I actually don’t hate RNG as a rule. I find it is more exciting to have the potential for an awesome drop than to just buy something outright since, in the latter case, you know basically how long you have to do X, but only the last time is rewarding. A hybrid system where you can buy it OR it can drop could always work, I suppose, but I’ve rarely seen that used…
I do hate when RNG is attached to the end-chest of a dungeon or something like that though, as it has a similar effect to what I mentioned before; if that is the only thing in the dungeon that drops something you want, each playthrough becomes a slog just to get to the end as quick as possible. Not fond of universal loot tables either though as that makes things boring.
Something more like what PSO did. :-)
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
Eh. I liked the idea of them, but the lack of sets that could be acquired in-game was disappointing.
Remedying that and having them as wardrobe skins would be better though; I’m not fond of medium and heavy armour in general, but my main and my two worthwhile (attractive) alts fall into those classes, so getting some nicer clothing options would be great.
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
Only races I’d have much interest in would be Largos, Wardens, and Djinn. And of those, only Largos are all that reasonable, so meh…
I guess they could introduce more new races, but unless we head to a completely new area (Isles of Janthir, East of Ascalon, etc.), that feels questionable…
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
Paragon seems likely, but I’d prefer they go with something White Mantle…
May not seem like something we’d embrace, but I’m sure there’s a way to spin it.
Justiciar, Confessor, etc…
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
But, if you started listing what some (especially) male humans do, it wouldn’t be a pretty read either, would it?
Wars, physical (and other hostile and/or highly inappropriate) attacks on women and children, serial killings, shootings, slavery, racism (and other isms), organised crime, cruelty to animals, endless unnecessary greed (even if it causes other people to suffer and die)…
The list goes on and on.
For everything you can accuse (some) dolphins of doing, you can almost certainly accuse (some) humans of doing something at least as bad (and probably even worse).
…and yet, you wouldn’t refuse to hang around any other humans, would you?
I mean, really, if it was a question of hanging around a random human male, or a random dolphin male, you would quite possibly be safer around the dolphin.
Assuming you weren’t a porpoise, maybe…
So… As I choose to interpret this…. Human pets gogogo? >_>
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
Eh… I’ve had issues with the game’s story from the start (Things seemed far more interesting pre-release), and LS S1’s quality did nothing to correct that. At least the earlier parts that is; I was so disinterested in it (and the concept of temporary achievements) that I left the game for a year.
I remember during the first Flame and Frost bit when there was supposed to be all this devastation, yet… everything in the world (even in the relevant zones) carried on like nothing happened. You had a few refugees walking by and some annoying/repetitive portal events, but 3 feet over, you’d have a Norn lodge going about its business with no reference to the supposed problems.
But anyway… Coming back and doing LW S2, I can say that it at least feels more relevant to Tyria at large, even if I do still have issues with some of the writing (and I’m not too keen on the whole Mordremoth aspect being a thing as it stands). And while I hate the style of Silverwastes and Dry Top (was fun for about a week), the zones at least have a better design to them than Southsun.
So, while I’m not going to say I love the direction things have gone since, I do feel a lot of the additions since S1 have improved.
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
GW2 is a game that tends to look better in screenshots than it does in motion. They also have the benefit of hiding the failings of the world as a whole (such as there probably being a scout or settlement within 5Ø feet in the direction the camera isn’t facing).
If the game could legitimately maintain the feel of scope, isolation, and majesty that many of these screenshots convey, I’d be a lot more impressed. Obsidian Sanctum and the crypt in Dredgehaunt are the only places that really come close to what I’d have liked to see throughout the game (and they had to ruin Obsidian Sanctum what with the whole PvP kitten). :-(
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
The universe of GW2 as presented in all the lead-in material to the game seemed amazing and a suitable evolution of the events of GW… Granted I wasn’t a huge fan of much of the GW lore [particularly Cantha], but it did have its charm.
What we got though… Not so much. The feel and tone is substantially different, a lot of the remaining connections just feel there for the sake of being there (some of the historians in particular just seem like they’re spouting random blurbs from the wiki rather than reciting their culture’s history) and the story is… Well, the story of GW2 has ended up being quite terrible as a whole, so I guess expecting much out of that would be kind of daft (seriously… I remember when the dragon’s were supposed to be cool. **** you Zhaitan, your zombie anti-aircraft guns, and your wandering eye. **** you Victurus and all of you other conscious minions… And **** you Primordus for feeling like you’re now some kind of lame afterthought)…
Honestly, at this point though, short of a complete do-over or some DEM that would allow them to completely shift gears, I don’t think anything could really be done about it…
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
Or skirts… Actual skirts that are leg armour and not affixed to a top…
And decent-looking trenchcoats… Hanging open or otherwise made to look light and stylish…
So basically I want more armour all-around for adventurers that doesn’t look bulky and cumbersome.
As far as giving each gender the others armours goes, “Meh”. Until you add some cute guys to the game, seeing guys run around showing skin isn’t going to do anything for me, but I won’t decry it (though I will decry the lack of cute guys further).
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
I wish Anet would realize how much more money they could get out of us by selling the new skins in the cash shop for the first week, make them account bound so you can’t gain a monopoly on the market and then, a week later add them to the lion weapon vendor. I’d buy those pieces but there is no way in kitten I am gambling my money on those kitten lion boxes. Just let me throw my money at you Anet and let me buy them!
The people that will gamble their money away make them more money than directly selling to you ever will.
I’ve seen so many games where people will declare, “I just spent $300 on this crap and got NOTHING!? Why won’t you let me buy them directly!?” to which the only response is, “You answered your own question.”
One of the games ultimately got so much flack (despite people continuing to dump money into it) that the distributor agreed to ‘compromise’ and sell some of the skins outright… Seems the compromise was that they would sell them at a price they felt wouldn’t make less money than gamble-boxes would; which ended up being ~$200 for a single outfit.
Don’t underestimate how much money people throw at these things…
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
I’d be keen if they’d add in something like the armory system FFXIV uses, but I’m pretty sure it’s never going to happen. :-/
Fine for now, I suppose, and would only really become an issue if a new profession is ever added. Same with race changes, really…
The storyline bit though I don’t think should work against it. As terrible as the story ended up being, its implementation and ‘integrity’ should never really be used to counter anything.
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
In gw 1 whenever you looted something nice it always meant something and players had a reason to go out adventuring just because they hoped to maybe drop something nice,
Disagree.
PSO? Yes.
GW? No.
Outside of a few dungeon speedruns, there was very little of actual (gold) worth to be looted in GW1. And honestly, outside of minis, there was nothing in the game that really felt worth collecting to me. And considering the cost for some of those, you’d better be into power-trading there as well if you wanted in on it.
A good chunk of my time in GW1 ended up being spent grinding ectos to fund my HoM.
So while I can agree that the state of the TP and the nature of power-trading is annoying and I’d love to see things introduced to curb that trend, I don’t think GW1 is the best example to cite…
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
Since “one time items” aren’t really prestigious one time items, how about reintroducing the 1st Halloween devil horns, the Wintersday ear muffs, the launch day GW2 celebration hat, and the GW2 dragon emblem shirt as rewards for some unrelated event as well? It’s “not fair” that players who just bought the game or quit a month after lunch weren’t able to get them.
By all means.
The wizard hat from Wintersday? How about the mini Mr. Sparkles back
By all…
as a gemstore purchase
No.
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
I liked the concept of huge event chains leading up into these epic multi-stage boss battles, but the execution of them honestly ended up being terrible.
You either get scheduled loot pinatas that become increasingly repetitive or you have the new mega-bosses which… honestly feel just as soulless and repetitive but which instead of being an automatic win are instead exceptionally frustrating due to the need for so many people (to the point I’m probably going to stop bothering with them entirely… Sick of ending up in a server full with… certain groups… who then bail and leave the map as a skeleton crew…)
World bosses and mega-events could have been something great… Like so many things here though, it just ended up being lost potential. :-/
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
Why not have like a Black Lion department store or something with various NPCs you can readily find and identify? Like a less annoying version of Embark Beach? >_>
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
Welcome to the cash shop model. If this becomes the standard in MMOs, then I will no longer be playing MMOs.
This is pretty much how I feel.
I’ve always loathed the idea of cash shops and microtransactions, so its frustrating to see everyone becoming so much more accepting of these models as time goes on. It’s especially revolting to see it crop up in games that do have subscription fees, but that’s the direction things are heading…
It’s difficult to find MMOs that I can get into at all even with that factor removed, but with that being the new standard, there’s pretty much no place for me going forward… ;-\
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
It’s done the opposite for me, and pretty much driven me away.
I was making it a point to get all the achievements for each section, but honestly, I don’t have a lot of free time, and what I do have, I may not want to dedicate to GW2 for a while. Even still I was forcing myself to slog through each ‘chapter’ so I could wrap everything up before they ended until Sky Pirates came around. I found out about the difficulty of the dungeon achievements and, above all else, the obsidian sanctum cache achievement and just stopped. Had these been permanent additions I could go towards at my own pace, I could deal with it, but to go for those in the time they were available would basically require me to throw my weekends away in hopes of getting them.
And now that those achievements are lost to me, I’ve no more motivation. But even if I’d pushed through and gotten them, the feeling that I have to log on and do the event activity crap on their schedule kills the motivation. It became less a matter of feeling like I was logging on to see something I wanted to and more just out of a sense of obligation. And it was doubly-bad because I never found any of the content designed to actually be engaging and fun or the narratives to be… well… good. The constant influx of this underwhelming material killed whatever hope I had left for Tyria to become the world they always made it seem like outside of the game :-/
Logged in today just to mess around for a bit, but I don’t think I’ll be coming back often, if at all from here on.
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
I think this pretty much does it for me. I’m honestly not in much of a mood to play in general this weekend, but limited-time content is limited, so I went ahead and forced myself through the Goemm’s Lab one and was about to carry on. Then I look up the other achievements and find out about this…
I endured this crap around the time of release to get the JP achievement, and I’m not about to do it again. Truth be told, I really, really love this jumping puzzle outside of the PvP element and would have liked to see MORE of the game follow in its footsteps in that respect (The Dredgehaunt mini-dungeon is the only other thing that comes close). But the PvP is frustrating enough to just completely kill it for me, ruining what would have otherwise been my favourite area in the game. And I’m not going to bang my head against that wall again, especially since this stuff isn’t sticking around all that long and I’d HAVE to do it on their schedule…
Between this and the dungeon achievements, it’s just going to be a future of incomplete achievement tabs (I should mention that I loathe the notion of achievements in the first place, but OCD reigns supreme), so I think I’m out.
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
In the lore leading up to the game, they seemed that way, but now they just seem like generic enemy commanders that will come and go with a handwave and a lack of worthwhile presentation.
They could have been Lovecraftian horrors or unkillable beings whose existence sustains reality. But… They weren’t. :-\
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
I miss the days when games relied on having you pursue content you actually found compelling rather than switching the focus from worthwhile collectibles and goals to overly-tedious and/or arbitrary lists of lazily-implemented achievements.
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
I liked consoles when they were dedicated gaming devices. Not so much anymore.
I do agree with FlamingFoxx, and I’ve got to say that the standardized performance is something I was a fan of as well. A game should strive to afford a unilateral experience as much as it can, IMO. ‘Leveling the playing field’ in the way that consoles always have goes a long way towards that.
Granted, nowadays with consoles moving the direction that they are, that’ll probably end up being lost as well since they’re pretty much overextending themselves and trying to be like PCs. ;-/
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
Exactly and I still am convinced they would make more money just selling the skins outright than resorting to the gamble boxes.
You would be wrong. I don’t think you realize how much certain people will throw at these things. The amount of people that they lose by not selling directly is insignificant compared to the amount of cash generated by crazies that will just keep buying. And that’s assuming those in the first group don’t actually cave in the end.
It’s why the “Stop buying it guys! That’ll make them go away!” mentality won’t actually work; some people will NEVER listen to that. And if the mass actually does stop buying them, that just makes the items even more rare/desirable, so it’d only make SENSE to throw more money at them to get such a unique skin, right!?
Basically, the only thing that may work at this point is bad PR, annoyance, and a massive drop in the playerbase. And since it’s a B2P game, I don’t think the latter even will do too much unless it comes with a massive decrease in new box sales…
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
I played Guild Wars 1 for many years, and there were items I’d never be able to collect, particularly some of the rare minis. I had to resign myself to the fact that you weren’t really supposed to collect them all, it’s not what they were there for.
If you insist on having everything in a game like this, you’re going to end up disappointed.
Feh. To me, if a collection can’t be completed, it’s not worth bothering with. And collecting things (that are worth actually collecting rather than just being forcibly-injected to drag things out) is the most fun part of these games…
Going for that one super-awesome-amazing item is no fun. Getting all the cool things along the way while working towards a goal of checking everything off? Now that’s fun.
Gods, I miss PSO. ;-(
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
But given the nature of your complaint with ranger weapon swapping, you’ll then complain that you have to swap attunements and you don’t want to do that.
I have no problem with weapon-swapping.
Between short-bow and long-bow (and if they’d give it to us, rifle) that is.
Hell, I might even go axe-torch once in a while for the Hell of it, since the idea of throwing axes is kinda fun.
I’ve just no desire to play melee,. and I won’t have any desire to do so until mmos have combat as fluid as Zelda or Devil May Cry. If even then…
If Ranger isn’t the class for me, then by all means, I’d welcome it if they’d add one. But it’s apparent that’s not gonna’ happen. :-\
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
I’m a collector, i just want to say i’m sad certain skins and items won’t be in my collections. If there was some way in the game i’d go for all of them, all the molten skins, all the SAB skins all the dragon bash skins, but as it is now over half the skins that are in the game or will be added will be unreachable in a few months if they aren’t already :/
Sad collector is sad
It kind of kills my motivation to go for anything at all.
Aye. Any games that do limited-duration or cash-shop-only items hit this issue with me. If I can’t achieve a complete collection just through normal gameplay, then the game can’t ever truly keep me interested. I’ll still faff about, but feel like there’s no real point. It’s part of the reason I’ll never actually throw any money at WoW.; I can’t actually get all the mounts now, so **** that.
With GW2 (much like in the first, PSO2, and most other games), it hits a second problem though… There’s not much I actually WANT to collect. The rare system is dull and none of the weapons really feel collectible to me. All that it has that could be a decent collectible are the minis, and since they tend to be limited and/or cashshop, that’s out. Was hoping they’d not pull anything lame like that here, but after the stuff they did with the Asian/tourney minis in the original, I’m not surprised…
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
When you say, “I just spent $2ØØ and got nothing! This is stupid and I’m never buying your boxes again!” what they hear is, “I just spent $2ØØ” and then cash registers going off…
Especially since a huge chunk will say that and then go, “Well, maybe the next event will be different… In fact, I’m so condifent, I’ll buy even MORE stuff because it’ll surely pay off!!!”
It’s the same crap that cropped up in Scarlet Blade, only there, the outcry was enough to get them to put some of their costumes up as direct buy… With the compromise being that since you didn’t have to gamble, you’d have to front $2ØØ (and that’s not hyperbole). And honestly, that’s the price point they’d actually have to sell it at for it to be more lucrative than gambling. Because if they don’t charge that much, the one guy that blows his bank account on the lottery will handily destroy the sales they’d get from the bulk who’d directly buy the items for a low price.
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
Could a Ranger play melee instead of bow? Yes. But what if you wanted to play an Archer – what profession do you pick? ArenaNet describes the “master of the bow” as the Ranger. But the Ranger’s “mastery of the bow” is not working.
This, pretty much. I like to play ranged characters. I have in every online game I played, and I hate the idea that ranged weapons are just something to use until the enemy happens to get close enough to switch to your REAL weapon or for extremely situational/quirky encounters.
I’m probably one of the ‘bad’ rangers in peoples’ eyes because I will not use a melee weapon unless a very specific circumstance comes up in which I absolutely have to (and I will be extremely annoyed in such cases). But quite frankly, if it comes down to “Melee or get out”, I’ll take the latter option. The main selling point of rangers to me was 2 (default) 1200-range weapons + Eagle-eye. If the class was never intended to be able to stay at a range and fight (and given the way the Risen behave, that does seem to be the case), then I consider that a massive failing on ANET’s part, as the lack of a class that is designed for this purpose pretty much means there’s no place for me here. I’ve tried R/LB Warrior and SB/P-P Thief, and while the mobility is a lot closer to what I wanted in the latter’s case (though still not ideal), they still seem massively kitten. :-(
Kusarigama
Kama
Double-sabers
Crossbows (or give Ranger/Thief a rifle… Or add a pure range-focused class… Just give SOMETHING that improves my capacity to fight at max-range)
Summoning stones (More like Keats’ ID usage from Folklore than a true companion summon)
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
Normally I’d be somewhat opposed to this on the grounds that it could look stupid, but honestly, people can wear the clothes wherever they want already, and if it’s going to look stupid against the Shatterer, it’s going to looks stupid in town too (or 50 feet away from the Shatterer dancing on a rock), so why not?
It’d also be grand, as it’d allow me to play a medium/heavy-armour class and not get stuck looking horrible.
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
I’m cool with new additions as long as the call for more ‘mature’ stuff isn’t actually a call for an influx of flaming skulls vomiting acid blood and the like everywhere…
Though I know they’ll go their own direction, an idea of the types of things I’d like to see are: Bow (either type) –
Ginrei Kojaku (bow materializes in front of hand when wielded and dissipates when stowed): http://i.imgur.com/syKdZIy.jpg
Greatsword -
Ragnablade ( Pure energy. Emanates from within fists when wielded and moves chaotically, growing and shrinking.): http://i.imgur.com/F6dGBL7.jpg
PSO honestly has lot of awesome stuff to take inspiration from. Though when those items are distilled down to nothing but skins, they do lose a lot of their charm ::shakes fist at PSU and PSO2::… :-(
But basically, keep it diverse and interesting and don’t just go grimdark, but glowy…
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
It would be pretty epic to have an elder dragon, or an army of it’s minions/one of it’s generals, come and crash the bash! As long as it didn’t end up as much of a lagfest as Lost Shores’ karka attacks. :P
My vote?
Instead of one of the remaining dragons showing up, at the finale, a giant hole in reality gets ripped open and suddenly an eye opens from through the rift… An eye as big as Zhaitan… The eye of the ACTUAL Zhaitan.
Turn the guy we fought into a usurper that somehow took Zhaitan’s mantle and kept him sealed away. Then use the living story to basically ‘redo’ the Zhaitan struggle. Make the Risen the mindless, unending zombie horde they should have been, show the battles to a scale that makes them seem real and credible (so none of that, “My Gods! There’s so many!” [5 guys run at you] stuff), and end it with him still around and the races barely managing to find a means to hang on. That way the dragons can become the supreme, maddening threat they sounded like prior to release.
Then carry that momentum into the first expansion and feature more heavily the other dragons there.
Basically, use the living story to try and address some of the failings of the original story rather than just focusing on random chunks of additional stuff. Make the game world feel like what the material outside the game seems to indicate it should feel like.
But eh. Won’t happen. :-(
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
Leave it as is. Having some events failing is part of the fun. What the hell is the point of these events if they don’t fail?
I want to see The Shatterer completely decimate a group, and then progress to take over the entire map unless people band together to stop him. I want to login one day and be told in guild chat that the entire map is lost and we should help try to take it back.
The problem is, the events aren’t really compelling enough for that to have the impact in-game that is conveyed when you say it.
I’d love it if the world-bosses were genuine world-level threats with huge event-chains spanning multiple zones, days of progression, etc.
But as it is, even if they did have the Shatterer take over the zone, it’d basically be, "3 minute DE where you take back camp X, 4 minute DE where you take back camp Y, etc. etkittenil you fight him pretty much as usual (and we all know how engaging that is). Then nothing major changes and he attacks again in 3 hours…
That’s what Orr was like orginally, and see what happened, everybody hated it.
What Orr was supposed to be (AFAIK, at least) was great. What it actually was? Not so much. Rather than being a huge warzone with wall-to-wall zombies and a back-and-forth battle to try and push inward, it was the same dull, disconnected cycle of events over and over, and obnoxious and tedious enemies laid out in a dragnet grid…
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
Would just be nice to have town clothes part of the actual game in general.
But yeah, this is a big want for me. Remember when it was said that all the clothes NPCs were wearing would be available to us? And there wasn’t an obvious caveat of “if you buy gems, that is.”?
Yeah… Good times…
At the very least, having the ability to dye our undergarments would be good.
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
All I know is that an MMO with a skill system akin to a Collectable Card Game would have been revolutionary…
It’s kind of funny you describe it like that, as I’ve always liked to refer to (the original) PSO’s gear system as a gear-CCG, and that was the most fun a game could be to me.
GW’s build system though? Not so much. I’ll admit that elite skill hunting was probably one of the more fun parts of the game, but all the normal skills that were just go to outpost → Buy were… less so… And that things seemed to be balanced around the idea that you would be using ‘meta’-builds though kind of put a damper on the enjoyment all those skills might have brought.
If refined and expanded on, I guess I could see the collection aspect working though. Collecting stuff (that doesn’t feel like forced and pointless bloat [IE: Achievements] is the most fun thing about games to me after all… Getting all the pets was one of the only really grand things about maining a ranger…
And hell, back in the early days before GW2’s release, one of my class ideas was for a summoner akin to Keats from Folklore. Basically, the profession mechanic would be that you could steal tkittenence from every enemy type in the game to get a unique ability utilizing that creature’s strengths.
But I suppose that wouldn’t be viable as it stands. :-(
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
Compared to other games like Scarlet Blade the item-mall here is pretty much fair. But lacking.
With the crap they pulled in Scarlet Blade, that game should never be used as a metric for these things. If it gets to the point where you have to use that as a means to display a favourable comparison, the game in question has fallen too far.
Gone for good after Halloween 2Ø12.
A shame fun things could not simply be fun.
?
