Guild Wars 2

You can say what you want but the hard facts are:
a) Noone in TTS or on Deso has access to the game source code or the developers ideas on how the wurm has to be killed.
b) All we could whitness we’re a cause, namely the wurm being lured outside a certain area and an effect that the wurm gets more vulnerable outside of said area.
c) Whether that effect was caused by a bug or by an intended game mechanic wasn’t obvious to anyone because of a) until an ArenaNet developer stepped in and said “This is not how the wurm is meant to be played.” There’s quite a number of encounters where almost the exact same strategy is a neccesity in order to defeat a mob.

And just to avoid confusion, I’m not a member of TTS and I don’t speak for them, neither am I a commander on Desolation. I just happened to be around for the last head-kill to whitness what happened.

Meglobob.8620:

TTS has killed the Wurm!!!

Well done…

But, what are you, the 10th to kill it now?

Also, Anet recently made some changes to the Wurm, I think they fixed some bugs/made it a lot easier.

So all that takes away from your Wurm kills…just saying…

Seriously, there have been around 10 kills so far. Out of over 10.000 attempts (That is, by the way, not an estimation but the actual number of wurm events happening over the past 17 days on 52 servers.)
That means the wurm event was succesful in less than 0.1% of the attempts. We’re I’m coming from that qualifies as special. Every kill counts. Well done TTS.

Pexx.6327:

Jabberwock.9014:

There is nothing inherently wrong with what we did, because it is almost literally the only way to win currently. The coordination needed is still immense.

Almost, but not quite. We’ve gotten really close legitimately several times now, we are just tweaking small things to clench it. The coordination is still immense, though.

I’ve stated before, but all current and future BG (now Attuned [Att] guild) and friends runs will not be using this bug for our attempts.

The real question here is, how are you going to avoid that from happening? The way the wurm is designed at the moment, it only takes one player outside of the box for the wurm to potentially move there. And what are you going to do then? Stop hitting it? I’ve done this for more than 2 weeks now and the way the wurm is designed at the moment, you just can’t be sure whether it was done legitimately.

Bloodstealer.5978:

Nokaru.7831:

CorneliusCoffin.3169:

I never said that leechers contributed to those kills, I’ve said "those ‘leecher guests’ " did. Bloodstealer was very specific on including all people from other servers in his use of the term “leecher”, hence my use of the quotation marks.

This is a problem with semantics. He’s not calling all guests leeches, but rather blaming their failure on guests who leech.

And if you think one or two people can’t make a difference, you clearly haven’t had a Guardian spamming symbols on your raid when you’re trying to Might stack, or blast Water. The issue is also not “a few people”; it’s impossible to get more than 45 per stack on Blackgate main for instance because there’s at least 20 people perpetually AFK to retain their spots. Then there’s the Achievement hunters who will only do what benefits them. (Running kegs, going to the first Wurm that dies, etc.) Finally, you can have actual trolls who get a kick out of the ability to be malicious with no consequences.

Edit: I do want to add though that redesigning some Achievements would make the Jungle Wurm a much more pleasant experience for all. For instance, the number of explosive barrels should be reduced to something small, like 2-5. The Decapitator and Wurmslayer achievements should give players credit for the efforts of their allies.

Excuse me but if your gunna use someone else’s quote in order to reply to them.. I would suggest not changing it and adding other names into the pot.. never in this thread have I talked about leechers across servers etc.. that cookie most definitely belongs to Mr. awesomesauce Phoenixlin… no worries I will ask the mods to do their jobs on Monday morning!

Sorry, this was actually my mistake and not Nokaru’s. I kinda got confused with who posted what and put your name down where it should have said Phoenixlin. I corrected my mistake before you noticed but unfortunately it still shows in Nokaru’s quote of my original post

Nokaru.7831:

This is a problem with semantics. He’s not calling all guests leeches, but rather blaming their failure on guests who leech.

I beg to differ.

Phoenixlin.8624:

Leecher guests = Instead of organizing or participating an organized group in their server, players that guest to another high populated server to use its organization for themselves.

Nokaru.7831:

So when you say these leechers contributes to Desolation’s kill, you’re flat out wrong; they didn’t.

I never said that leechers contributed to those kills, I’ve said "those ‘leecher guests’ " did. Phoenixlin was very specific on including all people from other servers in his use of the term “leecher”, hence my use of the quotation marks.

And I’m totally aware that the event currently fails on Deso because of leechers (meaning, people afking or not gearing up correctly) but I’m in contact with quite a few people who are guesting on Deso at the moment and they’re all bringing their main classes, all geared up, all on TS, all at their keyboard at least half an hour before the event starts. Most of these people have done 3-4 runs a day and more on their main servers for more than a week before guesting on Deso and are now sacrificing one of their two daily guesting options to Deso to -yes – profit from your great organization.
What I’m trying to say with this is, yes I am aware that Deso has had an increase of “destructive” palyers since the wurm kills, but I am willing to bet that at least 50% of those – if not significantly more – are coming from your own server.

Phoenixlin.8624:

Bloodstealer.5978:

I should also say that I almost stopped doing Wurm after 1 week. I still need body achievements (my last one) but my problem is mostly leecher guests in Desolation.

Leecher guests = Instead of organizing or participating an organized group in their server, players that guest to another high populated server to use its organization for themselves.

Keep telling yourself that. There were “leecher guests” around the first and the second time the worm has been killed on Deso. I dare say Deso wouldn’t stand a chance without those “leecher guests.”, because they’re the ones who are actually willing to gear up for the encounter and take all means neccesary for killing the three-headed beast. On the other hand, there was least one failed attempt on Deso yesterday, because a Deso commander (I’m not gonna call names here) was afking on the map with his commander tag still on.
I’m not gonna lie, the organization on Deso is top notch most of the time and I love how it takes my game to the next level, but there’s no way you’d be able to do all that without ambitious players from other servers. Because the truth is, if you’re guesting, it’s because you actually want to get the event done. if you just want to leech, you’re going to do that on your own server.

SirMoogie.9263:

I think the biggest problem with the current system is that overflows are international.

They aren’t international. They are shared among all worlds that are part of the same regional data center. So, all European world’s can share the same overflow, but an North American world can never share the same overflow with a European world.

That’s exactly what international means. They are shared between (inter) nations. The term you mean is global, I think.

Cyanchiv.2583:

Carighan.6758:

Uh, the Great Jungle Worm? I mean sure it has a lot of health, and sometimes it regains some HP from a Husk, but when did you last manage to fail the event.

If you mean the Three-headed Wurm, that’s not content for you.
Single servers are meant to maybe kill 1-2 heads, gaining loot in the process.

It takes properly organized server- or even better alliance-runs to kill it, and the content is designed for them.

I completely agree with this post. I quite enjoy the fact that now content exists in the game that actually requires people to organize in order to complete their challenge. I’m part of a community that does the Tequatl event daily, and have been putting in a solid effort in the recent Wurm event.Tequatl has reached the point, where as long as people are organized, it’s not even challenging anymore. The Wurm has finally offered a real challenge, something that requires skill and competence from all players in order to be successful.

I completely agree that it could be fun and challenging to have content that needs 120+ people to get organized, but then you can’t do it in open world and put a hard cap of 150 people on the maps. There are just too many factors other than players skill and willingness that play into these encounters at the moment for them to be enjoyable.

skullfaerie.7203:

Genuine Question: Why don’t the people complaining 24/7 that content x is “too hard” for them pour that energy into improving their gameplay, organising their server (or cross-server if they think population is a problem), figuring out strategies etc- because if you did that instead of wasting time complaining that you haven’t done it yet, eventually you’d get it done.

If you don’t want to do that, this is a game, and it does not punish you for it. You are free to ignore such content and play content that you do enjoy.

Genuine Answer: Because we simply don’t have the tools in game to do that. I mean, a lot of servers are actually battling with overflows rather than not having the popularity. There’s hardly any chance to get 150 coordinated people. On main servers you’re battling with afk-residents, on the overflows you’re battling with randoms from different servers. The strategies to kill the wurm are pretty much known by now. The reasons why the wurms aren’t slayn on a regular basis by now are manifold, but lack of effort and organisation are certainly not among them.

EDIT: Also, the 2 hour spawn timer gives us plenty of time to complain, since most who are doing the wurm are not doing anything else at the moment

Melfice.5091:

I guess you are either from BG, Deso or TxS. With communities as big as these ones the Wurms (and Tequatl) are actually fun to do, and hard but not impossible. Now try to immagine yourself on literally every other server, where there aren’t even close to enough people doing the Wurms.

Oh and lets not ignore all the faults the fight has, like open world content where a single person can fail it is an automatic fail in design in my book, that kitten should be instanced

The only thing you got wrong in there is the assumption that it’s a fun event in big communities. I’m currently guesting on Deso and it’s a drag. We’re hardly ever getting into the head phase because it’s depending on so many little things (how many people are afk, how the people split up between the teams, how many people are actually listening to the commanders etc.)
TxS, as far as I know, has completely given up on the wurm after their first kill, saying something along the lines of “glad, we’re done with this.”

I have to say I kinda feel the same way. I still have some spirit in me to finally kill that stupid thing, but I don’t think this is content I will be coming back to after that.

PcGamer.1834:

We did one zerg-tactic too, you can see the result down there.

After the three escort events we port to the west-wurm and needed 4 dmg-phases with ~130 people to get it down to 3%-5%.
Then we did the wurm in the middle collectet the diffrent colors and hit him down to 10%. All fine!

Now was the third turn. You can the the suprise at the screen shot

From the file dirctory that picture was saved in, i take it you’re male and single?

SirMoogie.9263:

laokoko.7403:

Most people are probably just guesting. The overflow are doing much better compare to some of the home server.

I think technology for single shard with district kind of like that in GW1 is a good idea. But I’m not sure how difficult it is to implement. And server transfer is one of the way Anet makes money. I’m not sure Anet would do that.

GW 2 has this. Most people who suggest the GW 1 system are under the impression that it is vastly different in GW 2. It really isn’t.

In GW 1 you had a set of named districts. These districts had a capacity that when reached a copy of them was created that also had a capacity. When that capacity was reached another copy was created. Players could not switch to a district that was full, they could only switch to another named district (or one of its copies) that isn’t.

In GW 2 you have a set of named zones in worlds. These zones have a capacity that when reached a copy of them is created that also has a capacity called overflows. When that capacity is reached another copy is created. Players can not switch to a zone that is full, they can only switch to another named zone in a world (or one of its copies) that isn’t.

The only difference between the setups is interface. In GW 1 it was painless to switch to an overflow district or other named district. In GW 2 to switch to another named zone you have to log out, guest (which you’re limited in doing), and then log in. If you want to switch to a specific overflow you need to know someone in that overflow, and “Join in” their overflow. Arena Net borrowed their district technology from GW and applied it to zones. They just changed a few rules on managing them.

One possibly fix that might please people is listing the overflows, assigning each a visible identifier, and letting people join them through a menu. However, this list might be huge considering GW 2’s population and might need a search function. Even then, will it really help solve the problems players are having with grouping for empty events? Creating underflows might be a better solution though that has its own problems… such as who’s version of the zone do you copy the state of (if you even bother copying the state).

I’m not familiar with how the system worked in GW1 but from what you’re describing it sounds like the copies of the districts were specific to the respective main server, which the overflows in GW2 currently aren’t. I think the biggest problem with the current system is that overflows are international. We’ve been organizing wurm runs on Elona Reach for days on overflows now (to keep people who are afk-ing from blocking server spots and to incentivise people to join TeamSpeak, if only for a taxi), but a soon as you are on an overflow, you will inevitably get at least 10 people from different servers, who don’t neccesarily speak your language, don’t understand what they’re supposed to do and consequently cause the event to fail.

I think it would help tremendously if the overflows were at least regionalized. It doesn’t neccesarily have to be one overflow for one main server, but if you have a German, Spanish or French speaking main server, there should be some mechanism to ensure that the overflows get filled with people speaking the same language. Otherwise all attempts at organizing these events are in vain.

Thobek.1730:

CorneliusCoffin.3169:

I’m glad you mention Tolkien with his evil overlord, who’s almost indefeatable, except for the fact that he wears his one ring of power over, instead of under his armor. And the giant, quasi-omniscient eye that this evil overlord later becomes, which has the capability to command giant orc-armies, yet for some reason leaves the only path to its destruction, that is the way up to Mount Doom, where the one ring was forged, completely ungarded.

unguarded? Firstly the only way in was either through a massive guarded gate or a huge fortress. They had to use Gollum to show them a hidden entrance also guarded by a giant spider which beyond that was another fortress. Even then the entire plains of mordor was filled with camps of Orcs. Unguarded? The entire region was basically filled with guards.

You’re talking about Mordor. I was refering to Mount Doom specifically, which for some odd reason seems to be the most neglected place in all of eastern middle earth, despite being the only place where the one ring can be destroyed.

DarksunG.9537:

CorneliusCoffin.3169:

darkace.8925:

CorneliusCoffin.3169:

I’m glad you mention Tolkien with his evil overlord, who’s almost indefeatable, except for the fact that he wears his one ring of power over, instead of under his armor. And the giant, quasi-omniscient eye that this evil overlord later becomes, which has the capability to command giant orc-armies, yet for some reason leaves the only path to its destruction, that is the way up to Mount Doom, where the one ring was forged, completely ungarded.

Yes, I am in fact familiar with the concept of suspension of disbelieve. That’s why I mentioned all those things. If you can suspend your disbelive so much that you accept ogres, giants, dragons etc, I don’t see why you can’t accept a villain whose actually really clever and really powerful.

That you’re even bothering to argue that Guild Wars 2’s Scarlet Briar is as well-developed as Lord of the Rings’ Sauron shows a lack of literary sophistication on your part. Please don’t take that as an insult; some people like Saving Private Ryan and Mozart, some people like Transformers and Justin Bieber.

There’s nothing wrong with liking Transformers and Justin Bieber. But you lose us when you start trying to convince us Transformers is just as well-written and directed as Saving Private Ryan or that Justin Bieber has just as much musical talent as Mozart did.

Nice try. I almost fell for your trap there, but I’m not going to get down to that level. Please just re-read what I have written, especially what I did and didn’t claim in my post and correct your post accordingly. Maybe after you’ve learned to do that, we can discuss my literary sophistication.

Nah, he explained the flaw of your comparison perfectly.
Pretty much all of your reasoning shows any ability to distinguish between what makes something work better & what makes it broken. I myself can admit that I like the movie The Story of Ricky. But to say that it is of the same caliber or shows the same grasp of story telling, character development, setting & consistency as say, Blade Runner, is just being dishonest.
Story of Ricky is a crap movie, but I like it. Same can be said of Scarlet for some people. But trying to rationalize Scarlet because “you can accept apples, why not oranges?” doesn’t work. None of you points allows for any distinction between anything. Essentially you’re saying we should accept Scarlet because she can’t be broken.

Well, I never made the comparison between Tolkien and GW2 in the first place. That comparison came from him and I was just trying to show that even Tolkien’s admittetly great character-crafting skill had its flaws and requires suspension of disbelieve.
That being said, I get your point of criticism. Maybe I was too sarcastic or I wasn’t clear enough, but I never intended to say that Scarlet can’t be broken. I know she can be broken and I know that she can break lore. What I meant to say is that so far she didn’t despite people constantly claiming otherwise. And that I can’t understand how most of people’s hate is not based on knowledge but on uncertainty, about her intentions, about her influence, about her methods, rather than on facts. People are passing judgements on the character, without having heared the full story, because for some reason, everyone is expecting ArenaNet to screw things up.

Again, I’m not saying there’s no chance that we’re all going to be disappointed. But I can’t understand the amount of disapproval that’s been spread based on the fact that we’re not fully in the picture but the expactancy that things will not be explained in the end.

darkace.8925:

CorneliusCoffin.3169:

I’m glad you mention Tolkien with his evil overlord, who’s almost indefeatable, except for the fact that he wears his one ring of power over, instead of under his armor. And the giant, quasi-omniscient eye that this evil overlord later becomes, which has the capability to command giant orc-armies, yet for some reason leaves the only path to its destruction, that is the way up to Mount Doom, where the one ring was forged, completely ungarded.

Yes, I am in fact familiar with the concept of suspension of disbelieve. That’s why I mentioned all those things. If you can suspend your disbelive so much that you accept ogres, giants, dragons etc, I don’t see why you can’t accept a villain whose actually really clever and really powerful.

That you’re even bothering to argue that Guild Wars 2’s Scarlet Briar is as well-developed as Lord of the Rings’ Sauron shows a lack of literary sophistication on your part. Please don’t take that as an insult; some people like Saving Private Ryan and Mozart, some people like Transformers and Justin Bieber.

There’s nothing wrong with liking Transformers and Justin Bieber. But you lose us when you start trying to convince us Transformers is just as well-written and directed as Saving Private Ryan or that Justin Bieber has just as much musical talent as Mozart did.

Nice try. I almost fell for your trap there, but I’m not going to get down to that level. Please just re-read what I have written, especially what I did and didn’t claim in my post and correct your post accordingly. Maybe after you’ve learned to do that, we can discuss my literary sophistication.

darkace.8925:

CorneliusCoffin.3169:

3.) The argument that Scarlet’s over-the-top superpowers and her whole demeanor are unrealistic.

I am sorry, but I have to fight this one with sarcasm and I apologize in advance, but:
Really?
In a world where centaurs, trolls and giants live, where dragons spawn to spread magic and bring the dead back to life, where gods and demigods used to walk amongst mortals, an insane, superpowered plant-person is unrealistic? That’s where you draw the line? Really?

Yes, really. Trolls, giants, dragons, demigods…these are all present in Tolkien’s world. Yet his villains are well crafted and believable, and they don’t shatter the suspension of disbelief. Are familiar with that term…“suspension of disbelief”?

The presence of fictional elements, particularly those found within the fantasy and sci-fi genres, is obviously unrealistic. But if handled deftly, suspension of disbelief – the ability to set aside the fact that none of what you’re seeing is realistic – can allow us to enjoy the plot or setting nonetheless. Poorly handled, and these fictional elements destroy any chance of suspension of disbelief.

I’m glad you mention Tolkien with his evil overlord, who’s almost indefeatable, except for the fact that he wears his one ring of power over, instead of under his armor. And the giant, quasi-omniscient eye that this evil overlord later becomes, which has the capability to command giant orc-armies, yet for some reason leaves the only path to its destruction, that is the way up to Mount Doom, where the one ring was forged, completely ungarded.

Yes, I am in fact familiar with the concept of suspension of disbelieve. That’s why I mentioned all those things. If you can suspend your disbelive so much that you accept ogres, giants, dragons etc, I don’t see why you can’t accept a villain whose actually really clever and really powerful.

Here’s what I don’t understand about the Scarlet criticism:

1.) The argument that Scarlet breaks lore.

I’ve seen this reiterrated over and over again, to a point where I’m thinking that people are just taking over points from other players to justify their hatred for Scarlet, without thinking about them for themselves. It’s nonsense. Scarlet didn’t break any lore. True, she bent lore on numerous occasion to an extend where you would feel that it would break (the most cited example is, when she got the krait into an alliance), but whenever this happens there’s usually a very strong motivation given (e.g. the promissed resurection of the krait prophet).
And even if Scarlet DID break lore, I don’t really see the problem. Since lore itself is fictional, it’s essentially at the author’s mercy. Much of what we think we know about the lore, we actually just believe to know. Apart from events where the player was present in person, all of the lore is given to us by narrators (mostly NPCs, but also narrators in books or short stories) over whose credibility we can pass no judgement at the time of narration. So if that lore gets “broken” at some time in the future, it probably wasn’t correct to start with.

2.) The argument that Scarlets’ motives are unrealistic/stupid/illogic etc.

It’s really surprising to see how many members of this forum seem to work at ArenaNet and absolutely, one-hundred percent know the outcome of the Living Story. Since I don’t have that benefit (although, if you need staff members, ANet, hook me up) I honestly have to say that I can’t reliably tell Scarlet’s motives yet. Sure, I’m speculating on how the story is going to end and what her motives for all the madness might be, but as of yet, I’m pretty much left in the dark. You can’t judge the end of a story that hasn’t been fully told yet and expected to be taken serious.

3.) The argument that Scarlet’s over-the-top superpowers and her whole demeanor are unrealistic.

I am sorry, but I have to fight this one with sarcasm and I apologize in advance, but:
Really?
In a world where centaurs, trolls and giants live, where dragons spawn to spread magic and bring the dead back to life, where gods and demigods used to walk amongst mortals, an insane, superpowered plant-person is unrealistic? That’s where you draw the line? Really?

I’m also pretty sure that if someone besides desolation had killed the wurms, you’d read about it on the forums.

Ayrilana.1396:

xarallei.4279:

That’s weird. I’ve never seen the npc’s on the plats. If that’s true, I agree they should not be there.

Same. I have never seen them on the platforms. That’s why I think it’s a bug that they’re there in the first place. I have all NPC tags set to be visible so it’d be hard to miss them the 15+ times that I have done this.

tbh, I’ve only ever seen them when they were on my own platform. Never seen them on another platform.

Ayrilana.1396:

They don’t. It was likely a bug or something.

Actually, they do.

But since there’s only one NPC per lane, it’s likely that only one platform gets the npc. I have at least seen Marjory and Braham on there. Never had the described problem though.

Meglobob.8620:

Paradox.5498:

After a portal phase, you get portal sickness which prevents you from entering another portal soon. With the current duration of portal sickness, you don’t skip 1 lane but 2 before you enter another portal. So, if you start in lane 1, you can enter a portal again when the event in lane 4 starts. There’s no use getting to lane 3.

Yes, I just found that out…

You can run a maxium of 3 wardens, I just ran 2—>5—>2, killed 2 out of 3 of those, just failed 1st was only 1 left standing and just ran out of time.

It does help a lot if you have runners who are willing to do upto 3 wardens if your short on numbers.

You only need about 10 defenders per lane to defend portal, so excess can run and help other lanes with wardens.

Again, you can’t do 2 – 5 – 2, because there’s only 1 lane between 5 and 2 (being lane 1). 2 – 5 – 3 would be a viable option.

Personally, I never understood why you would start lanes 1 and 2 with 25 people. The bosses during the first 2 chains are easy enough to be done with 4 people on each platform max (i.e. 20 people per lane). I wish there was a way to condition people to stack to lane 5 as crayz as they stack to lane 1 and 2 at the moment.

To be honest, I don’t see the “open world” as the main problem with the wurm. Correct me if I’m wrong, but from what I’ve seen, all the guilds who are genuinely trying to beat the worm are doing so on their “private” overflows anyway, i.e. they get into an overflow and invite only guild members. The real problem is the hard cap. That hard cap is neccesary, though. Everyone who’s been around for the first Southsun/Karka-Champion Event knows that. If you don’t have a hard cap, the game turns into a slide show.

Elona Reach just did it.

I also liked the story instance, but I think it also demonstrates a severe problem I’ve had with the pacing of the Living World. The current Living Story-arc has been going on for almost a year now (The Flame and Frost prelude went live on January 28th, 2013).
And here’s this lovely little instance that tells us all we need to know about the current state of affairs, everything that’s happened so far, and how everyone involved feels about it in less than 10 minutes. In short, there’s a story that takes 10 minutes to tell, stretched out over almost a year, delivered in 2 week intervals. And there’s the reason why most people aren’t really caught up in the story.

I actually think it’s cool as it is right now.
A lotof people have been complaining that those release previews were giving away too much right from the start. Sometimes, especially when the updates concerned gameplay, the preview was understandable, but since, as I understand it, this next update will be purely around story, I think we can all do with just a teaser trailer.

Crazy, though, is a very human concept. It signifies a certain deviation from a social norm. This presupposes that there’s a generally accepted pattern of “normality” amongst the society. Although Sylvari tend to immitate human behaviour (and other things), it is by no means inherent to them. Therefore I’d be careful to judge Scarlet Briar’s sanity according to human standards. For all we know, she saw incredible things. However crazy it seems to us, for a Sylvari she might still be acting quite rationally.

The one thing that needs to be done as soon as possible is some kind of counter-measure against ever increasing precursor prices.
I remember an official ArenaNet statement that came after a row of complaints over exploding prices basically, saying that they’d monitor the prices closely and take action as they deem fit. That was back in the days, when Dusk went for about 250 gold. Now, more than a year later, Dusk is on the TP for 800+ gold and nothing has been done against it.
I don’t expect it to happen in the next patch, but it really needs to happen sooner, rather than later.

Immensus.9732:

yeah exactly skill progression is what we want, and any kind of progression that does not require grind or so much grind as the current ascended gear require`s. And for that let me give a definition to grind, grind is something you do again and again to make some wealth or farm some crafting materials, grinding itself is not bad, the fact that it gets boring is, and thats one reason why theres so much rage about ascended because currently there are not many efficient ways to get ascended except grinding. That been said progresion in this game is its weak point for many reasons and thats what Devs are trying to implement in the game with a more proper and entertaining way and are looking for ideas through CDI

^

I disagree with that.
Except for legendaries maybe, the game doesn’t require you to grind for anything. The reason why people feel the need to grind is because they usually want their ascended gear/weapons asap. That being said, there’s usually only ever one most effective way of accumulating any given material needed for an item. That’s not the devs fault, it just lies in the nature of things. You just can’t balance everything so that it all distributes the same amount of gold, t6 materials, t7 materials and so on. Once people have figured out that fastest way to “grind” for their material, they will do so. Is that the only way to get to your ascended weapon though? Most definitely not. Just take your time. Play the game as you like it, you’ll end up with ascended gear eventually. It’ll just take a while longer.

The post above pretty much explains it all. There is a way to make it, even if you’re jumping in a large group.
The only criticism I have about the gifts is that they don’t all explode once the first explosion has been triggered. Sometimes the first group makes it to the top so fast that more than half of the presents remain, at which point you’ll see a large crowd of people waiting around the campfire for ‘that one idiot’ who thinks he’s gonna make it and drop to his inevitable death.

Belenwyn.8674:

I guess we will hear from Scarlet at December 24th – just in time to ruin Christmas/Wintersday

Call me nuts, but I’d love that. Scarlett coming in on christmas eve or during the christmas days and spoiling it for everyone.
Only problem I see is that there will be significantly less players during these days, so the chances that most players won’t even realize it until after christmas is quite high.

Dark Adonis.5096:

are you guys seriously giving us the same old crap AGAIN?!? .. i was so excited for halloween and very let down that you just reused last years boring crap… no wonder you guys are losing players like crazy

In all fairness, though, this has been announced a while ago. They are bringing back all the holiday events so that the creative staff can go on an extended vacation focus their energy on bigger Living Story content. I just hope we’ll get to see some of that stuff next year, because so far all the LS updates were of the same scale or smaller than the content that was put out last year when Wintersday and Halloween were still new.

After you have beaten the story mission, the Thaumanova fractal becomes part of the fractal rotation, meaning there’s a chance you stumble upon it as the third regular fractal.

deepwinter.9015:

Listen closely; this is the important part:
We do not like Scarlet Briar!

If I were a writer at ArenaNet, I’d really be congratulating myself on a job well done.
People claim that Scarlet is poorly written, but the truth is that over the past decades, thanks largely to Hollywood writing, we’ve become far to accustomed to sympathetic villains. Antagonists, who are often the antithesis of the hero, troubled by deep psychological trauma, whose actions are to a certain degree understandable or at leat comprehensible to the reader or viewer. This developement has lately reached a point, where the “gentleman” villains often become the protagonists themselves (e.g. Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Pirates of the Carribean etc.)
Scarlet isn’t that. She isn’t likeable, her actions aren’t comprehensible, she’s annoying because she meddles with everything and people are spewing venom and bile because they don’t like her.
Here’s an update: You are not supposed to like the villain. You’re supposed to hate the villain, hate what they do, hate that you don’t understand why or how they’re doing it and get so emotional that you call for their early demise.
Judging from the majority of the reactions on these forums here, I think ANet have done a pretty good job with achieving that.
Kudos.

EDIT: I don’t want to say this is the case everyone. I can tell from reactions to this thread that there are also people who see right through what is actually happening here. But there are far more people on these boards who claim to be disinterested in the Scarlet story-arc, yet the emotionality in which their posts are usually written reveals that this couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Durzlla.6295:

3) i have a feeling she was there naturally, she wouldn’t (i hope so at least) have access to fractal technology, so i have a feeling we were just witnessing a past event she was at, i mean Dessa and Kiel were both there guarding the equipment so there was no tampering without us learning about it. Unless Kiel is in league with scarlet (unlikely).

The Thaumanova fractal isn’t just the story instance but also appears in the normal fractal rotation. Every time you get that fractal, Scarlet appears, which strongly suggests that she is part of that “history” and was physically there when the reactor exploded. If she had just found a way to enter the fractals like the consortium did and was just there to whitness the explosion, there’d be no logical explanation for her re-appearance during successive runs.

Sampo.9678:

in the story you only had to do 2 objectives
in the fractals explorable however we had to finish 3.
So we had to do the fire room as well

I can not confirm this. I was doing this in the fractals explorable and we did not have to do the cooling chamber to complete the fractal.

That looks like Consortium Karka alliance to me.

Not sure if this is working as intended, but appearantly you can right out ignore the cooling room (meaning, you can also ignore the subject 6 champ).
As soon as you’ve completed the room with the lightning canons, the teleport to the instability boss-champ gets activated and you can go there. All else seems to be optional.

magic fly.2041:

CorneliusCoffin.3169:

Despite the voting I’m still pretty sure that we won’t have truly branching storylines as this would require the dedication of two out of four Living World Teams to a single update (one for the Evon storylinbe, one for the Kiel storyline). This would also mean that the work of one of the dev-teams would never get published which would essentially be a terrible waster of resources.
I think it’s more likely that we’re either going to get a very generic storyline, where the winner/loser of the election are interchangeable placeholders or the election is going to get manipulated in one way or another so that our vote doesn’t really count.
Either way, I’m pretty sure they have a fixed storyline that will not be influenced by who wins the election.

My guess is that whatever storyline is affected by them is a good ways down the road in order to give them time to adjust it as necessary while some other event happens.

Yeah, that’s possible, still there’s got to be some solution to the election. You can’t realistically go and say: “Thanks for voting, we’ll give you the results in four months time” So I’m thinking there’s going to be a generic storyline first and it’s probably going to influence events, like you said, a little down the road.

Despite the voting I’m still pretty sure that we won’t have truly branching storylines as this would require the dedication of two out of four Living World Teams to a single update (one for the Evon storylinbe, one for the Kiel storyline). This would also mean that the work of one of the dev-teams would never get published which would essentially be a terrible waster of resources.
I think it’s more likely that we’re either going to get a very generic storyline, where the winner/loser of the election are interchangeable placeholders or the election is going to get manipulated in one way or another so that our vote doesn’t really count.
Either way, I’m pretty sure they have a fixed storyline that will not be influenced by who wins the election.

lordkrall.7241:

draxynnic.3719:

All of my orbs come from dailies, achievement chests, personal story rewards, and other sources that have nothing to do with the gem store.

And yet they are still goods made available (and possible even made) by Evon.

A Charr with an interest in reviving? Hear, hear…

Anakita Snakecharm.4360:

CorneliusCoffin.3169:

So in other words, you feel like helping Kiel to prevent Lion’s Arch from getting destructed after the consortium stirred up the karka, sink the settler contracts on Southsun and capture Mai Trin and strike against the aetherblades was more out of neccesity than your charatcers deep personal conviction? The Canach situation may have been a different thing, but we’ve helped Kiel numerous times now and more often than not it felt like we did it because it was the right thing to do and not because it was the less bad alternative.

Um… no, when I said Southsun I meant Southsun, not everything ever.

It was just an example of why a character might do something not totally representative of his/her own opinions and desires.

My character doesn’t necessary disagree with Kiel about every issue, either. Again, that more-than-one-dimension thing.

Because of the Southsun incident, though, Kiel has very much lost my character’s trust. She may win it back at some point, but that hasn’t happened yet.

Okay, there’s the leeway you’ve been talking about and i can accept that as part of one’s own personal interpretation of the character. Still, none of these options makes for a good motiviation to support Evan Gnashblade in an election. If your character chooses not to fully trust Ellen Kiel, it shows that he/she is inquisitive and wants to know about a candidates backgorund. Then what makes you vote for Evon Gnashblade, whom we know nothing about, other than that he runs the single most captialistic company in Tyria, an instituiton that has been likened to the consortium on various occasions and his employees describe him as a “big, old, grumpy cat” (Sareb in the BLTC headquarters)?

Anakita Snakecharm.4360:

In the real world, I often have to make decisions that I wouldn’t make in an ideal world. My actions don’t always exactly match up to my internal monologue because I’m influenced by external as well as internal factors. That’s part of being a three-dimensional human being.

Likewise, my character may feel it is necessarily to go along with events she is not in full agreement with (like helping Kiel at Southsun) because circumstances dictate it and the alternative would be worse. I really don’t see any inconsistency there, personally. Not every possible mindset would fit every scenario, but there’s a fair bit of leeway.

To use the Southsun example again: My character helped Kiel, in my view, not because she likes Kiel or thinks Kiel made good decisions in that situation, but because letting the refugees suffer just to spite Kiel for being a hypocrite would be kind of awful too.

So in other words, you feel like helping Kiel to prevent Lion’s Arch from getting destructed after the consortium stirred up the karka, sink the settler contracts on Southsun and capture Mai Trin and strike against the aetherblades was more out of neccesity than your charatcers deep personal conviction? The Canach situation may have been a different thing, but we’ve helped Kiel numerous times now and more often than not it felt like we did it because it was the right thing to do and not because it was the less bad alternative.

Anakita Snakecharm.4360:

CorneliusCoffin.3169:

What you are saying about kiel there may be true, but the other side of that coin is that every single time she did something that made her feel self-righteous, (for lack of a better term) the PC was there assisting her as her henchman.
Whether you like Kiel or not is part of your personal assesment, it does, however, not seem to reflect the cognition of the character we’re playing. At least I couldn’t see an indication of it so far.
The entire narrative of the game so far has moved in a very tolkien-esque fantasy-world of light and shadow. There’s either bad or good, no real grey areas (which is why Canach, for example, ended up in prison, instead of becoming Tyrias version of Edward Snowden.) And that’s where I have to situate the character that I’m playing. He or she doesn’t go so far as to evaluate who would be the better suited candidate for the ship’s council from a political or economical standpoint. Or at least he didn’t in the past. If he’d take those aspects into consideration all of a sudden, I would expect to be given a really, really strong motivation for him to do it. Otherwise it’s just inconsistent narration that violates my perception of the character according to the possible world theory.

That’s totally valid take on the story… but also a totally different explanation than what you originally said. What you originally said was pretty accusatory.

Other players have very different views on the situation based on how we view the story from our own lens – neither is better or worse, and the fact that other people view the story and characters differently than you do doesn’t mean we’re less influenced by the story and characters or are more focused on pure game mechanics.

I tend to view events through who I know my character is, rather than having events dictate my character’s personality and opinions. That’s just preference, though, not some sort of universal mandate.

That accusation in my first post was not meant to be general, it was more an observation I made in this thread that a lot of people seem to be more interested in who’s going to reduce their travel costs or which dungeon is going to end up in the fractals than thinking about what this all means for the story. And to be fair, I wouldn’t even blame the players for that, because the story bits seemed to be pretty much secondary in many of the recent updates (I’ve read in another post just now that some people weren’t even sure whether there was a plot point in the BotFW update at all and they’re now suprised to be confronted with the election scenario).

And I really understand and appreciate the position that you are coming from. You take up a stance that is more a roleplaying perspective on the game, which lets you envision your own character in a way you like it, in opposition to how the game tells you what they are like.
But that creates a problem for the story. If you’re trying to tell a story, you have to make sure that the characters (and in the living story the PC is a character) have a consistent mindset, so that their actions have meaning. If you’re going to say that the player can inscribe each and every possible mindest to a character, that means their motivations for their actions and as a consequence their actions will become random and therefore meaningless for the story, unless of course it’s your own story that you are trying to tell (in which case of course the protagonist will have a fixed mindset again, namely the one that you have inscribed to him).
And that’s what i mean when I say if Evon wins this election, the Living Story has failed. I can understand that it might be seen as an approach to give players more control over the mindset of their character, but at that point it’s also going to get inconsistent and we’ll start to tell our own story instead of being told the story by ANet.

Hermes.7014:

Kareth.6572:

Hermes.7014:

Esplen.3940:

Hermes.7014:

Really, five-hundred gems?! To me these things aren’t worth any more than 50.

Then you shouldn’t buy them.

Yeah, like hell I’m going to. I’d rather use those gems to buy Transmutation Crystals.

Problems of kids these days…

lol what? If you want to spend over 17 gold for a useless toy then go ahead. I just said I wasn’t going to do that.

I think the question raised here is rather, why are you telling us this?

Minos.3450:

That’s simply not true. I’m a huge lore fan in GW2 and in games in general and I have followed thoroughly the whole living story up to now. Yet, I’m going to vote for Evon for several reasons, none of them related to gameplay.
First, I don’t really like Kiel in general, she suffers from the same syndrom than Kormir or trahearne in the way she steals attention from the PC by cornering all the benefits from our actions. Moreover, her whole story with canach was imo too much Manichean : on one hand she want to stop canach action because he make innocents suffer to get to his ends but on the other hand she does the same in the end (that’s not like the ship she made exploding was empty…).

What you are saying about kiel there may be true, but the other side of that coin is that every single time she did something that made her feel self-righteous, (for lack of a better term) the PC was there assisting her as her henchman.
Whether you like Kiel or not is part of your personal assesment, it does, however, not seem to reflect the cognition of the character we’re playing. At least I couldn’t see an indication of it so far.
The entire narrative of the game so far has moved in a very tolkien-esque fantasy-world of light and shadow. There’s either bad or good, no real grey areas (which is why Canach, for example, ended up in prison, instead of becoming Tyrias version of Edward Snowden.) And that’s where I have to situate the character that I’m playing. He or she doesn’t go so far as to evaluate who would be the better suited candidate for the ship’s council from a political or economical standpoint. Or at least he didn’t in the past. If he’d take those aspects into consideration all of a sudden, I would expect to be given a really, really strong motivation for him to do it. Otherwise it’s just inconsistent narration that violates my perception of the character according to the possible world theory.

That vote Kiel vs Gnashblade is essentially going to be a vote on whether the players value story over gameplay.
If you have followed the storyline and are interested in it, there is no way you could possibly endorse Evon Gnashblade in any way (the terms ‘ludonarrative dissonance’ keep revolving in my mind).
However, as is appearant form this thread, many people seem to care more for the impact their decision is going to have for their gameplay than for how much sense it makes in light of the development of the fictional universe they are moving in.
In my eyes, if Evon Gnashblade wins this election, then the living story and the living world have failed.

EDIT: That is of course, unless they give us a very strong reason not to vote for Ellen Kiel in the coming days, which I doubt.

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

Her name is Kiel, you guys, not Keil.
Same as Tolkien. Oh, and thief.

e_e

That rule is so not applicable for proper nouns (which Kiel is.)
It’s an English language rule, however proper nouns are very often loan words.
In this case, Kiel is likely the German version of the nautical term “keel”. There is a German word Keil, however, which is the German word for wedge.

Sometimes when I’m doing a series of lightning jumps I think it registers as falling and resets me at the last checkpoint. Does anyone else have that issue?

Qin.7325:

found a video of some mesmers portaling each other to get to the very top
mentioned an invisible barrier and emptiness

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tfC0jr20QU

Whatever the achievment says: This is the best. dive. ever.