Guild Wars 2

Google ‘gw2cursor’

I played in the last Beta on the EU server. I’ve not played previous beta. The animation had improved (compared looking at old youtube stuff) but it was still very South Park.

I don’t really care about that though – I’m more concerned with the game mechanics. Graphics stuff is easy to change.

ESO has poor character animation and the characters are boringly similar apart from being crude. But the general graphics quality is as good if not better and it does not have GW2’s awful overblown particle effects wiping out the screen in every fight.

One thing it does have is an economy that’s actually tied to guild ownership of resources and keeps. If your guild takes one of these, you get the right to set up a shop (there is no global AH). Lose the keep camp or whatever and you lose your trading right.

Zerg a tower, cap and move on? Never!

WvW was a great game. It was immense fun to play and had huge potential.

Now it’s not even a shadow. Every move Anet has made has been in the opposite direction from the constant pleas of the player base.
Arrowcarts, Trebuchets, Warriors, Commander abilities, WXP, titles, Ascended gear Legendaries. All these are subjects of general consensus among players and determined resistance from Anet.

They’ve ruined their own game. Can you blame us for being bitter about it?

The important question is whether it impacts on Living Story.

Well, does it?

I like the way eso battles go, with people spreading out rather than stacking. It gives a much more realistic feel to the fighting.

Same applies to the autoattack – I’ve never liked that about GW2. It feels so artificial and out-of-control to have your toon swiping at things all the time. Eso brings a bit of skill to actually selecting and hitting your target. It’s not perfect by any means – but I prefer it like that and the spread-out battles make it easier to choose your target anyway.

Too late for me anyway. ESO comes out in 2 weeks and having just experienced the beta I’ve finished with GW2. I’m just reading the forum because I’m bored – but not bored enough to play WvW.

Okaaaay – you want to WvW?

There’s a menu bar on the top/left of your screen. One of those is an icon of a tower. That will bring up the dialog that offers you a choice of battleground.
(Or just press ‘B’ – that’s the hotkey)

Armour and weapons for WvW (also useable in PvE) can be bought for karma from the karma trader at the back of the Asura gate hall in ‘Citadel’ – that’s the place you port to when you go to your server ‘borderland’, one of the three home borders to the battleground.

You need to look this stuff up on the Wiki, it’s all a bit complicated at first (Google is your best friend)

sirrealist.1360:

“or example when I first switched from the default skill bindings to using the number pad”

How do you do this? You take your hand off WASD or the mouse to hit skills?

With my warrior, I JUST switched to a new keybind, from default to having 6=Sh+E, 7=Sh+A, 8=Sh+S, 9=Sh+D, and 0=Sh+W, where Sh=shift. That way, I don’t even have to take my fingers off WASD to do them. Thoughts?

I don’t use WASD at all. I use the thumb buttons on my Naga Razer for movement.

All the combat and utility skills are re-mapped to keys that fall naturally under my left fingers so I can play without any gross hand movement.
(I even have a little bit of tape stuck on the #1 key so I can feel it with my pinkie – helps me keep my hand position)

It’s seriously poor design. The fact that the cursor vanishes when you mouse-steer is the worst thing about it. If you stand still and cast, it’s not too bad but if you are trying to move at the same time, tough!
The recent change to ground targeting improved matters but it’s still far from perfect.

One thing that helps is an addon called gw2cursor (google it). It overlays a non-vanishing cursor that’s actually big enough to see and that doesn’t disappear under all the particle effects.

Junkpile.7439:

ESO doesn’t have asuras, world and combat system is kind of depressing, armors are depressing and animations are depressing. Probably ok game, but it did feel so depressing.

Yes – I agree. The game doesn’t look very interesting visually. I suppose they have to work with the legacy they have. TBH, WoW wasn’t terribly exciting from that point of view.

Anyway, I haven’t played it yet – but I got my Beta key today, Yaaaaay!

It doesn’t matter. If some people feel it’s OK for them to spend money so they can pretend to themselves they ‘won’. I don’t care. I don’t doubt there’s a market for fake Olympic Medals too.

The point is that the reality failed to live up to the hype again. It did so in the most spectacular way possible. So much so that it felt like a slap in the face even to those who were not on the winning server.
It took a huge chunk out of the morale of everyone involved and WvW hasn’t recovered from it.

To many of us, it isn’t the winning that matters, it is the feeling that we’re taking part in something worthwhile.
Anet decided to value it at a few greens and a bit of account bound crafting material.

Sorry guys but you’re completely misunderstanding the whole point of the game.

The idea is to make money.

Given the B2P model, Anet have to keep finding new punters, not hang on to the old ones. That means they have to keep pumping out new, simple content for the new players – and that means Living Story. (with maybe a new easy-mode WvW map so they can claim innovation there.)

Money spent on fixing bugs or reworking the UI or social interaction stuff is basically money wasted. Especially anything to do with the minority interest PvP mode.

I foresee Pandas not too far down the line.

Why are you asking us?

If you don’t like the game, do something else.

Andrew Clear.1750:

… Plus, if they keep a sub fee, plenty of people who play GW2 will not end up playing ESO.

Not necessarily a bad thing.
Personally, I don’t give a kitten about the sub. Obviously, I’d prefer to pay nothing but there’s a downside to that. I want to play a game populated with people who’re prepared to pay for something half-decent. That usually means on the whole an adult population with a significant disposable income.

I’ll happily pay £10 a month if I don’t have to put up with miss-spelled trash-talk in the chat. In fact – they could double it

A long walk in the fresh air and a cold bath usually does the trick for me.

etiolate.9185:

There are concerns/…snip….
As for ESO, it’s got nice big maps and some cool siege warfare, but the combat is miles behind GW2 and it suffers heavily from skill lag within battles.

The rest of your points are completely valid but that last one is speculation. So far it’s still in beta so you can’t really say if the lag will be worse or better. Certainly they seem to have the right idea. Reducing the number of inter-player calculations by limiting AoE skills and promoting a play style that’s much more spread-out (no stacking) seems to me a step in the right direction.

As to combat. I’ve never been a fan of GW2s combat. The target system is clumsy, especially ground targeting. The centre-screen-aim system that ESO uses is more to my liking.

Anyway, the point is not whether it’s wonderful or mediocre at launch, it’s whether they will listen to feedback from the player base and act on it.

Straegen.2938:

GW2 is now a mature MMO and most players left are pretty hardcore MMO’rs. Games like ESO and Wildstar will siphon off quite a few of our better players and what is left will be a strong core of players who love GW2 warts and all. Some will stay, some will check in from time to time, others will move on forever and some will come in when big patches hit for a few days. This is the cycle of almost every MMO except the behemoth WoW. WoW will fall in similar fashion but it clearly has a much longer gameplay window.

We’re not talking about GW2, we’re talking about WvW.

There’ll always be a steady supply of new punters for any game. GW2 is no different. Nor is WoW.
GW2’s pricing model demands new blood – it’s the only way to make significant revenue (The gem shop is just icing on the cake). Fact is, Anet have pretty well abandoned development of WvW – there’s no percentage in it for them.

The launch of ESO probably won’t affect GW2 too badly overall – it’s only another MMO – not even a particularly good one by reports.
BUT – if the PvP combat system lives up to even half the hype, it will be a serious rival for WvW at just the moment when most of us are up to ‘here’ with Anet.

If they actually listen to feed back from players instead of ignoring us, – well, the sky’s the limit. Anet will either have to completely rework WvW along the lines we’ve been begging for in order to revitalise it, or abandon it to the ghosts.
I predict it will be the latter.

Oozo.7856:

Health is fine (obviously). Magicka and Stamina, I disagree with. Let’s say you run across someone fighting someone else or just coming off of a fight. You shouldn’t be able to see if they are a total sitting duck or not.

Like for example a big green arrow alongside their nameplate that says ‘here → kill this uplevel’?

Why would you pay money to someone just to get through the game faster?
It’s like paying someone else to watch a movie for you.

The whole point of the game is to start with nothing and work your way up to riches.

Yeah, don’t spoil the game for yourself. It’s not like most MMOs where you can’t do anything interesting until you get to 80.
All the fast levelling tricks are really for when you need to level alts.

Also, don’t get hung up on doing quests. Try exploring the other racial zones and cities. You get quite a lot of XP just from doing that.
The main levelling experience is the dynamic events rather than straight quests – they can be a lot of fun.

I’ve got foot controls. A three button system.
They’re a bit clumsy because it takes a lot of pressure to activate. Also they can’t emulate ctl or alt etc.

After a bit of experimenting I found the best use was to use them for targeting functions. next-target and target-nearest-enemy.

I also use a Naga mouse with thumb buttons. I have l/r strafe and forward movement bound to the thumb along with lookback and autorun. Dodge is on the middle button. That puts all my movement on the mouse (except jump – somehow that always feels best on the spacebar) and the keyboard is entirely free for skills.
(I never kbd turn or ever backpedal)

I’ve sent one-off sums of money up to 100g through the mail no problem.

As long as you don’t start sending significant sums to lots of people over a short period there shouldn’t be a problem.

Just recently my guild moved server and our guild leader helped a few people out with the fee from the guild bank. (We’re talking thousands of gold.) He got banned for it at first but it all got sorted out eventually.

Combos aren’t really intended to be single-player ‘tricks’ they are really for group play.

A typical example is the very commonly used swiftness buff you’ll encounter in WvW.

Your commander will call a halt so that everyone can group up then call out ‘static field’. The elementalists in the party will then lay down an AoE static field that you see as a shimmering ring. The commander calls ‘blast it’ and all the guardians and warriors will then do a hammer blow, which is a blast finisher.

That combination of static field and blast finisher grants up to a couple of minutes of 33% increased run speed to everyone in the party.

Similarly, in the middle of a fight, someone will call out ‘water field’ and lay down same on the commander. Everyone with a blast finisher hits that and everyone within range gets a huge heal.

Knowing your combos takes group play to the next level.

Amins.3710:

The assumption on Anet’s part that ‘since we’re F2P, they will come back for expansions, updates and new content’ and however this might be true for PvE’rs, more often than not, once a PvP’er or WvW’er disassociates themselves w/ a particular game, they’re already invested in another one and the likelihood of coming back for WvW is next to ziltch.

Add the fact that it takes a fair bit of practice and muscle memory to get twitch-good at PvP with a particular weapon set and keybindings. Once you’ve dropped a character for even a short while it’s really hard to pick up where you left off.

Whenever I stop playing a game, I never go back.

Novalitus.7382:

Lord Kuru.3685:

A lot of people will leave for ESO. Some will be back. In any case, Anet’s doing a pretty good job of killing WvW with lack of attention towards the game mode — ESO isn’t the biggest problem.

Í’ve played the ESO beta and watched a lot of other reviews but the game is a real disappointment. It’s not living up to the hype.

Nothing ever lives up to hype. That’s by definition. But it doesn’t matter. The problem here is WvW in GW2. It’s gone from being an enjoyable PvP game to a static avoidance of combat.
If ESO offers a functioning combat system (and it does appear to) then I’ll happily hand over the required money-tokens.

Overpowered ACs and supply-draining-door-defending trebs have completely shut down the game.

It’s become unplayable.

I think the problem here is that no-one understands what you mean by the ‘1 skill’

There are weapon skills keybound to the 1-9 buttons on the keyboard by default.
There are movement, targeting and utility skills bound to other keyboard buttons. All of these can be re-bound to other keys.

The mouse buttons left/middle/right control the camera and character steering and also allow forward movement. These can’t be unbound.

Mouse steering is normally done by holding down the mouse left button and moving forward using the keyboard. Or you can hold down both mouse buttons at once, which also moves you forward as you steer.

Personally, I don’t ever turn with the keyboard (or move backwards for that matter). I just strafe and mouseturn.
When I want to attack – I just press the appropriate keyboard button.

The only minor difficulty is that mouse left can also be used to select targets, which can be difficult if you want to turn at the same time, especially with ground targeting – I rarely use it that way in this game, preferring to use tab-targeting. (There is a target nearest enemy function which is unbound by default – that’s extremely handy)

All games have problems of that sort, one way or another – it just isn’t possible to control a humanoid avatar adequately using such simple controls.

Repeat: Crafting is a gold sink.

Anything you can make by crafting can be bought more cheaply on the TP. In general, anything you craft will cost you more in materials than you will ever be able to sell it for.
(Glitches in the market sometimes reverse that temporarily)

Anet have tried to ‘fix’ that by making Ascended stuff untradeable but until you get to endgame that won’t be a concern (and not even then really)

Suxen.8574:

Anet has left the WvW
Anet thinks the future of GW2 is in PVE
at least so it seems

WvW players only have one output: find another game
I like GW2, i love WvW but unchanged …. 20 months is much

I think it’s the pricing model. Anet need new punters every month to provide income. There’s no subscription and the gem shop doesn’t make much. They need to keep opening new markets to survive.

New players means PvE. It especially means Living Story so that newcomers don’t feel they’ve ‘missed it all’. For new punters actually wanting to PvP we have EotM with it’s zero learning curve.

Anet see no need to improve WvW, there’s no profit in it.

Reborn.2934:

…most of the times opponents retreated from the fight even we are outnumbered …

This is the thing. It’s become normal for some servers to actively avoid fighting. If a tower is unoccupied, they’ll take it. If not they’ll move on.
Once they’ve taken something (preferably overnight), they siege it up to the eyeballs.
If their tower or keep is attacked, they’ll pour in from the nearest waypoint and use ACs and door trebs until the wall/door is breached, then waypoint out. (It’s ridiculously difficult to stop people running into a sieged tower – every class has enough stability/invulnerability to survive the few seconds it takes, even solo.)

In open ground any hint of a fight is avoided. If you do manage to catch them by surprise, they scatter and waypoint as soon as they can get out of combat.

EotM is just a PvE gamer’s idea of what PvP should be like.

Have you got your keyboard wrong way up again?

It’s possible to play a high DPS guardian with sceptre/torch and zerker gear. In PVE it’s quite powerful but the slow, telegraphed attack and dependence on static AoE will get you slaughtered in PvP.

You sound like a true WvW player.

Just get in there and have fun. If anybody tells you you shouldn’t be playing with a level 6, tell ’em to spin on it. You paid for the game, now enjoy it.

P.S. Best place to get WvW gear for your level is the Citadel in your server borderland. Look for the karma vendor standing by the laurel vendor at the back of the hall.

Those materials you gather are a good source of cash at your level, not so much the drops.

BUT whatever you sell, make sure to sell it on the TP if you possibly can because those ‘Merchants’ will rip you off good. Some of the things you find and gather are worth a LOT more than they offer.

I remember a guy getting kicked from my guild once for making persistent use of the ‘n’ word. He insisted it was perfectly OK in his language so it should be OK in English.

Even after he was kicked, he continued to protest his innocence and that the rest of us were being totally unreasonable.

Just saying…

Prysin.8542:

depends on their particle effects. ESO has higher requirements then GW2, so even if the AOE size is smaller, depending on particle effects, the client side lag in large encounters (Beta isnt even CLOSE to the final size of the game) will be equally laggy.
Also, it seems you can mod certain parts of the game, client side, allowing for some client side modding in an MMO opens the door to abusing basic mechanics such as FoV, and high density information allowing for small advantages over other players.

Particle effects aren’t really a cause of lag. Even client-side, they don’t involve any significant 3D calculations because they’re just texture effects ‘painted’ over the viewscreen. It’s a bit of visual trickery.

The real issue with AoE is the calculation that has to be performed server-side to determine who gets how much buff, damage or CC from each source. That leads to skill-lag, a much more serious issue. It’s possible to live with a low frame rate (client side lag) but not being able to fire skills, select targets or rubber-banding all over the map make it impossible to play.
From what I’ve seen, these problems seem to have been addressed by avoiding AoE skills in general. I saw very few ‘red circles’ and a lot of single target shots.

As for customising the client: again, it’s possible to design problems out by choice of game mechanics. WoW allowed quite extensive use of macros without these being a real problem. In GW2 even something as simple as increased zoom became a serious issue.

I’m not saying TESO is going to solve all these problems – just that GW2 never really addressed them. It’s as if someone had a ‘vision’ of what they wanted and passed that brief down to the programmers with no regard to practicality. That would square with the fact that all player-based suggestions have been studiously ignored, no matter how simple and obvious.

Prysin.8542:

people seem to forget that ESO IS STILL IN BETA.
THEIR BETA DOESNT EVEN CONTAIN 10% OF DAILY GW2 PLAYERS.

But ofc, this could in no way be the reason why it is lag free. Obviously a low population across a large server park with a low workload can never affect lag or game performance, right, right?

That’s been discussed earlier in the thread. I for one expect lag to be about the same. Although, having said that, the apparently lower level of AoE in the game COULD have a significant effect on that. At this stage we simply don’t know but I doubt it would be worse.

I levelled all my alts in WvW.

There is no way I could bear to plod through all the PvE content over again.

WvW, hammer/staff.

Early in the game you need gold so the best thing to do (if you can’t use it) is to sell it on the TP for the best price you can get.

Later on, you might want to improve your chances of getting the really juicy drops so you want to boost your magic find rating by salvaging greens/blues.

Whether to salvage exotics or rares is always a fine choice but like I said, early on you need cash – so sell ’em.

As for materials from salvaging – these are rarely worth it in my experience unless you REALLY know what to salvage for what material and it’s current value etc.
Crafting itself is a gold sink. Unless you have excess gold and are levelling an alt, it’s best avoided.

insanemaniac.2456:

Contiguous.1345:

The guard defence stuff is just garbage – what really matters is the final cherry on top – Applied Fortitude.

you have that backwards…

How so? Guard attacks are pathetic and they go down in seconds anyway. OTOH 2.5 k extra health against a player is almost godlike, especially if you’re playing one of the low vitality classes.

Heezdedjim.8902:

They really ought to just make it so that you can just grab a set of green gear and go straight into RvR from level 1, and pretend the whole rest of the game doesn’t even exist.

Ahhhh! – that would be my dream-MMO of course

It’s a big-business perception problem. I remember when Star Trek first came out in the 60s (Yes – I am THAT old). The moguls couldn’t believe that there was a market for pure SciFi on TV so we had the spectacle of Captain Twerp every episode snogging some green alien female to give the story ‘love interest’.
That’s the PvE content of MMOs. The bit you have to have otherwise who would buy it?

The guard defence stuff is just garbage – what really matters is the final cherry on top – Applied Fortitude.

Of all the weird and self-destructive things that Anet have done (or not done) to WvW over the past year, this is the weirdest and most self-destructive.

In fact, it’s probably the only thing that has universal, unequivocal agreement from all involved parties (except Anet).

Does anybody think this is something that does NOT deserve the highest possible priority? Come on – don’t be shy.

That reads like a reasonable, critical review, thank you.

It’s about what I would have expected. I haven’t played the beta but I’ve seen the videos. The NPC voice-overs sound seriously cringeworthy – I just hope they can be turned off! Some of the graphics animations looked Hanna-Barbera, especially the main character, which appeared to be suspended in the centre of view, having little relation to the ‘ground’. The playable races look uniformly boring – I’m going to seriously miss my little Asura Warrior.

Anyway, no-one is expecting it to be perfect and whatever people say, large numbers of players has to mean server lag. That’s a network limit – you can’t exceed the speed of light.
I did notice a distinct lack of the visual noise that plagues GW2 – all the particle effects that completely swamp the FOV. And the lack of stacking made it look far more realistic and probably more playable.

As for the PvE being a fail – as far as I’m concerned, that’s a given anyway. PvE is for grinding, that’s all. NPCs are just automatons that repeat the same actions and dialogue over and over. Once you’ve played through the PvE content the first time, any repetition is just pointless. For me, PvP competition is the only reason to play MMOs and it’s the only one I need.

WvW in GW2 has become stale and static. It’s been forced into a dungeon-style model by the developers instead of being allowed to develop from player feedback. The recipe for winning has been reduced to the simplest possible terms. In fact, if servers co-operate, its possible to play the game without any fighting at all and thereby achieve maximum rewards.

Anet have proved their determination to make this game their own, regardless of what players want from it. Bethesda may not be different, but there is a chance they might not be so obdurate and I’m prepared to go with them based on that chance.

P.S. No arrowcarts – are you kidding me? That in itself is enough to sell the game to me.

As far as I’m concerned, the game is over. I’ve done just about everything in the game that holds any interest for me.
I’ve been playing a year, solid and for the last 9 months almost exclusively WvW except when I’ve literally been forced to do something else in order to keep playing WvW.

Now the game has become static with the defensive zerg-model preventing any tactical development. Biggest population wins – that’s it. EotM is more of the same taken one step further: no team play at all.

The developers steadfastly refuse to take on board any suggestions from the player-base. They have an agenda and they’re sticking to it.
I haven’t played now for two weeks and I would never have dreamed I would miss a reset night – but what’s the point?

I’ve pre-ordered my copy of TESO – just have to find something to do for the next 4 weeks.

I don’t think I get a DC more than once a month, if that.
Least of the problems in WvW if you ask me.

Removing the Matchup forum was one of the few things Anet got right.
It was just a platform for Trolls and contributed nothing but bad feeling to the game.

It certainly had nothing to do with the decline of WvW.