Guild Wars 2

Something as big as Gods vs Gods conjures up pretty grand things. They’re gods after all.
If Evon won, this already extremely hyped fractal will be hyped up even more in the months preceding its release. There’s no way that fractal in our minds will live up to whatever Anet may eventually make. People will say how bad it is, or might even say its Zhaitan 2.0.

I think things turned out for the better, for both ArenaNet and the players. We get a fractal that wasn’t overhyped, and so people go in with more realistic views. ArenaNet isn’t prisoned into living up to hype, and so can focus and making things work.

A lot of the enemy encounters worked this way late in those games: there’d be a roaming spread out group of mobs following some kind of semi-random path. Sometimes, one group will get close to another group and stay there for a bit, until they break away again.

The best part of it was that right before you get close, some of the more timid creatures would actually clump together and form a defensive core, as if they were scared of you. Sometimes there was one sentinel mob who scoped you out, walking out just enough to the edge of your aggro circle.

I remember when I played Nightfall a long ago, there was a specific moment where I saw the groups all moving around on screen in a savanna, and thought “wow, this looks so lively.”

I don’t really remember anything like that in GW2. They all basically charge at you without really any thought. A lot of the mobs are also all loners, waiting to die. Of course they do some cool things, like fighting other enemies, but if you engage them in anyway they just start attacking you.

VoxShatterfall.5470:

Robots can’t be mentally corrupted by certain other draconic influences.

But they CAN be reprogrammed, or be built to override their normal protection protocol to kill the Queen. More than likely by either smart Charr or Asurans.

All this hooplah seems too perfect for an assassination attempt at the queen, and I’m calling it right now, Rox and Braham will be conveniently there to save her and thus elevate their status as more important players in the GW2 world. We’re just at the start of their ascent into Trahearne-dom. (Once again, stealing our thunder )

What say you? They keep their current cycle of two weeks, but just keep it online longer. If they really keep their schedule consistent, that gives players about a month of leeway time to plan around playing the content.

Also, Torment is a perfect fit for the Mesmer, thematically speaking. I played a Mesmer in Guild Wars 1, and while other players hated it, I loved the energy denial and complete player shutdown mayhem I can cause with a good Mesmer build, and this condition reminds me of those skills.

Hey all,

Super casual here, and while it’s great that we can see anvil rock is dominating pvp because it’s the unofficial pvp server, I’d like to see who the top 20 are in my own world.

And since I’m a guardian, I’d like to know where I rank with all the guardians of the game, or maybe even only guardians on my server, if the system can even get that granular.

I know devs are rolling it out slowly to see if servers can handle the load and what not, so I’m fine with it not being in there right away.

But I think leaderboards on this granular level would be a great incentive for casual pvpers and people new to pvp, as they can have smaller, more achievable goals to work towards, rather than just the number one spot.

EDIT:
Also, so far, leaderboards have been pretty smooth, especially when clicking the next, prev, and first buttons.

At what point did you stop? Just curious.

Could you provide particular instances where they didn’t explain something clearly? I’m pretty sure most of the motivations in the story are in there somewhere, but I guess I just like digging for things.

Alternatively, set your computer clock back to april 1 for the title screen, and run SAB exclusively all day, everyday.

To the OP’s point, I’m vehemently opposed to putting any more rewards to events than it has. DEs will become very much like the Mega-Boss events we have currently, with timers everywhere , and people just grinding them out, without much care for the lore or story.

Lucas, you’re assuming that a single player game is just as easy to design as an MMO. While we’d all love for those little things you mention to happen, it just won’t happen nilly-willy in a game like GW2, unless some massive reworks to the system take place, and by that time, the game would probably look more like a GW3 with such a overhaul.

To me, it seems the team is making “big events” one time deals, where as smaller DEs will still be the way they were before.

I think the team’s conflicted – on the one hand, they want to cater to people like you, who would like to see permanence, and things that change frequently. On the other, they have to cater to people who work, have lives, kids and other responsibilities, who can’t login everyday and can only play for so long.

The best compromise I can see, is just having more DE sets in each area, and have more than a “WIN” and a “FAIL” state. A seperate chain of events for daytime, and a seperate chain of events for night. Maybe a few one off events during sunset.

Note that even this requires MASSIVE amounts of manpower, dev time, and dev testing. Making sure that events don’t collide with another and bug out. Making all connections and making sure story is consistent throughout the entire thing. Making sure that characters act within their lore, and not do something they usually wouldn’t do. Lots of little things that the average player wouldn’t even consider.

They like doing that, don’t they, trolling us with that theme.

I saw this as well on Tarnished Coast. Was wondering why I wasn’t in overflow, haha.

Can’t we have a rotation of three servers a month or something as “official” PvE servers?

This way at any given time, you have two other options where it’s guaranteed that there’ll be an above average amount of people. The monthly rotation ensures that all the servers get some sort of activity, and no one server will be burdened by extra people for more than a month.

They all went to Tarnished Coast for some reason.

I was just there a few hours ago hanging out in Divinity’s Reach, place was packed, full of regular people, RPers, and new people.

I did a few dailies out in queensdale, and well, let’s say there were moments when it felt like launch.

Picture a daily achievement for meta-events, with one catch – meta-events won’t count if they’ve been counted for in the past seven days.

Say I do one meta-event in Harathi Highlands. It counts for today’s achievement. Tomorrow, if I try to do the same one, I won’t get the achievement- I have to do a seperate meta-event to get the achievement for one day. What this does is get people around the map. What’s happening now is that people just go up to Gendarran fields for their diversity kill, and rinse and repeat that everyday. With this, you’re forced to roam around the map for different meta-events, and keep the areas more populated.

Another similar reward I was thinking of, is a kind of token that could be given after any meta-event, which can be exchanged for more fun things – (or maybe, stuff for your home instance, if they ever implement that.)

About the NPCs randomly changing: guys, it’s probably a random NPC feature generator.

Olithia, I know this issue is very close and very dear to your heart, but you have to put everything into perspective here. Guild Wars 2 is not a game just about humans anymore. They have to balance the lore, art and resources against four other wildly different species. Think about the 3D modelers – They have to have tilesets of varying features for the different races, five different architectural styles (Humans actually have three different styles, so are the most diverse), including a small sampling of the non-important races (jotun, skritt, dredge, etc.). They cannot simply focus on one race and put all their time and money into it.

In fact, I think the great collapse is a great example of the time constraints or resource scarcity that arenanet had – This would have probably been the canthan district, but I am guessing that they had to scrap it, as they didn’t think they’d have enough time and resources to meaningfully flesh out an entire canthan district. Good thing the Ossan Quarter survived the cut eh?

In terms of speaking roles, they are also constrained on time – in the first game, they only had to care about humans and their cultures. This time around, they have to balance their time and money for voices for almost every sentient thing on Tyria. We may groan about how voice actors underperform and how this and that aren’t exactly right, but just think about how many voiced things there are in the world. Think of all the cities, and all the unique dialogue they have. Think of all the different story paths, and all the voices they had to do for each one. Now imagine only about five or so people coordinating the work, among twenty five or so doing the voice work. That’s a lot of work.

In terms of Lore, they cannot solely think of humans as well. Humans have a huge backstory to cull from, but the lore guys at Anet need to think of each of the other races’ diversity as well. Their stories need to be as fleshed-out as the humans’ stories are.

Yes, I think Divinity’s Reach as it stands today could use a bit more diversity, considering it SHOULD be a melting pot. Granted, it’s the second most diverse city next to Lion’s Arch.
I acknowledge that while Anet is a big company, they are still indeed limited to time, balancing, and resources. This next part is conjecture, but I really believe that come time we have an expansion to Elona, we will indeed have a more fleshed out Ossan Quarter, along with new features for character creation specifically for elonan features (as what will probably happen for cantha as well.)

On the issue of seeing yourself in games – I am a short Filipino guy. In games in general, short people with that weird short people proportion aren’t usually seen. In Western culture, South East Asians are usually grouped with east Asians, and just collectively labled ‘Asians’. In popular East Asian culture, SEAans are sometimes seen as dark, inferior, dirty, lazy and promiscuous. I won’t argue the lazy part. Good luck finding our human counterparts in a fantasy world.
:)

^^^ New idea stemming from that -

We go to a Divinity’s Reach tavern during RP primetime, as regular people roleplaying as normal roleplayers.

One person starts it like that, and then it spreads around the room, until we’re all kodan.

“Skateboarding” and levitating while walking around was definitely the most fun for me during the entire thing.

We need to do this during RP high-time, most people who saw it just assimilated into the borg (or should I say “bearg”) collective.

“MY MOTHER DID NOT ALLOW PEPSI IN MY HOUSEHOLD”

alternatively, you could also have zone variety achievements, where you play dynamic events in different zones, similar to the kill variety achievement. That way players would be even more motivated to roam around the map.

Two possibilities:
- Large parts of urban Cantha will deteriorate, and their population will be largely contained in small isolated patches, hiding from that dragon.

-Cantha grows even more than before, making almost the entire continent an urban environment, save a few places like the jade sea.