Guild Wars 2

Here is the thing that I never really understood.

I, and many other people, enjoy soloing dungeons. Why? Many reasons. One big one for me is that the encounters are much more enjoyable alone. Things that would never be a challenge for an organized group suddenly become problematic and usually fun to overcome, trying to think of a way to survive something that was intended to be a challenge for 5 people. For some cases its only because it takes you 5 times as long to kill whatever it is, but that gives the enemy time to show their skills, and gives you time to kitten up and die. In others, it requires completely different tactics, a focus on kiting for example which is almost always frowned upon in groups.

So when encounters are more enjoyable alone because they carry a higher degree of risk to overcome and introduce different tactics, why would you WANT to run the most efficient gear unless you’re going for a record?

I love joining new player parties because I feel like its more of a challenge to figure out how to work with what they’ve brought instead of what they didn’t bring to come up with how we’re going to get past this part of the dungeon.

Vekk’s book in the library suggests that the dragons will become stronger as the others are killed off as they also benefit from the increase in magic to the world.

Easy to imagine a scenario where they are all killed but then omg the center of the alchemy gets all the powers and its gg for our heroes. Now we must split the power evenly again since energy cannot be destroyed in the eternal alchemy. Channel that hoodoo magic into 6 points and gods help our descendants.

nice work on the run SC! always a pleasure to watch.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Crysto.7089:

With all the other clipping and errors in this game (that will never get fixed I’m sure) I think that no one who still plays the game would care about this except some particularly anal designer. It CANNOT be the reason we do not have capes it is just so utterly stupid.

Please remember to speak for yourself.

There are already back items that conflict with certain weapons and it looks ugly enough that I tend to avoid displaying back items for that reason. As I see it, saying that there are “plenty of clipping errors already” is a great reason to be cautious adding more items that cause still more clipping issues and display errors.

Mind you, I would like to see Capes in the game. I just don’t think it’s as simple a situation as expressed above. If & when they get added, I want the community to echo with cheering, not see a mountain of complaints in /map & the forums about how ANet didn’t do a good job of implementing htem.

At this point if they ever get added and somehow they make them amazing and they don’t clip and they fix all their other broken stuff, the response will still be “it took you long enough” and “it should have been in since launch”. Which is true.

Mostly yes, though there are a few max level maps that you won’t play normally that you can explore. (Southsun Cove+Dry Top)

However, odds are you will not experience everything on your journey to 80. Missed events, secret locations, diving spots etc. So those are things to go back to.

Also, if you are playing a game for somethings other than S&G you are only fooling yourself.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Wouldn’t capes interfere with any weapons stowed on the back? There were no weapons stowed on the back of characters in GW1, if memory serves me.

Maybe players wouldn’t care about that, though, but it might look odd to see weapons poking through the material of capes.

I’m neither for nor against capes; personally, I rarely wore mine in GW1, and would probably never wear one in this game.

With all the other clipping and errors in this game (that will never get fixed I’m sure) I think that no one who still plays the game would care about this except some particularly anal designer. It CANNOT be the reason we do not have capes it is just so utterly stupid.

the grind is to look good and get good

Playing with Mechanics

Mechanic- Weapon Skills are Static
You can work with this in many ways to break player’s expectations to provide a challenge/interesting shake up of the mechanic-

• Randomly shuffle the weapon skill’s locations (ex. autoattack becomes 3, 3 becomes 1 etc.)

• Take that a step further and destroy the UI! Skills are thrown around the edges of the screen. Also randomized!

• Lock out a skill slot(s)

• Debuff that weakens a skill or makes using that skill apply the effects to the user instead or a mental “bomb” where the skill becomes marked and if you use it, it blows up and does damage/knockdown/stun/whatever.

Mechanic- UI Elements and Effects
One of the coolest things I discovered early on was using a blasting attack in a shallow body of water and having the water splash up and “soak” the UI. Lets take advantage of this system some more!-

• Visual Obstruction. We’ve had mild attempts at this with things like Karka blindness, but take it all the way! Get hit by an nasty ooze attack? Colored slime filter over your screen distorting your vision. Bonus points for combining this with environmental hazards like say… the edge of a cliff or some narrow walkways.

• Flip everything upside down. Double bonus points for combining this with environmental hazards like say… the edge o…

• Lock the camera in “look behind you” mode. Triple bonus points for combining this with environm…

Mechanic- Guitar Hero
The bell choir mini-game is one of my favorite and the mechanics found there could be adapted to group play-

• Shield your team/self from attacks with a bundle item. Press the corresponding button as the attacks approach (think old tom/eye of zhaitan with attacks of different colors) to negate or significantly reduce the incoming damage.

• A soundwave themed enemy (dredge) where you must play the same note out of phase to cancel the attack. (uses music instead of color as the tell)

• Crack the code. Perform a rapid sequence of button presses within a time limit.

• Simon says. Copy a tune.

i vaguely recall a similar idea using town clothes and a “passive” toggle.

i got my weekly gifts for a while and never got a vampiric dragon sword

however, most things (green weapons) that I wanted had that perfect balance of difficulty/reward/price/drop rate. by which i mean, drop rate was high enough that you could spend an hour farming to get what you wanted, it was challenging enough that it wasn’t mind numbingly boring or so hard that it was discouraging, and if you didn’t get your item it was usually cheap enough to just buy and if you had been farming for an hour you probably had a sizeable chunk earned towards the item.

in gw2 the drop rates for things are so abysmally low that you may as well just forget about it and buy it.

Game is great while it lasts. Easy to get into and the journey to 80 is enjoyable. The event system is a cool alternative to quests. As far as single player goes, the personal story has some great moments, though you will be severely disappointed in the ending’s execution. Treat it as a side game and it’ll last you for a long time.

Worth a buy but wait for the sale (they happen fairly often) and for the love of god don’t buy stuff from the gem store, it only encourages them.

I’m just scratching my head at so many of these suggestions. I haven’t read past CDI threads but this is really depressing more than anything else. Its not a matter coming up with how to resolve an issue with someone’s suggestion when the core idea of it is just so against what I enjoy about the game.

I just like unique experiences. I will rarely repeat something even if I really enjoyed it. Once I’ve done it, its on to the next new thing.

Suffice to say, I take A LOT of breaks from GW2.

I don’t really make money but its ok because there’s nothing to spend it on anyway except sharpening stones and consumables.

you could try killing the enemies instead of running past them

What Could A Raid in GW2 be?
Events + Guild Puzzle + Guild Challenge + Tequatl/Triple Trouble/Whatever challenging world boss taking place on the space of an entire map with the format of completing objectives that drastically alter the map for a set duration.

Why an Entire Map?
Map size allows multiple groups of players of varied sizes to complete the objectives they feel comfortable with and draws on their specific expertise.

Being a separate elite map also means that you won’t have the problem of some event suddenly blindsiding a poor adventurer. If you’re on the map, you know what you’re there for.

How Would this Work?
As objectives are completed, various things unlock on the map and players progress till they come to the BIG BAD (think opening the gates of arah but with guild challenge and guild puzzle level events. oh, and lupicus and his 3 brothers jacked on inquest-grade steroids are behind the door).

Objectives are completed in event chain style and make a noticeable difference on the map itself (blow up a mountain to transport a megaweapon).

Objectives must be completed in tiers (events XYZ must be completed to trigger GATE ENCOUNTER A, meanwhile events LMNOP need to be done to trigger GATE ENCOUNTER B, and so on till the big bad is opened.)

What About Mah Guilds?
Guilds can “claim” cleared map objectives to confer some sort of specific bonus to members of their guild in the same style as WvW (if majority of contributers belong to a guild they can claim it).

Won’t People Just Show Up for the Big Bad?
Players participating in the completion of any objective are rewarded and receive a key (figuratively speaking) into the Big Bad. Access to the Big Bad is only given to those who contributed in whatever way (read: received objective completion credit). Could be done with an achievement that resets each week.

I Don’t Want to Feel Like I Have to Rush to 80!
Upleveling on the map.

Proposal Overview
Platforming/Environmental Hazards should be a strong element in any “raid.”

Goal of Proposal
Currently, jumping puzzles are a mostly isolated part of gameplay which is underutilized in content that also contains challenging combat encounters. Adding challenging jumping puzzle-like segments intertwined with other kinds of gameplay would go a long way towards showing full mastery of the game’s mechanics and ultimately give a much more rewarding experience.

Proposal Functionality
While minor platforming elements do find their way into dungeons and fractals, these are no where near the difficulty that they should be for an elite adventure. The precision jumping needed for the tribulation mode of the Super Adventure Box gave us a taste of how difficult and rewarding the platforming elements of this game can be and they have yet to be implemented into the “real” game. Combining this with “real” combat encounters would make for a challenging and engaging adventure that tests an aspect of your game mastery not yet found in other content.

An Example
Eternal Battlegrounds jumping puzzles.
Here the main opponents are other players, but with AI foes introduced, it would be the perfect example with a few tweaks.
-Progress through the substages (ruby, emerald, saphire sanctums) to retrieve 3 keys.
-Ascend the Obsidian Sanctum covered in traps, large jumping segments, and challenging encounters
-Use your three keys to open the way to the pinnacle of the sanctum where an EPIC BOSS ENCOUNTER* awaits.
-BONUS: Once groups became comfortable, they could split into 3 groups to each retrieve 1 key while inexperienced groups could stick together and get them 1 at a time.

• EPIC BOSS ENCOUNTER
  Tribulation mode SAB jumping WHILE fighting Lupicus WHILE dodging the laser grid from CoE WHILE avoiding the wind mechanic from personal story priory where you have to time your running when you see the wind stop blowing the flag WHILE Liadri spams AoE and clones hunt you down

Associated Risks
-Alienate players with poor jumping skills
-“This isn’t Mario its a MMO”
-Potentially frustrating if you happen to mess up a jump and have to start all the way over (checkpoints placed strategically would help to mitigate this)

GW1 was a better game for many reasons and maybe someday it will get a sequel, but this game is OK for a change of pace. Clearly you prefer instances, others prefer open world (I don’t know why). Now you can play GW1 or this game and pick what you like.

As a designer for Guild Wars 2 with a job of improving most of the traits in Guild Wars 2, what do you do?
What do you determine is fun?
In this situation we will determine fun to be unique and impactful, a tangible benefit, via either mechanic or a number increase large enough to immediately be apparent.

What factors determines the quality?
How successfully is meets the above guidelines.

Is quality measured by personal taste?
To some extent, but it is largely irrelevant given the guidelines set in the first question. It is very easy to determine whether or not the trait is providing a unique mechanic not already present in the class’ existing skills or a noticeable increase in damage/condition duration/survivability etc.

Experiences with others? Should it be up to a single person? Should there be numerous tests? Compare it to other games?
If you have teams of people at your disposal of course you should have more than one person work on it at least at some point in the development and as with anything else it should be play-tested.

At the core of game designing and improving the base of your game, what is the ultimate factor of quality?
Ever trait choice should be a difficult one due to all the awesomeness packed into the newly revised system.

I play engineer so I will give you one example trait.
Inventions – Grandmaster – Quantum Displacement
Detonating a turret causes you to be teleported to that turret’s location.
Fun lore-ish explanation: The energy released when the turret explodes is re-purposed to fuel the teleportation.

Does it pass the fun test?
Immediately noticeable power increase: No.
Unique mechanic: Yes.

why do people get upset about it in the first place? do you think they are saying naughty things about you? are you so ridiculously driven to help everyone that it gives you fits of rage knowing that you are potentially missing out on a chance to answer someone’s question?

Malediktus.9250:

Depths.4051:

No instance owner is the best thing to ever happen to dungeons, I’m sorry but I 100% disagree with OP. If your in a long and difficult dungeon, and the the pug leader who opened has to leave, the dungeons over. Even if the opener doesn’t leave party and disconnects the instance eventually times out and people are forced to leave. The new system is a god send in my opinion and I hope it never reverts.

There are no long and difficult dungeons in this game. Even Arah p4 can be done without skipping/exploiting in a hour or less.

an hour straight of playing a video game isn’t a long time? you must be old.

blakdoxa.7520:

What does gw2 becoming without leveling? Not an mmorpg, but an massive multiplayer online battle arena (moba aka LoL, IC, DOTA)?

A better game.

Personally I hope it is all open world content OR has the ability to solo/shortman it (scales to your party size). I have just enough friends for dungeons, having to find 20 more people that I could stand/trust to play with would be difficult.

gw2 should have never had levels in the first place so not only should they introduce this item, they should make it free.

For a real meltdown have her try SPvP. I’ve been PvPing since beta and I feel like I could use a little more instruction.

I do like to make things interesting.

ANet went broke and gambled on putting all their remaining resources into Living Story and New Player Experience in an attempt to get new revenue to salvage their game.

Labjax.2465:

Crysto.7089:

If I really thought they were such amazing ideas, I’d probably just do it anyway and face the consequences or find a way to get it done (volunteer to be the fall man to your boss should it come to it etc.). If the ideas don’t stick and I thought they were so great then its not somewhere I’d be able to work anyway knowing that it could be better. I’d find somewhere else that shared my goals/vision.

You would, or you have done so in the past? Cause it’s easy to talk big about such things when it’s not your paycheck on the line.

If you think that’s talking big then I pity you. That’s like a major principle to living any sort of satisfying life. That’s like saying I can breath is talking big.

Esplen.3940:

Crysto.7089:

She makes it sound like game employees are so scared of losing their jobs by questioning established process that it wouldn’t be an environment you would want to work in anyway. Surely not everyone in the game’s industry is so spineless? Perhaps the ones that weren’t are now unemployed or running their own company. We see which one she chose.

Well, unless you’re in a relatively small company, your say doesn’t account for much unless it’s being asked specifically for.

It’s not so much about losing your job (unless you somehow keep managing to sneak things into releases that aren’t intended at all), but really there’s only so much that people can do because the company objective keeps changing.

Imagine you work at Gamestop and you had all these great idea’s for how they could improve their customer experience. What do you do about it? You suck it up and keep doing what your boss tells you to do. If you tell your boss, that’s great, he can’t do anything about it, either. This is what happens in lots of jobs.

If I really thought they were such amazing ideas, I’d probably just do it anyway and face the consequences or find a way to get it done (volunteer to be the fall man to your boss should it come to it etc.). If the ideas don’t stick and I thought they were so great then its not somewhere I’d be able to work anyway knowing that it could be better. I’d find somewhere else that shared my goals/vision.

She makes it sound like game employees are so scared of losing their jobs by questioning established process that it wouldn’t be an environment you would want to work in anyway. Surely not everyone in the game’s industry is so spineless? Perhaps the ones that weren’t are now unemployed or running their own company. We see which one she chose.

Check roster.
Ranger?
Respec for that trait that makes turrets reflect stuff.
Equip a shield.

Congrats, rangers now kill themselves AND you get to be a kitten head turret engineer.

engineer in all of those things

engineer in all of those things

Maybe then we’ll get Guild Wars 2.

For me, ANet is very inconsistent in releasing things I like to do. Though what they have released has generally been enjoyable.

So I can’t really ever be hyped when 9/10 times there is either very little or no content I would enjoy doing.

I thought having a ton of teams of people working on different aspects of the game would mean we were going to get constant content in all areas of the game but that didn’t happen.

run a tracert to your server ip.

i find many times its the specific ncsoft server lagging.

The ability to spawn a solo/party instance of any open world map. The instance would be scaled dynamically based on party size so that while potentially difficult, all content would be doable with a maximum of 5 people.

ANet should add a FPS mode and add headshots and body specific damage values

IndigoSundown.5419:

Engineer damage is inferior to Thief, Warrior, Guardian, Elementalist, Mesmer and to some extent Ranger. In some circumstances, especially PvP, it is behind Necro.

This is so wrong it hurts.

Also for leveling, equip the bomb kit. Hooray you win.

Spiderbite.8049:

It’s coming out in the cantha/crystal desert expansion with four new dungeons, hardmode for current dungeons, and guild housing. While wearing capes.

This is such torture why ANet whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy :’(

For me nothing beats an engineer. Tons O’ Damage, has options to deal with anything that comes your way, lots of combo potential.

What didn’t you like about engineer? Lots of gtfo skills and the Tons O’ Damage thing make it seem like a good fit for you.

Another important one for me.

Soloing content gave you the reward as though there were still 8 people. (as in you’d get x8 the loot)

Made soloing things quite rewarding beyond the “just to say I could do it” aspect which gave lots of motivation to solo, increased difficulty/ingenious build required which added variety and rewarded you for it in a tangible way.

Until it was nerfed, but even post nerf you still got more then if you were in a group.

Hunting down rare skills BEFORE THE CHANGE. When you had to use the capture signet at just the right time it 100% changed the encounter for some enemies. You didn’t just have to kill the boss, you had to figure out how to get the boss to use the skill in the first place and then find an opening to cap it. In fact, many times you had to actively avoid killing the boss. It was great and unique for 99% of the skills and for the 1% that the boss just wouldn’t use the skill, well that could have been easily fixed on a per enemy basis.

The traits in GW2 just aren’t the same since they were just tacked on to existing content that in no way changes it. You just do the same thing you’ve always done and happen to get an extra trait as a bonus. The other thing is there just aren’t that many unique enemies for a solo player to hunt. Champions could fill this gap but the design of GW2 means you’ll have a ton of other mooks scaling them up and lessening your personal impact on the encounter. Also, champions all drop the same lame loot bags/boxes instead of something unique to that champion (for the majority). Skill hunting in GW1 there were obviously some repeats for enemies having the same elite but it was at an acceptably low level and often times even enemies with the same elites didn’t have identical skillsets so the encounters still played differently.

Also, the loading times.

Coming Soon TM

THE GUILD WARS 2 LEGENDARY UPDATE!
New Legendaries!
Quality Pass on all Old Legendaries!
Precursor Scavenger Hunt!
Secret Surprise Reveal (spoilers its legendary armor skins)!

Please make a legendary.

1. Solo mode for dungeons. Something a little more toned down to make it comparable to semi-organized 5 man dungeons as a solo player. If the time to solo is the same as the time to do it with 5 man then the reward should be very similar. Alternatively, x5 reward for soloing a dungeon at current difficulty would also work. When solo mode is active no one can join your party, no cheating

2. Improved strength on rune effects. It kills me that there are all these runes with really cool effects that never get used because their cooldowns are so ridiculously long or are just plain lackluster. Increase the strength, decrease cooldowns, make them worth using. Make Rune choice as big a part in the flavor of your build as your trait and stat choices.

3. When I log into the forums please make it so it takes me to the thread I was looking at instead of having to either find it again or hit back a few times.

:)

Just because they are “for” someone else doesn’t make them against you. They may be giving persons or aspects of the game more attention than others but they aren’t setting out with the goal to marginalize you or to ruin your gaming experience.

Am I disappointed with the news so far? Kinda, some of the new loot looks interesting and I’m a little curious to see these new changes by starting a new character but it is otherwise pretty ho-hum. That doesn’t mean I feel like ANet has anything against me though.

Step up your role playing game. You shouldn’t even be thinking that someone is griefing you. They are simply other characters playing a role. Sounds like you just need to get better at RP.

So far, content has been interesting enough that I’m looking forward to the next installment. I personally love desert areas and the Arid Sea was my favorite location in GW1. Moredremoth is the lamest of the dragons though and I don’t like jungles/plant enemies (Sylvari and their areas are the worst in the game), so I’m not sure how long my interest will last. Looks like something half-way interesting is forming in the story so grats to ANet on that.

For now, I’ll keep playing as they come out.

trying harder than me,
84% here. i still just vendor stuff.