Guild Wars 2

I want Robert to post again with a Video of him doing the event “The intended way”.

Until then I am done with GW2. First time since launch i am loading up League of Legends to play on my off hours from work. Your game is now sitting next to SWTOR on my shelf until you figure out that you made a massively bad move with this patch.

vicwolf.7862:

What playtesters? You think this patch was playtested?

A +1 to you sir.

2 – You want Flame Legion gear to feel like a REWARD. Well lets see…now you have an impossible 2nd chain, that gives little to know gold in return after the obnoxious amount of repair bills, less than 5% chance for Rare drops and even lower for Exotic drops in chests from bosses, No token increase per completely a 3 times as hard / long instance to manage the fact that it takes 90+ runs to get Flame Legion gear. And a segregated group of players of those who got to 80 within 2 weeks and farmed it and those who will never obtain it in its current form.

How should you of handled this? You bite the bullet and you learn from this…you don’t release instances / content without much PTR/BETA testing so you have it perfectly tuned by release. You should of left Flame Legion as it was let everyone use it as their starting instance to get gear because it was already being used by most people for that. This was your meal ticket to get people involved in Dungeons at an entry level to the game, it was your meal ticket to get people into WvW and playing your core gameplay mechanic, and it was your meal ticket to then release harder content down the road knowing that people now got the jist of the Dungeon raiding runs.

What is now the issue is you have made it so that new 80s have no where to grind gold, no where to grind mats, no where to get dungeon gear easily and efficiently because even at a casual level (99% of the playerbase) no one has a ton of time to run 90+ runs of the same instance. YOU NEED TO REVERT CoF IMMEDIATELY. You have your largest competitor about to release a new expansion and you’ve ALIENATED and peaved off your core audience (Casuals) by this change.

3 – As was stated as an immediate reply, there was absolutely no testing with this change and you can’t even deny there wasn’t. This was a “This sounds harder, click click, coded. That should fix those silly grinders.” change.

I am with the others, please get a group of Developers/Designers together in entry level 70 greens/blues and try to run the Magg event your way of intention which is killing the mobs as you cross the lava pit with Magg and then Try in greens/blues to face tank / kill the Kiting event mobs. Video tape it with Fraps and put it on the GW2 Youtube page if you feel that it is anywhere near doable.

What you are going to find is it is IMPOSSIBLE and proper “MMO” testing environments would of told you this IMMEDIATELY instead you released content in a hot fix on a whim with absolutely no notice / patch notes / or care of the resulting outcome.

Test this in house and tell me it doesn’t need to be re-tuned. And if it stays as is I can guarantee in todays MMO market next Tuesday when a ton of your casual players leave for WoW because of the CM / CoF buffs that the person who will be getting a knock at their cubicle is you as to explain why you did nothing about the issues of your changes.

4 – This should be a lesson for you as well as the GW2 team. You can not hotfix content without notifying people, without testing the changes, and without a proper PTR setting. These are normal procedures in game development. You did like 20 betas pre-release for stress testing…where has that core mentality of perfecting product before releasing it gone within 2 weeks? This is a colossal failure on ANETs part. And this will single-handedly have a dollar for dollar impact on your product.

I am sorry but you should of taken lessons from SWTOR’s disastrous development cycles and not done something that reminds so many freshly aggravated MMOers of the same environment they just got shafted in.

Robert HroudaContent Designer

Hey folks, I’ve been reading this thread for a bit and figured I’d come weigh in on things. I built this dungeon, and fixed the problem, so I’m going to come at you from the designer perspective on things to try and illuminate why I did what I did, and what exactly I did. It wasn’t made clear, and I apologize for that.
The main thing I am seeing, is that people are upset that I took away their super profitable low risk, fast, token grind. I did not go into this thinking everyone would be happy with my changes – I knew I would be upsetting people because I was taking away a super easy speed-run money printer.
I took it away for a few reasons – chief among them being what I feel is taking advantage of a couple bugs found in the same chain, and our leashing/aggro system. I played with groups who did this, and watched you-tube clips of what was going on. The problems I identified with the speed run aspect of this are as follows:
1. You just need 1 person to get to the magmacyte across the magma field. This will cause an invulnerable Magg to run across the entire field through mobs and progress the dungeon. Then this person teleports back.
2. Instead of fighting the enemies in a timed event at he door buster, you just circle strafe them or leash aggro them to “kill the clock” since it was only a 100 second timer on the event.
3. Final Boss encounter isn’t threatening.
So what did I do?
1. I made it so that Magg has to get to the other side of the Magma field and close to the magmacyte – not just a player. Magg not taking aggro from nearby enemies was a big reason for this issue to be resolved. By giving him aggro, and forcing you to escort him to the ending, I fixed what I considered to be a bug/exploit that I introduced through poor planning.
2. I extended the time from 100 seconds to 200 seconds at the Door Buster event. I intended for you to fight those guys, not circle strafe them and aggro leash chain them. I also added 1 additional mob to the encounter at the very middle (a bow dude) to account for you now having twice the time to defeat the waves that come in.
3. I made the fireballs hurt more. Not greatly more – they’ll do about 3-4k damage to a DPS focused player, but you should have anywhere between 15k-25k HP, so there’s a bit of wiggle room for error.

I made this path hard, because it was easy. It’s an explorable dungeon path, and they should be hard. Wearing the flame legion armor set should be a symbol of what you went through to obtain something. It should mean something. Right now it means you did 40 speedruns in 2 days.
I hope this helps a bit, but I understand you’re upset. For all it’s worth I’m sorry, and I hope we can move past this.

Hello Robert – Thank you for coming forward in this post but now I am unfortunately going to have to break this down for you from a design aspect again on “What you did wrong; and how things should be handled.”

1 – You claimed you felt this dungeon was to easy, so you buffed it…fantastic.
2 – You wanted it to seem REWARDING to have Flame Legion gear.
3 – You did absolutely no testing on this patch in-house.
4 – You only made guessing judgement calls on the entire update.

Lets break it down:

1 – I don’t mind you fixing bugs and buffing content don’t get me wrong. But before you buff something why not make sure it is do-able “PRE-BUFF” before buffing it even more. The largest reason everyone “Kited” the kite room is because you CAN NOT kill the spawns fast enough with most standard groups. So if you want to implement the “Trinity” into GW2 then by all means put in a Threat mechanic give us tanks and a Cleric class so we can have someone tank the 10+ Mobs that spawn within 10 seconds of the event starting which all hit for 12K+ and have ridiculously high HP pools in a game where you only have 3 cooldowns on LONG timers to burst them down.

This is like watching a train-wreck happen in extreme slow motion…

Zenyatoo.4059:

Goomba.6248:

Zenyatoo.4059:

Goomba.6248:

FYI It’s not a kiting event, Never was intended to be one. People did it that way because you could kite the mobs and not have a problem. Its a Defend the NPC event, where you have to fight the mobs.

And you make it sound like CoF is the ONLY way to gear up as a “Fresh” level 80, there are numerous ways to gear.

The only 2 point you have are 1 and 2, but they are moot if 3 and 4 are not correct, thus your whole argument is meaningless. Sure I don’t like the update, but not because of these moot points you spew from your mouth, I don’t like it simply because it doesn’t fix anything

The spawn rates for defense are ridiculous. People die when kiting, that is, when actively attempting to avoid as much damage as possible, teams still routinely wipe. Telling people that they should instead be fighting is ludicrous, monsters simply have way to much hp to actually be successfully killed during the time limit before they overwhelm you.

Really? I have completed CoF with a group with 0 wipes, in this new patch, what did we do, we fought. A very organized fight. everyone knew what they had to kill and what they had to do. it’s really not that hard, just time consuming. You obviously don’t understand how the game mechanics work, and you’re obviously not utilizing combo fields and mass healing. I really hate it how you people come in here and cry all day about useless topics, Yes the dungeon system has problems. Is this a problem? NO, its not.

Im not utilizing combo fields?
My elementalist has 2 combo fields he can place down and I use them both regularly. My combo finishers are on 45 second and 30 second cooldowns, which means during the bomb fight i’ll get to use them once per spawn. So uh, im utilizing them as much as I can :<

as for mass healing I actually have that in spades. Ive got 3 large AOE heals every 10 seconds, party wide regen and protection, 2 AOE condition removals every 10 seconds, and then a much larger heal+condition removal every 40. But it’s still not enough to be keeping all party members up all the time. Especially not when smokelords like to hit my teammates for 9k.

HEY! We don’t talk about healing people in this game TRINITY is forbidden!

/sarcasm.

Pikafan.3792:

These changes are good, and should continue. Weed out the weak, dungeons are intended to be challenges, not snoozefests doable by subpar players.

You do realize this is not a subscription based model…to survive GW2 needs AS MANY players as possible and since Blizzard has done enough surveys in 7 years to tell us repeatedly that 99% of players are casuals and only 1% are “Hardcore” that what ANet shouldn’t be doing is pissing off the casuals they do have if they ever want to see a dime of profit.

Problem is this move straight up gives the finger to both parties the Hardcore grinders who are ok with grinding out the ridiculously long hours to get anywhere in crafting legendaries.

As well as p*ss off the casuals who can no longer farm a few runs a night to get gear for WvW.

In the end this is probably the dumbest / worst move ANET will ever make. And they did it 1 week before Pandaria. Not someone’s brightest moment.

conquista.1536:

prob need like a guardian, and people need to die one by one and not die all at the same time for that part to work.

This is the biggest issue of the patch…

“Need to” die

Building a mechanic into a dungeon that isn’t possible without suicide is ridiculous. That is by far the dumbest design of any MMO I’ve ever seen…EVER. You do not build mechanics that you say “You will not be able to do this”.

If I was ANET I’d have this reversed immediately. Anyone who was judging either WoW vs GW2 for next week will not be a hard decision for them…even I could sit here and be like:

Well there is no longer any viable entry level end-game PvE and I know WoW has raids so as a PvEr I will just pick that up next Tuesday.

I was really enjoying GW2 up until they pulled this stunt…it shows ANet as a developer has no real idea what they are doing for end game development. Which can lead to much larger (Cough SWTOR cough) issues down the line.

underpaidpyro.1809:

I for one welcome this change and look forward to an actual challenge. It was my understanding that exotic gear was there for the prestigious appearance and the smattering of stats you get compared to rare pieces was just a bonus. I still haven’t gotten around to clearing all paths in all dungeons but the last time I had this much fun in an MMO was the transition from BT to SWP in WoW.

My understanding from all the pre-launch press was that the dungeons would be grindy 5 mans (excuses for not having raids) and that the giant world dragons that spawn every few hours would be your “Raid” content.

Instead the Dragons are a joke to most people and the farming is just to get gear for WvW where people feel the entire fun of the game actually is.

So there’s a lot of give and take on “what” these dungeons / gear were supposed to be and what they have become.

The bigger question is why the hell would you do something like this 1 week before WoW’s new expansion drops…you do not want to p*ss off the playerbase you have right now when the one huge competitor is just about to make a release =/

Goomba.6248:

Zenyatoo.4059:

Goomba.6248:

FYI It’s not a kiting event, Never was intended to be one. People did it that way because you could kite the mobs and not have a problem. Its a Defend the NPC event, where you have to fight the mobs.

And you make it sound like CoF is the ONLY way to gear up as a “Fresh” level 80, there are numerous ways to gear.

The only 2 point you have are 1 and 2, but they are moot if 3 and 4 are not correct, thus your whole argument is meaningless. Sure I don’t like the update, but not because of these moot points you spew from your mouth, I don’t like it simply because it doesn’t fix anything

The spawn rates for defense are ridiculous. People die when kiting, that is, when actively attempting to avoid as much damage as possible, teams still routinely wipe. Telling people that they should instead be fighting is ludicrous, monsters simply have way to much hp to actually be successfully killed during the time limit before they overwhelm you.

Really? I have completed CoF with a group with 0 wipes, in this new patch, what did we do, we fought. A very organized fight. everyone knew what they had to kill and what they had to do. it’s really not that hard, just time consuming. You obviously don’t understand how the game mechanics work, and you’re obviously not utilizing combo fields and mass healing. I really hate it how you people come in here and cry all day about useless topics, Yes the dungeon system has problems. Is this a problem? NO, its not.

There is no way you fought the mobs in the Kiting event…The mitigation down to the level 75 statistics means that you won’t output anywhere near enough damage to kill the mobs as fast as they spawn.

You are trying to cause trouble by lying please stop.

For ANets sake I wanted to put this here as I have calculated this out:

For Full Flame Legion Gear Requirements:

~1,770 Tokens – Approx 90 runs of CoF. (Depending on Weapon)
26 silver per run – Approx 24 gold return from 90 runs. (Pre-selling items / repairs)

20 min per run x 90 Runs = 30 hours of in-game time spent inside CoF not including 6 min event intervals.

If you had included a 5 run lockout system instead of ridiculous buffs then you would of made the time required to get gear from a minimum of 30 hours to a minimum of 18 days.

Do the math of which one would keep your player-base playing the game longer…

Server Side Auction Pricing for full Gear enhancements:

Guild Backpack – 5 gold
Amulet – 3 gold 50 silver
Accessories – 7 gold (for both)
Earrings – 7 gold (for both)

6 x Superior Runes for Gear – 12 gold total.
Exquisite Jewels for Accessories – 3 gold total

4 exotic Dyes (Black/Whites) – 14 gold
All Bank Slots – 14 gold
20 slot bags x 4 slots – 50 gold

Total Gold investment for end-game gear (Not including Legendaries):

116 gold

CoF by itself will only cover 24 gold of that. Not including repairs / items.

As well as not including maxing professions.

Do you think this really needed a Buff.

I’m just going to rattle these off:

Normal Things:

1 – Inspecting…seriously…
2 – Dueling
3 – Guild vs Guild PvP on server side World PvP (Outside of WvW/Mists) ( This is “GUILD” Wars isn’t it?)
4 – Show own Character Name / Titles / Guild Name…(I Like seeing my own name)
5 – Titles …where the hell are all the Titles?
6 – Pets haven’t seen one in the entire game yet.
7 – The Ability to Preview 2 weapons at once…2 swords, Sword and Shield…etc.

Real Money Items (ANet does want real $ right?):

8 – Gems to Buy new Hair Styles / Colors (Resets if you want)
9 – Gems to purchase in-game name changes
10 – Gems to purchase pets
11 – Gems to buy Race changes
12 – Gems to buy new Dances

In-game Mechanical Suggestions:

13 – THREAT I understand no one wants to see “Trinity” become the play-style but at minimum it’d be nice to have an idea on who has the agro in dungeons. I ran with a group where we had 4 DPS and a Tank and it was the smoothest run I’ve been in yet…just knowing that a guy with Sword/Board is actually taking the damage and not the little elementalist who has to be revived every other second.

14 – More complex mechanics (use the above to allow this) right now everything can be easily done at ranged…you don’t even want to be melee in this game at the moment because with no threat a low armored thief/warrior just gets demolished. This means that the entire game can be done just kiting. Not very complex mechanically at all. Threat would resolve this issue as having a tank would allow for more cool mechanics than just Tank and Spank kiting.

Trading Post Suggestions:

15 – The Ability to Preview Items from the Trading Post…frustrating.

(I have more I will update as they come into my head)

This has nothing to do with paths. This has everything to do with how this update was handled and what causes its going to have on the community.

I have gotten this issue since Launch except mine seems more extreme than most…here is what is happening for me:

I believe this is some weird reverse sudo-DDOS issue on ANETs server side to selected ISPs (I am running Comcast). I have done Winsock resets/IP changes/Packet dumps and updated every single driver I have.

I find that if I even once Alt+Tab out of GW2 the issue becomes 100% prevelant. As it seems the game tries to replicate itself when it is re-opened which then surges the outgoing packet information the larger issue I am having though is when I get the 7:11:3:189:101 errors they will not stop after the first one hits. Then it gets worse; it will kill my modem and drop my Internet connection completely until the bottleneck clears out. Which it seems can be anywhere from 1-2 million bytes of data that pile up.

This is extremely annoying as I have had my internet crash from GW2 for over 45min. Something needs to be fixed here.