, but adding content long term. By long term I mean new zones. We’ve gotten many placating, but honestly I would rather say demeaning, comments on how you’ve been listening and new more permanent content will be added. sorry but I’m not seeing it. Even worse content that has been added as “new” permanent content is in fact deserted. IE tequatl and aether dungeon path. These changes only had short term appeal due to achievement points, which is another fail but a different discussion.

So how to get back on track. First of kill Scarlet in the most humiliating way. So for a “genius” of her level being cut in half, while doing a speech, by a jotun seems quite appropriate. Scarlet isn’t interesting nor beneficial to the game world.

Add a fallen hero to be the new antagonist. Someone who was corrupted by an elder dragon and can move the story forward instead of sideways. The world is threatened by dragons and the player is running errands and partying, hence sideways.

Add new zones through multi phased story lines. These zones will be slowly build to become full fledged world zones with poi, hearts and vistas.

Don’t stick to a rigid schedule. Content every 2 weeks is stifling for everyone and only lowers the overall quality by at least a 100%. Yes you want people to play and come back, but you don’t want to burn people out. The only way to make people keep logging in is by quality content. Not AP, not more of the same. Quality means better writing. Characters need to be believable and that means flawed, very flawed in a lot of cases. For the most part characters have been stiff and perfect. Quality also means no more content that instils a sense of accomplishment, but without the need of having it fed to people by AP. AP is busy work, the current LV is a perfect example of it. It has no meaning and once finished will not be done again. To be honest AP grinding should be removed as far as I’m concerned. This is coming from someone in the top 1000 AP players.

There really is also no reason new players shouldn’t be able to experience some of the previous LV in some fashion. I don’t mean through fractals. Make the previous LV in a singleplayer experience by choosing some of the elements that would give people a sense of how it was. IE dungeons and short personal story like events.

TLDR yeah just read it.

lordkrall.7241:

EFWinters.5421:

If, in the NHL, certain teams could field 12 players while others could only field 6, I’m pretty sure that nobody would watch it because there’s no competition in the first place.

Coincidentally that’s exactly what is happening with WvW leagues at the moment.

Every single server in the game have the ability to field the same amount of player (I doubt there is a server that have too few people on it to fill up a map fully.

The fact that they don’t is another matter, they still COULD however.

No they don’t. WvW is won by coverage and only a few servers has the coverage to keep the maps filled. Stop living in a dream world and smell reality. As it is the server system is a huge fail where WvW is concerned due to seperating NA and EU servers. Had they not been seperated WvW would have been a bigger success, because you’d have an actual 24/7 battlefield as advertised.

As it is now Anet is stacking the rewards and gameplay changes more and more in favor of T1 servers.

Yes NO ONE likes the JP no one at all. Nice generalization there. Followed by another one. PVE players that only do these JP are keeping you out. They surely aren’t there because of another reason with it being the start of the league season and all…

Start playing off hours and really help your servers in stead of whining you have to wait during primetime.

I’d have to agree. The event seems phoned in. There is less to do and what there is to do has had the fun ripped out.

From everything they already had from last year they could have made an epic Halloween dungeon, but we got a crappy small room with a whiny brat being angry at his father. The Mad King is right The Bloody Prince is a failure.

1. Living Story
2. Rangers
3. Ascended Gear

When I read the OP I just facepalmed though. PVE is to broad to ask people their petpeeves and than pick from that. This thread needs a follow up thread with the 10 most wanted and have people rank their top 5 from that. Count up the tallies at the end and you will have a better idea of what the larger group cares about.

The only reason for me to do the jp now is if it is part of the daily achievement. I no longer find it thrilling or challenging due to how easy mode it has become. Last year I still had still a chance to miss jump. This is no longer the case. I also learned it on my Asuran last year with all the big Norns and Charrs in my way, but could do it on any race.

In fact I find the wisps to be a lot more annoying. This is because of the glowing effects that pop up in the middle of my camera due to being in the front after the first part is done.

I would love to have the back item on the characters I made after last halloween.

That said I had 3 characters still at level 2 when the event started last year and all of them got the complete version. The book pages were located in areas that any level character can reach except for the very last part. More than enough people were doing it though so help was always around the corner. Another option would have been to have a high level character parked in the same spot to clear the area.
There really isn’t an excuse for you not to have a complete version whatever the level your characters were.

Yes hooray for more ALT discrimination.

Kal Spiro.9745:

It never allowed for group join, or friends, because it is technically a PvP map, and always has been.

The Clock Tower was not a PvP map last year. To be honest the red names and the wisp form are bugging me way more than the real players ever did. Unless needed for a daily I won’t be setting foot in there again. I got my chest.