Guild Wars 2

It’s good ANet IS listening despite their resounding silence of late giving the appearance that they are not. So good job devs. All credit where it is due, that was a pretty fast turnaround time on that.

It’s a shame two devs had to give up part or all of their weekend to fix this. All the bad publicity could have been avoided if they were more communicative and got feedback on the implementation earlier. And the devs wouldn’t have had to give up their weekend.

Ellen Kiel. She starts off as a minor NPC and becomes far more important than you thought at first.

The slightly less glorious version of that armor is available in a reward track that anyone can access.

There were no lions in the Eastern Kingdoms either, but that didn’t stop Stormwind in WoW from having lions. And they actually didn’t remember what was on Kalimdor. Tyrians haven’t lost knowledge of what was in Elona, only what it’s current status is.

Precursor crafters: Stop thinking you speak for everyone. You don’t. It’s cool if you get something you’ve been looking forward to, I even hope that you do, but stop acting like the game is broken without it or that it’s the only feature anyone cares about. Because it’s really rather minor.

All it is, is an easier way to get a shiny weapon with a slightly cooler animation than most other weapons. And the more people who get that shiny weapon, and more people WILL get them, the less prestigious it’s going to be anyway.

It’s the most predictable, but possibly least interesting thing they’re going to add in this patch.

I’m not sure why people keeping talking like it’s something major like revamping the dungeons, re-working WvW, or adding player housing. Those would all actually drastically improve the game. A few people trading one weapon skin for a slightly more fancy one really doesn’t.

Odinius.9826:

Week 2 pleeeeeeeeaaaaasssseeeeeeee let it be player housing

I sooooooo wish that were true. But it doesn’t particularly seem like it fits the other two weeks, and it’s such a major feature you’d think an entire week would be named after IT.

I’m pretty sure this isn’t the feature pack for housing.

This feels like the feature pack for the more hard core players I think. Competitive PvP, WvW, precursor crafting, commander tags, all that stuff. It’s the feature pack for the “serious business” players. The only thing that seems to be lacking is dungeons and fractals.

And that’s probably fair. They’ve been waiting for some attention for a long time. But yeah, I really want player housing more than anything. Failing that I’ll take Polymock Arena so minis are useful and exciting as rewards.

Maybe I"m strange, but those seem like they’d be a lot more exciting than a new way to grind for legendaries, which are just normal weapons with shiny effects anyway.

I’d suggest WoodenPotatoes. He has done a lot of living story based videos on YouTube.

Also this page here has a ton of info: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Living_World_season_1

Taking out spectate mode in Hot Join is NOT the solution. Watching how others play the game is fun and there’s absolutely no reason to take it out. It’s also a wonderful teaching tool. There’s absolutely no reason to throw out the baby with the bathwater, or waste a feature that it took the devs so much time to implement.

You’re all waaaaaaaaay over thinking this. Just remove the ability for us to choose our teams at all. You don’t have to worry about players trying to game the system. And players don’t have to worry about which team is ahead, or which team has the players with the higher ranks. It will all just work. Like in every other MMO with instanced PvP. We’re not rediscovering new territory here. It’s not rocket science. No other game I’ve seen has this problem. Also known as “STOP doing things different just to be different”.

Choice is not always good. There is no reason we need to be able to select our team in a quick join game style. I can’t even think of another MMO that allows you to (with good reason apparently).

This is NOT a lobby in a FPS’er game. Stop treating it that way.

No we don’t need another casual lobby type. Why have hot join at all? All you’re doing is fracturing the player base in that case.

And no, the answer isn’t saying “just use the tournament modes”. I’m a casual PvP’er. I will NEVER use those modes. It will NEVER matter what rewards you add to them. I don’t like the sort of people that join them. I don’t want to play with them or interact with them.

I just want a fun way to divert myself from what I’m usually doing in the game, get my dailies done, and make progress on my reward track. I will never care about ladders or rank points. If you force me to in some way I’ll just stop PvP’ing. And given the nature of casual players, I’m betting you lose a lot of others as well.

I’m not putting down the players who enjoy competitive PvP mind you, but I’m offering the perspective of a casual player, which is probably not heard often in this particular forum, despite most likely making up the majority of the people who play the game mode.

Don’t quote me on this but I thought I heard somewhere there is supposed to be a mid-season break and then we’ll get Feature Pack 2.

Can anyone confirm that or am I being crazy?

I think the real problem is we have no real concept of where the game is going from here. Feature Pack 1 was awesome for the most part, and the improvements to the Living Story in Season 2 and the Story Journal were great. But now no one really has any idea of what their vision of the game is going forward.

Story and open world stuff is pretty strong and getting stronger. We can expect a slow but constant evolution on that front it seems safe to say. But it DOES feel like every other part of the game is being ignored. The team swapping in sPvP ruins hot join which is the mode most people will actually use, Dungeons are nothing but a “stacking up” farming experience, and WvW has a lot of cool elements that just don’t quite come together yet. Even the removal of Daily Activities from being a daily every day seems to isolate that game type for no reason at all. It feels like every play style other than open world/living story has a fatal flaw that keeps it from being a fun experience.

I think ANet’s focus should remain on the open world and the living story as that is what sets them apart, but the complete lack of information on the other play styles is disheartening.

It also feels like they should let us know what they are working on for Feature Pack 2 so we can give feedback NOW when it’s still useful and they can change things.

We don’t need them on these forums to constantly reassure us. But we DO need the blog posts back that let us know where we’re going. Yes, not everything will make it in, yes you will be blasted on that by more ignorant fans (no fan more ignorant or childish than a precursor fanatic) but that’s the price of doing business. The silent majority of their player base should have some idea of their vision for the near future.

Between the old blog post road maps and the CDI’s I used to feel ANet was a very transparent and communicative company, and that made me root for them as a company. I still love GW2 but I don’t feel that way anymore. They feel really distant as if we’re dealing with an EA dev house or something. It makes me a little sad.

I DO like the two different shows they do “Ready Up” and “Points of Interest”. I like giving a face to the devs, it’s always a joy to see creative people who are passionate about their work, and the ANet devs are obviously that.

I doubt any kind of guild hall feature would be put into the personal home instance. Why would guild members go to YOUR personal instance over their own? I think guild halls will be their own separate thing one day and they’ll put up a guild hall stone on the gem store at that time.

It’s good to know that one day when the personal home instance actually does something this item will be available.

So now get working on making the home instance real player housing and I’ll buy one.

Any chance of a response from the devs? We love you guys, we’re just trying to help!

If GW2 is number 5 right now (comparing the games on the list with NCSoft’s financial reports), it will be interesting to see where it is after it’s been released in China for a year.

Unlike every other game on that list, GW2 has the potential to increase it’s player base, where the others have reached their plateau.

Evan Lesh.3295:

At what point are you seeing players join teams from spectator mode? Rewards are based on time played on a team, so are people forgoing partial rewards to be on the winning team?

I see it in more games than I don’t. I don’t even fault them for it. It is not spectate modes fault. It’s that we are allowed to choose our teams at all.

Here’s why this happens step-by-step:

1. Blue team dominates Red team in a smashing victory
2. New game begins, everyone is reluctant to join Red team.
3. Blue team will automatically have an extra team member over Red as people wait to see if they can get on Blue Team.
4. Game starts. Blue rushes toward capture points.
5. Red rushes toward capture points but with one less person and delayed because their last person to join waited till the absolute last second to join, so for the first 1-2 mins of the game they will be effectively two players down.
6. Blue team is firmly established on two capture points. Will maintain lead through the rest of the game in the majority of games.
7. This lasts till no is willing to join Red, then the lobby empties.
8. Everything resets with all new players.

In that situation it can get frustrating to be on Red Team. You get caught in this endless loop of always being on the losing team.

At that point it’s better to check to see if Red team has one less player, if true, then enter spectate mode, putting Red team two players under, this forces an autobalance. Once the autobalance happens, join Blue team before anyone else does.

Victory is assured.

And less rewards or not, it definetly feels like you get further on the reward track bar by doing this than losing 5 games in a row. And even if that feeling is wrong, it’s more fun to win than to be crushed every single time. It’s demoralizing. And does not make for a fun experience.

The solution is simple. It’s not to take out spectate mode, it’s to remove the ability to choose your team in the first place. If you choose spectate you cannot join until the next game. If you choose to play, you are placed in a random team.

I’m surprised this isn’t known by the devs. It’s killing hot join as a fun experience.

They already said they are actively working on putting our character’s voice back in the game. They want to make it so that the in-world cinematics allow the characters the same facial changes as the personal story had, but without the silly screen where just two characters talked at each other.

They didn’t give a timetable but it’s something they’re working on and not “we’d like to do one day”.

So it’s coming. Just not yet.

A Scruffy tonic would be awesome too.

I happen to really like the bicoincs. They’re a lot more lovable than Destiny’s Edge and I’ve grown quite attached to them. Sure I’d like to see the PC be as much a character as they are, but that doesn’t mean I’d like to see the rest go away.

For those mentioning SWTOR, when was the last time they advanced their class story? Or even the planetary story? Makeb over a year ago? Other than that they’ve only advanced the story through the usual raiding the way every MMO does. The story in GW2 advances every two weeks. And the characters may be more cheesy, but they’re also more memorable. Like in… umm… Star Wars actually.

GW2 story still matters and effects things. SWTOR’s story stopped mattering as soon as you reached max level.

I prefer the way GW2 does things.

Having said that, as much as I enjoy Marjory and Kasmeer’s romance, and the other character interactions, I do look forward to the day when they get the PC talking again and we can have interactions, friendships, and romances too.

But I don’t expect to see that in Season 2 and I can understand that. It’s a big undertaking, one that even SWTOR, who sold itself on story, hasn’t been able to do on an ongoing basis.

The problem is that ANet makes their intentions clear on a blog post that every MMO media or fansite links to. And then they later make corrections in out-of-the-way forum posts, reddit posts, ect.

The majority of the people don’t hear the corrections. Then ANet begins to communicate less so we don’t blame them for not delivering what they intended.

But the answer was never to communicate less. It’s to communicate more, and in a place easy to find. If you delay precursor crafting then SAY so when you know that is the case, in the same venue you announced it originally.

I say this as a person who couldn’t care less about precursor crafting. But I do care about the increasing lack of communication as time goes on.

Stacking is why the dungeons in GW2 have become a sad experience, and a very embarrassing fact of this game that rears it’s head whenever I try to recruit friends into spending time in Tyria.

It’s just such bad game design. GW2 is such a wonderful game and I find it truly shocking this continues to be a thing.

If ANet doesn’t do something SIGNIFICANT to break this mindset in Feature Pack 2 I’m just going to mentally write off the dungeons permanently.

I love you ANet but this one thing is sorta sad. We wouldn’t accept it in any other game, there’s zero reason we should accept it from the best MMO on the market (except in dungeons, where you’re at the bottom).

-An event calendar (that you can invite guildies and non-guildies to events, and not only does it mark in on that player’s calendar if accepted, but it sends them an in-game mail the day of the event reminding them).

As a former guild leader in WoW, I saw attendance of guild events increase dramatically after the implementation of that feature in that game.

Yes, I know guild sites usually have an event calendar, but those just don’t get player’s attention even a fraction of the amount that an in-game event calendar does.

Very much agreed.

I agree that stacking in dungeons needs to go. That is not fun game play and is just bad design. It’s a major reason I can’t recommend this game to my MMO traditionalist friends. It’s just an embarrassment that it is still a factor 2 years after launch.

I also agree we need build templates. And not just in PvP and WvW. Though that isn’t really a flaw, just a feature that would be realllllly nice.

Everything else in the OP is just personal opinion. I wouldn’t call any of the others “fundamental flaws”.

And the Living Story has been going for over a year now, it’s obviously sustainable. And until recently didn’t even touch on the dragons.

The Living Story is obviously more successful than it’s detractors realize because it’s the only MMO story people talk about on an ongoing basis. No one talks about SWTOR’s story now despite it being one of the selling points of the game, no one talks about WoW’s story unless a new expansion is coming out. It generates a lot of excitement. People talk about it the way you’d talk about your favorite ongoing comic or TV series.

Taking out the Living Story would make this game soulless and destroy one of the things that makes this game different. The Living Story is now at the heart of what makes GW2 special. It will certainly change and evolve over time (like season 2 being almost all permanent content), but it will never go away. Nor should it. Because it wasn’t there at launch people think it’s an optional add on. It’s not. It’s the core of what GW2 is now. The highly touted dynamic events from the manifesto failed to create a world that seemed alive. The Living Story is their second attempt.

Very much in support of this. Please make is so!

There’s some interesting information in there.

And did anyone notice the name of the image of Eir and the Charr? Jamie_Ro_cover_concept_art. What cover is/was it planned for? Are we getting a new GW2 novel?

Actually the characters did talk about forming a guild at the end of season 1. It centered around the conversations where Rox was going back to the Stone Warband and Braham said they’d form the guild without her.

And the Pact seems to be making a return. In the Lion’s Arch aftermath patch there was a Pact airship hovering over Lion’s Arch as noted above. That’s an obvious prelude to their reintroduction to the story.

Though I personally hope that Mordremoth hits the Pact hard and it splinters. The three Orders were more interesting on their own.

She was giving a prepared speech. It’s supposed to feel forced. I’m pretty sure it was deliberate.

I think it’s pretty cool. I couldn’t care less about being 2nd in command of the pact or Traeherene, and the biconics are way more interesting and have more engaging personalities than Destiny’s Edge. This is exactly the kind of thing that people have been asking for.

Also, I can see why we might be made the leader, we’re the only character that knows everyone from before the Nightmare Tower (except Taimi).

It would be neat to link it all together with the team voting for us to be leader BECAUSE of our experience in the Pact.

As for the 2 million hero thing, how is that any different than 2 million people being fellows of the group? There isn’t any. You’re just picking nits. No one else is the leader of the biconics. Not in the context of the story. And since you can’t see someone else’s personal story I fail to see how that ever comes up. You’re just over thinking it out of some archaic notion that you should just be a farmer or soldier in an MMO.

Skan.5301:

I’m quite certain that ANet’s definition of permanant is vastly different than that of the player’s definition is.

This also goes for words and phrases like “expansion’s worth, soon, working as intended, exciting, new content” to name a few.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Sigh. I don’t suppose the naysayers will believe a word of it.

Still, the part about an expansion’s worth of content sitting ready to go is promising. =)

Remember the expansion’s worth of content we were supposed to get during January of 2013? Because I don’t remember getting it. Most of the non disillusioned are still waiting on it.

Actually that remark was meant to say “an expansions worth of features”. They corrected it soon after but no one noticed. Corrections are never noticed.

Now we wonder why they don’t tell us anything. That’s why. Players who are just knowledgeable enough to repeat these things on blogs and forums more than a year after, but too ignorant to know the full context.

I feel like we’re going to be in the dark from now on because of the forum/blog ragers. It’s really unfortunate.

That’s pretty awesome, great photos. Makes me excited to attend the next anniversary bash if they’re holding it again this year just to feel a little bit of that here.

I’d really love it if the Shatterer statue and the Zoijja usb hub got released in the store here on the website. We haven’t gotten any new merchandise in a long time.

Yes, Dragon Ball is soooooo potentially awesome. I really hope they fix the afk thing.

Aww… no Dragon Bash this year?

They removed one holiday and consolidated two more. It seems they expect us to be busy the rest of the summer with something else… I wonder why that could be?

For those complaining about “recycled content”, we ALWAYS knew these events were coming back. It makes sense to do it now before S2 gets started so they don’t distract from it, and it’s an event that keeps us busy, and enhances rather than distracts the new China players from their launch month.

It’s a good move. S2 will come soon enough.

Are you guys holding a GW Anniversary Bash this year?

I know you guys are busy with the China launch but an official announcement on this before PAX Prime tickets go up for registration would be nice. That way we can plan our time before buying tickets.

There’s no reason to get a ticket for a day there when I’m going to be spending it with you guys.

I’d guess it’s August 31st like last year but I’d hate to assume and be wrong.

I feel this is the only thing you can truly say that “I think I speak for all players” and have it be true.

But true it is.

I was actually surprised it wasn’t in the first feature pack. It’s something that benefits literally every player in the game. I’d have thought they’d want that in before the China launch too.

Actually, before Easter was a Christian holiday, it was a holiday celebrating fertility. That’s where the bunnies and eggs come from.

We probably won’t hear anything till after the China release.

Basket of Boxes.1976:

Anet just can’t win with the dailies, if there are too many dailies you have people complaining that they HAVE to spend 4 hours every day just finishing all the dailies. These new dailies you can still get your 5/5 in 15 minutes most of the time and you can finish all 10 in an hour so I think they will keep this system. At worst PvPers have to spend 5 minutes in PvE chopping a few trees if they want their daily.

The people who did that are such a small part of the population they shouldn’t matter. No one cares about the leaderboards. I’ve never once heard a friend, guildie, or anyone in map chat EVEN ONCE talk about the leaderboards. It’s a non-issue. The illusion that it matters is why it was a mistake to ever create leaderboards for anything other than sPvP.

I seriously doubt Achievement Point hunters are the reason they did this. Especially since they capped it anyway. Much more likely is they are trying to funnel us to different game modes. But that’s unneeded as well. The reward tracks are awesome. If those can’t get casual PvE’ers into PvP then they never will. If WvW needs help then up the season rewards again. But don’t take away choice. That’s what the daily achievements were supposed to give us. They were supposed to give us a short term goal anytime we logged on, doing anything we felt like doing.

Anything that takes away from that simple goal is losing sight of the forest for the trees. It’s as simple as that.

Don’t lose sight of the big picture ANet. This is a casual friendly game. This is a casual unfriendly move and it effects every player, pretty much every day.

They need to at least bring the daily activity back every day. It’s a DAILY activity. It’s right there in the name. And not having it there is going to lessen the amount of people playing those mini-games.

It’s also usually the most fun daily to do. Except on crab toss day. I hate crab toss day.

But it will be easier to get transmute charges, at least as long as you’re willing to do some sPvP as the new reward tracks will give out four per track and you can repeat them as much as you want.

And if they’re willing to give them out so much there, perhaps we’ll see them as rewards more often in other game modes too.

And we still don’t know if completing a zone after the patch gives one charge or three.

There are seasons to the living story. It’s the terms ANet themselves use. They liken the living story to a TV story, and the Scarlet storyline was what they call season one.

At the end of season one she woke up the dragon Mordremoth, the last dragon who was still asleep. Now season 2 is about Mordremoth (and likely the Sylvari, the dream, and the nightmare).

I can’t say when season 2 starts. My guess is June, in time to steal some of ESO’s and Wildstar’s thunder. But that’s just a guess.

I’m betting we’ll hear more after the feature patch comes out. If they told us now, people would get confused and think that the content is coming in the feature patch.

The season will probably start with a normal living story event in Brisbane Wildlands, then ramp up to introducing the new zones.

If you’d posted it in a thread about lack of content then it’d just be a complaint. But taking the new drums, which is actually kinda a cool item to add to the gem store, with some nice implications for old and forthcoming instruments on top of that, and then turning that into a complaint that has nothing to do with musical instruments in this game sorta makes it seem like whining.

You took something fun, and then twisted it into a way to complain about something important to you but that has nothing to do with the drums at all.

I want player housing myself. That’s my pet feature/content I want to see. We ALL have our pet projects we want ANet to work on. But if I want to complain about the lack of player housing I create a thread about player housing.

The end to the season 1 story pretty much hit us over the head with the fact that we’re going to be seeing new zones in the west, past Metrica Province and Brisbane Wildlands.

-Mordremoth is out there, and he’s the new big baddie.
-Marjory’s sister is heading to Brisbane Wildlands to investigate black market activity (i.e. the bandits).
-There are two exits to zones we can’t get to in Brisbane Wildlands.
-There is a bandit fortress with level 80 bandits, it holds one of those exits.

Marjory’s sister is going to that fortress. Something dramatic will happen. New zones to explore will open up. It’s not a big secret.

I am excited about it actually. I hope they add the new recording and loop functionality to the old instruments. It’s actually pretty cool.

And we’re getting new zones with season 2. We already know that. Why are you still whining about something we know isn’t going to be a problem? And why are you using a cool new toy in the gem store as the method to do it?

Question for the devs: Any chance this will work with daily activities? Because being in mini-games with my friends and guildies instead of it being totally random would be awesome.

This is potentially a great system and possibly what GW2 needed the most. But it really needs a tagging system so that players have some control over how the system sees them. No matter how wonderful the system is, that it’s in the background with no player input is sub-optimal. If that’s coming, even if it’s going to take some time to implement, it’s better that you announce it now than try to play mysterious with us.

RP’ers and Boss Raiders are two communities that could be endangered by this. It’s impossible to rebuild a community once it’s destroyed, you can only build a new one. A slow and painful process. Panic spreads faster than truth or corrections. And nothing destroys a community faster than panic.

I’m not sure it was wise to spread this information over three days to be honest.

I’m in complete support of the ability to tag yourself with different play styles such as RP. There’s no reason to stop there either. Tagging yourself “casual, heart quester, boss farmer, event chaster ect” would be wonderful. The players should have more control over how the system sees us rather than everything being in the background.

Will world exploration give transmutation charges? Perhaps other reward systems might award them as well? And in what amount? Because right now it seems like it’s three times more expensive to transmute items for level 1-79 characters than it was before the feature pack. That doesn’t seem a value for a player’s money given how short a time you keep equipment while leveling up.

The ending to the Living Story Season 1 made it quite clear we are getting new zones in the Magumma Jungle and Wastes soon.

My reaction hasn’t changed at all. I was super excited about the changes, but slightly disappointed there is no way to “save” a look, and I’m still super excited about the changes, but slightly disappointed there’s not way to “save” a look.

Pretty much my reaction to the trait revamp where I was super excited about the changes but disappointed there was no way to save a trait build.

They ALMOST checked off two of my top five wanted features, but fell JUST short of it.

It seems like we have a lot of exciting news but some points that need to be clarified. People have just had more time to think of questions that need that clarification. Hopefully ANet will clarify them quickly.

They list a charge cost because you can now preview all the skin transmutations and any dye changes, and then make all the changes at once with a single click.

The cost is there only for transmutations, not dye changes. In that picture the player is changing dye colors, but is not transmuting anything, so the cost is zero.