Guild Wars 2

Nuka Cola.8520:

funny cuz after 5y of gw1 its the only dungeon i never even tried even tho every other dungeon i spent months/years on. All i want is uw/fow kind of dungeon in gw2

A friend of mine and I were talking about the GW1 and GW2 similarities the other day. I can’t remember which of us made this comment, but one of us said that they had missed FoW until they realized that every single zone is FoW; a series of events that you complete until you complete them all and get your reward chest. There was no reason to make a dungeon like that because the entire world already followed that design.

Similarly, Urgoz / Deep are akin to fractals, but with randomly chosen paths. Instead of 12 fixed gimmick rooms, you get 3-4 gimmicks chosen from a pool, and 3 sets are chained together, giving you roughly the same content, but with the random twist that prevents you from preparing for everything up front.

I could easily see the DoA design being applied to dungeons with a final path, which requires you to complete the prerequisite paths first, following the DoA model. I never actually finished DoA, but I did enjoy it (running heroes or heroes + wife limited my options, and we both absolutely reject consumable abuse). The challenge was largely in the preparation, but that was always the case in GW1. The key design, as I see it, was the resetting progression that culminated in a boss battle and ewarded groups that could handle the varied challenges in each section in sequence. The environmental effects were relatively cheap, but given the lack of environmental interaction, they were a reasonable substitute; I want to say that the frostbite, darkness, etc. effects in fractals are a modern-day replacement.

EliteZ.1682:

I don’t really see how this would make a big impact on this game, most games don’t have monthly updates and then i would see this being an amazing idea.

However, as Anet are releasing a update every month anyway it’s basically the same, we write our suggestions/bugs/glitches here so that anet can fix them when they can depending on how important they are.

I would much rather anet work on the most important issues first and worry about the small cosmetic things when they have time to. This idea would force anets resources to work on these ideas instead of working on other issues that might be much more important

+1 to this.

In an industry where updates on a 6-month cycle are considered frequent, monthly updates of the scale we have been receiving (noting that this includes the iniital post-release support and a lot of major holidays) accomplishes the same or better, im[ns]ho.

Classic reasons to not implement conventional trading:

• Chat spam related to selling. Sure, you can turn it off, but that isn’t always enough, and people will sell in any channel in the interest of getting a sale/seller.
• Disputes between players; honest mistakes, false advertising, bait-and-switch, whatever form it takes, there are issues. When issues happen, somebody has to step in to arbitrate the situation; this is not something that builds a positive, cooperative community.
• It allows another user to impact your UI. This seems like a minor thing, but all it takes is a shout of “soandso is giving away 100g to the first 10 people to find him and open a trade window. seriously, he is, i’m not making this up—i was the first!” to make legitimate trading temporarily impossible for a single player.

Classic reasons to implement:

• I don’t like the 15% tax on the TP.
• Bypass message suppression that should be modified to exempt guild and party members.

I’m with the “bugs and tweaks” crowd. The one change I’d like to see is to have the kit toolbelt abilities swapped with the utility skills; F-key to pop out/put away the kit, regular utility skill to use the whatever ability.

Fabsm.5897:

Fildydarie.1496:

AdaM.6735:

Crafting is terrible in this game. Only used for 10 levels.

You’re absolutely right. I had absolutely no advantage by having a full set of gear prepared for myself every 5 levels. There is no way that this was useful at all.

All those potions I made? Well, I sold a lot, but I an’t argue with the buffs and exp bonus from them. Same with the food I made.

Those weapons I crafted? No, I didn’t make money selling them to people trying to gamble on ectos and precursors.

You’re absolutely right, there is no advantage to crafting; I could have just spent more money have the same result.

It depends on what you perceive as “advantage”.
If the “advantage” is having better gear at any level, you’re playing the wrong game (limited gear progression).

The advantage, as in all thing in GW2, is the ability to choose. You can choose to craft your armors/weapons instead of doing 20 dungeon runs to be able to have the stats you want.

I have maxed all crafting professions and didn’t regret it. Spent these 30g, when they were scarce, i have a title to be proud of, and if some friend would like to play this game, i can easily provide them with a better than average starting gear.

Remember, in this game “advantage” doesn’t mean “better gear”.

I define advantage as self-relative, not community-relative. So, when I said that having all that gear set aside gave me an advantage, what I meant was I was stronger than I would have been had I not pursued crafting.

You are completely right that advantages over other players tend to be skill-based, not gear-based, but that is not what I was talking about.

I didn’t really have much of an issue, but my wife and son did. There are clear playstyle differences that were likely an impact.

My son does not watch the minimap for resources. Thats strike 1 against him; he will walk right past a node because he doesn’t know it is there. He also doesn’t 100% zones—strike 2. Lastly, he is a coward. He overstays a zone because he is afraid of the challenge in the next zone (after 80 levels of that, the mid-70s blues he was wearing were just a touch underpowered for him) so he never has access to appropriate resources. Strike 3; he can’t craft.

My wife is OCD when it comes to nodes; if it appears on the minimap, it is being harvested. Period. She does 100% zones, but not always, and completing at a casual pace means she gets a nice chunk of exp from repeating dailies, which means out-leveling content, which in turn leads to skipping over zones that have some materials. That said, she keeps her tradeskills close to level-appropriate; she goes out of her way to acquire the materials she needs. By keeping skills current, the pain of retro-harvesting materials is lessened.

I leveled fast; my goal was to 100% at least one zone a day (noting that I only really got to play 2 days a week). My OCD isn’t as bad when it comes to harvesting nodes, but I look out for them and will go out of my way for something I need (carrots and onions are not on the ‘need’ pile, but you can never have too much copper). Because of the zones I visited and the pace at which I leveled, I hit an iron shortfall, but had an overabundance of all other materials. Had I spent more time in Harathi Hinterlands, it probably wouldn’t have been a problem; 100%ing the zones prior and using my main to help out my family members boosted me enough to skip the 35-45 tier of zones.

ANet has challenged a lot of the fundamentals of MMO design. Nowhere have they said the don’t want to create interesting, complicated encounters, to the contrary, they have insisted they want to make content that is not exclusionary. You should be able to play the game and reap fair rewards for experiencing the content you enjoy. That fairly accurately sums up the key design elements; they know they need more large, organized content, but it takes effort and appeals to a subset of the player base—they have a full plate but are delivering new content and they are responsive… but 4 months is not a lot of time.

Other MMOs, including but not limited to WoW, didn’t have the content for which they are currently known at release+4 months.

Give GW2 time. The basic design has merit, a more idealized implementation will follow; it happened in EQ, it happened in WoW, it happened in GW1.

Highly.8347:

domxnik.1453:

I don’t think we really need this in the game. Other games put in dps meters, and we all know what that caused.

People being able to know what helps their damage output? Being able to gauge if someone is really slacking off? Your bias against DPS meters isn’t unwarranted, a lot of people can’t read recount meters because they look at the black and white data and run with it. If GW2 was to offer a DPS meter, they need to allow parsing to show where the damage was done, who did it, and who did it target, so we can see EFFECTIVE DPS.

I’d love this, but I’m also one of those who looked at recount to see things like “70% of my damage was from this spell, so a 10% boost to that skill would do more for me than a 5% boost to all my damage.” I’m the minority in that regard. Who ever looked at the support metrics? Very few did; but you took healers and support players because you needed them. GW2 says you need the roles, but not a dedicated player. I trust well-informed players to get it right and see support for what it is and use mined data responsibly, but I also expect the majority of players would use it irresponsibly. I’d rather forfeit the knowledge to protect the character of the community.

Self-only meters might accomplish both goals, but it is questionable.

AdaM.6735:

Crafting is terrible in this game. Only used for 10 levels.

You’re absolutely right. I had absolutely no advantage by having a full set of gear prepared for myself every 5 levels. There is no way that this was useful at all.

All those potions I made? Well, I sold a lot, but I an’t argue with the buffs and exp bonus from them. Same with the food I made.

Those weapons I crafted? No, I didn’t make money selling them to people trying to gamble on ectos and precursors.

You’re absolutely right, there is no advantage to crafting; I could have just spent more money have the same result.

xCrusadentx.2784:

Hmm. Interesting notion indeed. However, stats on armor should not go party wide. Why? It doesn’t make much sense. Saying MF boost should go to all party members is like saying the toughness of someone’s rumor should go to all. It’s a stat you choose to have in place of another. IMO, it shouldn’t be touched at all, and is fine as it is. Let everyone hate on it if they will, people need to get over the obsession with it “weakening the party”. Bad players who won’t cooperate delay success, not a stat.

Lets be completely fair here: taking MF on your gear does impact your performance. It may not be by a lot, it may be almost completely insignificant (especially depending on your build), but it does have an impact.

Bad players tend to have a larger impact on a group than good players in MF gear.

Bad players will always be bad players, no matter what you do to stats. Selfish players will always be selfish players, too. Close-minded players… well, you sense the trend.

MF% is the difficulty setting. Set the level for your group before you start and trust people to comply with the request. If you have reason to believe they are not, then address the issue. Kick them from the party if you have to. But, for the love of Melandru grow a pair and talk to your groupmates like they are adults and solve your own problems before asking mom and dad to come in and force them to play nice. You don’t have to group with jerks, there are plenty more people out there that would love a spot—I recall one time where I could have finished off the last 2 spots in a group (wife and I) but we left because one person in the group was a jerk; the group chose the jerk over us, so we left, started our own group, and finished before they did.

“Selfish stats” are such a hollow argument when I don’t even have to wear gear at all. I can enter a dungeon naked if I choose to; I can wear the cheapest armor I can find, I can take off my helm and shoulders and you would never know. I can elect to not use consumables, I can run away and hide, I can bring sub-par skillsets, I can save 3g10s by not buying any trait books… you have so much power to undercontribute in ways completely unrelated to gear that the people fighting to “fix” this issue are missing the larger point—you’re ignoring the fact that you’ve chosen to approach this as a witch hunt and the only solution that will actually meet your ends will require you to interact with your group mates and trust them… and then punish them should they establish the trust was misplaced.

Being an adult is hard, isn’t it?

Why would you want to fix an encounter designed to require more than just DPS? It sounds like it is the one encounter that works right to me.

Rimour.9260:

In guild wars 1 they have the monk profession, so i guess it would be pretty easy to bring that class back. But if they do they will have to intro Cantha cause most of the monks are form there. Dervish would also be nice to see and most of them are from Elona.

Monks and paragons merged disciplines to form the Guardian class. Any attempt to recreate a monk would either be a repeat of the guardian or sufficiently unlike GW1 monks that the similarity is limited to name.

Dervishes (and Ritualists) have lore issues coming back in their old forms. While there is nothing to say that scythes can’t be added as weapons, dervishes were holy warriors, and the asura don’t really revere the human gods the way humans do, to say nothing of the charr’s opinion on the matter. One of the drawbacks of multiple races is the need for a class system that is not steeped in the lore of an individual race.

It has been stated many times that there is an appeal process if you feel it is necessary.

It has also been stated that RMT companies hijack accounts to run as bots.

It has also been stated that some people run bots in off-hours and play normally during regular hours (a friend of mine used to bot diablo 2 whenever he wasn’t actively playing it).

While it sucks to be one of the stastically few false positives, accidents happen (and there is a review process), but as was established with the banned-for-chat-violations thread a long time back, most of the people proclaiming innocence were guilty.

If there is a connection, most likely it has to do with the nature of magic. The human gods, as I understand it, drew their power from the bloodstone, which was meant to store and protect all magic which had not yet been corrupted by the dragons. The dragons consumed all magic they could find. If they thrive on different aspects of magic, it would just mean that they are not in direct competition for food with each other, which would explain how such ravenous creatures could coexist.

Knight.1084:

Blueshield.6291:

runeblade.7514:

I am all for this, this is a great tool for kicking people.

Don’t have ascended rings with enough infusion? Kick.

Don’t have full exotics? kick.

Using magic find? kick.

Yep, I really want to kick the parasites and leechers.

ANet has stated that they don’t want GW2 to be a gear-grind for players; so disallowing inspection prevents people like you from imposing your requirements on other players.

Yeah, but that on the downside also is more “single player” if you get me…

There is a jump in your logic that I just don’t get. I don’t understand how encouraging interaction and conflict resolution skills between players makes it less of a MMO. I don’t understand how elitism and features to facilitate exclusionary play make it more of a MMO. If anything, you have it backwards; not supporting inspection makes it more of a MMO.

Yumiya.3951:

The plushie is great! I really wish Arenanet makes a rl version out of it, I’m a little jealous of my character having one!

I’m planning to make one for my daughter. I’ll probably need to make several, in fact. Hopefully my RL tailoring skill is up to snuff.

Upscaling is a very complicated issue. The short answer is that armor contributes to stats, and your stats are upscaled. So in a way, yes, your armor is upscaled.

However, when you look at stat balance over levels and how upscaling works, it becomes a lot more confusing. For brevity, I’ll just leave it at this:

If you are wearing top-of-the-line gear for your level and have all your trait points spent, you will be scaled roughly to the stat equivalent of an 80 with top-of-the-line level 80 gear with all trait points spent.

However:

• Some stats are only available on high-end gear.
• Some stats (magic find, critical damage %) don’t scale.
• Maintaining top-end gear below the level cap is difficult because as soon as you level, it ceases to be top-end gear. 80s have an advantage in aiming for a fixed point instead of a moving target.
• 80s tend to have more skills unlocked as well as more major/minor traits. Many of these have effects that cannot be offset by stats.
• Food is scaled too.
• If you aren’t wearing a piece of armor, there is nothing to scale up (back slot, accessories, rings, amulet, helm, and shoulders being the typical culprits)

Shiren.9532:

I don’t want to post my character name on a website. It’s a common trend in MMOs for third party websites which receive account information (such as character names) to result in less account security (such as being hacked in some way). I know the website doesn’t collect email addresses or passwords, but I find it best practice to avoid posting my account information anywhere outside of the game (the official forum is an exception for me).

Your character name is hardly sensitive content. First of all, it is here, right now, alongside this forum post. Anyone that wants to harvest account names can do so. They have been known to harvest from in-game as well. GW2LFG asks for nothing but a character name, which is about as safe as it ever gets.

Why don’t they just add a new cross server chat channel for every dungeon in the game? Add an option to the drop down box for chat channels for players to select a specific dungeon. This could open a new chat channel which shows every other player looking to do that specific dungeon. Until we get a proper LFG tool, a way to centralise the players looking for a group for this content without requiring them to sit in LA spamming (and limiting them to their server population) would be incredibly valuable.

The last time this was attempted, Alderaan exploded. Millions of voices cried out and were suddenly silenced. Seriously, though, chat spam from a wider audience but focused on a specific topic sounds like a good idea on paper, but sifting through too much data can be as bad or worse than not having enough. Don’t forget the first rule of chat spam: if your text has been scrolled out of the chat window, it is time to spam again. Yes, it can work, but it can also backfire. I’d rather wait and get the right tool for the job.

We already have chat channels, it’s an existing mechanic in the game. Other games allow players a way to create their own chat rooms, so it wouldn’t be a dramatic coding effort to add a few chat rooms for dungeon groups. It’s a simple fix which would dramatically alleviate the issues players are currently dealing with when trying access this content. Until a proper LFG tool is implemented I’d love to have a cross server chat channel dedicated to each dungeon.

I’ve written 5 “chat” servers in my lifetime. Of those, only three supported user-defined channels, and the other two were specifically designed to avoid them. There are design considerations and depending on the chosen implementation and requirements, it may or may not be a trivial affair.

Of course, you have a lot of considerations with user-defined channels. What moderation options exist? How will offline moderators be handled? Is there an auto-promote when no moderators exist? How do you restrict access to private channels? How are channels identified? How do you disseminate channel information to users?

Just the work of planning the implementation is non-trivial.

gw2lfg is a nice stopgap solution. It is the right tool but not in-game; that is the one drawback. It doesn’t even require email addresses, just in-game contact info.

Don’t look at 7 as 5 with 2 on the sidelines, look at it as a group of 4 and a group of 3 with an additional 3 prospective new friends. This is how my guild approaches dungeons and we’ve met far more players worth noting as friends than we have players worth avoiding.

In open-world content, we often don’t even bother grouping.

I don’t remember the orbs being in the discovery pane for me, I seem to recall I just had to buy the exotic recipies to use them.

Gaudrath.6725:

So wait, let’s say I read up on a MF recipe here on the forums, if I put those items inside there is a chance that Zomorros is just going to gobble them up and give me a big wet burp back for my trouble?

If so, is there a way to torture mystical genies in this game?

For the first part: Some recipies have fixed yields, some have random (within certain parameter) yields. So it vaires. If you put in the materials to make a Rusttooth, you will get a Rusttooth. If you put in the materials for a level 80 exotic, you will get a level 80 exotic—of course, the exact parameters of that exotic are subject to a degree of randomness, however, the recipie only guaranteed level and rarity. Similarly if you put in the materials to upgrade t5 materials to t6 materials, you will get the t6 materials, but the exact number is randomly determined.

For the second: I’m looking forward to the addition of a djinn waterboarding mini-game.

Berengar.6951:

TWMagimay.9057:

Fildydarie.1496:

33/100 is straight-up 33%, only slightly less.

What do you mean, slightly less?!

Well 33% is slightly less than 1/3 which is equal to 33.33333333333333….%

Yes, that is exactly what I meant. Upon re-reading my post, I suppose the context of “relative to 1/3” was omitted for brevity, although I had hoped it would be implied.

My goal was to point out that probabilities determined from experimentation in the short term are great for approximating small yields, but just a tiny variation that wouldn’t be noticed in a small run can throw off the probabilities of large sample sets by several orders of magnitude. That being the case, I glossed over some of the details both initially and when I proofread, and I apologize for that. I swear by Grenth’s hoary nipples it will not happen again.

Edit: went back and edited my previous post to use a semicolon instead of a comma. Hopefully that makes the meaning clearer. A full rewrite would, but I don’t have the time for that, sadly.

Quick fix for the minipets: Put them in an invisible bag (or similar) It prevents deposit-all-collectibles from affecting the mini that way.

Zorada.9457:

For me GW2 is funny in that its supposed to be about guilds but does not really encourage guilds in the way i thought it would

The Guild Wars were an event in the history of the GW world in which many powerful guilds waged wars against each other. This in-fighting led to Ascalon falling to the Charr, Orr blowing itself up (to fend off the charr) and Kryta falling under the leadership of the white Mantle (and the Mursaat—to fend off the Charr as well).

The notion of infighting leading to weakness which is exploited by one’s enemies is a recurring theme.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/The_Guild_Wars

Terrahero.9358:

10x is for gamblers.
1x is the safe bet.

Still, with 1x i needed 378 to get 67 clovers. I got the last 10 a few days ago using the 10x recipe, got lucky there.
So even with the 1x recipe you can still have big differences in the amount of effort someone has to put in. And i personally question the correctness of 33% chance to get a clover. All the wiki uses as a source for that number is 159 1x attempts. Not exactly a large sample. My sample is more then twice as big with less then half the dropchance (around 17%)

I’ve questioned 33% for a while. Over a large number of samples, a small change in the base odds has a profound effect.

1/3 is what people tend to accept as the chance.
33/100 is straight-up 33%; only slightly less.
77/250 is 30.8%
3/10 rounds out the low end that I typically look at and is close enough to the top that people wouldn’t notice a significant difference over the short run.

Over 378 trials, the chances of any one result are pretty small, but the relative chance is easy enough to compare without an obscene number of decimal places:

• 1/3 -> Base
• 33/100 -> 2.4 times as likely as at 1/3
• 77/250 -> 546 times as likely as at 1/3
• 3/10 -> 3342 times as likely as at 1/3
• 1/5 -> about 5.8 billion times as likely as at 1/3 (2.85%).
• 17/100 -> about 10 billion times as likely as at 1/3 (5%).

I threw in some significantly lower yields to show the relative odds. I’ve seen a lot of results from people that suggest the yield is lower than 1/3, however, I have to admit sampling bias because people seldom come forward when they gave a good yield, only a bad yield. Right now I’m sitting at a 24/35 yield, which I know is not typical.

Komuflage.2307:

minekaoru.4095:

hey, sometimes you got wife/baby aggro. it’s not related to age. One of the pug members’ baby woke up yesterday when we’re inside TA and he needed to leave.

I don’t understand why that would be a reason to leave.
From my own experience I play in a group of 5 where 2 of us have small children, if there is any problem (They wake up, they start to scream etc) we just take a brake and let them handle their children, and once that’s done we continue playing, in a 4-5H playing season we maybe have to w8 20-30 minutes and personally, I don’t see that as a problem.

20-30 mins lost for a 4-5 hour session is a much better ratio than I can manage. I’m lucky to be able to complete my dailies while my youngest is awake. My wife and I wait for the kids to fall asleep before starting a dungeon, but one loud noise, bad dream, or other distraction later, we’ve got a 2-year old on a lap that wants to sleep, cuddle, push the keyboard away, and make us jump (asurans, don’t jump, they hop—because they look like rabbits to her).

If the older two are up, well, the poblems they cause scale up with age. Suffice to say, as a general rule, any kid-based interruption means our gaming session ends for the night.

As noted, this is not related to to age—this happens to people all the time. One of my favorite stories involves a kid stopping a BWL raid in WoW by saying “hold on guys, my mom is making me clean my room.” However, this could just as easily have been “hold on guys, my son just got home from school and it is repot card day, I have to go make him ice cream or beat him, I’m not sure which yet” or “my daughter just ran in the door crying” or “the baby woke up” or “work just called, I need to go to the office now” (saw this one many times; favorite reason: there was an office fire the day before a major audit) or “the baby just fingerpainted the walls with poop” (not my baby, thankfully, but I’ve seen this one before) and the ever-classic “afk; cat on fire”. The other night one of our members stopped early on in the cliffside fractal and didn’t answer right away. After a little while, he came back with the comment “Sorry, i was vomiting. I think i got the flu.” He finished the run (with many AFKs), but it goes without saying we didn’t ask him to carry the hammer.

These things happen and are generally beyond your control. As I’ve gotten older, I find I actually have more issues pulling me away from the game, not fewer, and they are more likely to be of the have-to-deal-with-it-now variety.

I use a lot of food (having 2 cooks myself, plus overflow food from my wife, I have a lot that needs to be used as it has no market value). That said, I am often without a food buff because I was unaware it wore off. I have a lot of food for WvW, but it always wears off without me noticing and I don’t use more than 1-2/night as a result.

Sorry for the vague title. If I included the necessary keywords, this thread would undoubtably be derailed into a troll’s nest within seconds.

In an old MUD a group of my friends played, there were two separate servers. The first was the normal game server, the second was the bot server. The former supported scripting actions so long as you were at the keyboard—the scripts were a key feature to executing a lot of complicated actions. The latter supported full, unassisted scripting.

I’m fascinated by AI, especially in the context of teamwork and communication. I would love to see what the community could do with an army of bots. There is, of course, the very real effect that bots have on an economy. I would love to have a bot-only server cluster; isolated economy, no transfers, isolated WvWvW, etc.

I don’t expect this to happen, but it is something I’ve wanted for a long time.

kiba.2768:

by your definition, the whole game is rng, which is too broad.

but what i think everyone means by rng is the fact that you can’t reliably get 77 clovers within a reasonable amount of time…but the other components you can.

That is sort of my point. People keep saying “RNG this” and “RNG that” but the whole game is based on the RNG. This is like getting a cancer diagnosis and blaming the doctor—the same doctor that treated all your other ailments.

The RNG is just the messenger. The whole point of clovers is that you have to demonstrate luck (in addition to hoarding karma and exp and exploring). A Gift of Mastery is supposed to represent grinding every aspect of the game—and luck is one such aspect.

People assume that getting worse than 1-in-3 means they are taking longer than the dev’s assumed would be required. Perhaps the odds were set based on 99.999% being successful within 500 attempts (or thereabouts—haven’t done the math, but you get the idea), rather than just declaring 1-in-3 is the way to go.

You can get 77 clovers in a reasonable span of time with a large degree of reliability. There are no guarantees, just like there are no guarantees on having DEs trigger how you want, or guarantees on enemies not spiking you to death over and over, or guarantees on loot received from enemies.

There is, however a reasonable expectation, and what is happening is that people are blaming the RNG because the expected level of effort is more than they want. Some people have much worse luck than others—that happens; luck is a fundamental part of any game. These people must expend additional effort, but the beauty of RNG-based systems is they have no memory. If you were colossally unlucky on your first attempt, the chance of having better luck on your second attempt is much higher (or, in the case of bernouli tests like this, the chances are unchanged, which is still ‘better than my average’). With accumulating success, you’ll get there eventually. Sure, it is possible to try to make clovers from now to the end of time and never get 1, but lets face it—chances are that won’t happen. At billion-to-one odds you’re looking at ~750 attempts for 77 clovers. This is not entrely unreasonable, it is just more than people want to do.

Downscaling makes this less than ideal.

I wnat to run AC on my 34 Elementalist, so I fire up the chat for that level range to find a group.

My 80 guardian wants to do the same, so I need to look in all the channels from 30-80.

It is easier to either go to the dungeon or Lion’s Arch to find a group. 80s would face the spam of everybody’s level-range chatter, everywhere. Or, if they are excluded from it, can’t find groups with lower-level players.

maddoctor.2738:

You don’t know how downscaling works at all, right? And you obviously haven’t done any low level dungeons have you? Your gear AND your traits are downleveled as well as your base stats when you go to a lower level dungeon. Don’t compare dungeons with lower level zones, there is a huge difference, lower level dungeons are competitive and hard even for level 80s with full exotics. This has nothing to do with “elitists” and “hard” and “easy” dungeons or facerolling, it’s just an imbalance that exists in the game and needs to be fixed, reading the posts above should’ve made that pretty clear

I’ve delved into scaling details and stat progression and all sorts of other stuff. Hundreds of hours (including all of BWE2) devoted to this. Maddoctor has it right. Everything* gets scaled.

*MF% might not be scaled, other stats that have less-obvious effects might not be scaled, either. I still have tests to run on certain combinations and whatnot, but for basic stats including health, vitality, power, etc., this has all been confirmed.

A far simpler and less controversial solution is to agree, as a group, how much MF gear each person will wear, and set the stage that way.

I don’t disagree that people that bring MF gear when the group wants them in combat gear are a problem, but so are people in combat gear that don’t know how to play their class, that face-tank and autoattack, that don’t use utilities and elites, etc.

You will find problem players everywhere you go, no matter what the mechanics are. You can work with them, you can kick them, or you can tolerate them. The choice belongs to you and the rest of the group.

My 2-year-old wanted to go down the slide at a park a little while back. She climbed to the top and, just before she could sit to go down, another kid rushed in front of her to go first. She let him. When he did it again later, she yelled at him. The third time, she pushed him out of her way and went down herself. I was proud of her for that. At two years old she undertands the basics of conflict resolution—she understands that mistakes happen, that you use words first, and that you don’t have to take crap from somebody else.

Why did I go on that tangent? Because I see a couple kids squabbling over a slide every time I get in a group and we have these arguments. If my 2-year old can handle it, we as players can handle it without calling in outside help. My daughter had no means to kick that spoiled brat off the slide—in game, we can do that.

Talk to people first. If they aren’t going to be a team player, then remove them from the team. Stop letting them bully you and stop running to mommy and daddy and ANet because the playground bully won’t let you use the swings while wearing his MF gear and autoattacking the jungle gym without dodging the monkey bars. Ok, maybe the analogy fell apart at the end.

To add to what DesertRose said, in lower level zones you can still find near-level appropriate loot, however it won’t reach level 80.

Fine crafting materials are scaled to the content, not to you—you will need to go to tougher zones to get t5/6 materials.

Only some of the loot is scaled to your level—you will find some that is level-appropriate.

Rewards from DEs scale with level, however the base reward is higher in higher level areas.

Iehova.9518:

Gift of mastery isn’t RNG at all. Gift of fortune is RNG personalized. Gift of Legendary X is gift of Farming.

Gift of Mastery has no RNG components? 500 WvW badges. You will face RNG with those no matter how you try to get them. Even the jump puzzle you have to face RNG.

How do you get the karma or fractal relics for the obsidian without RNG?

How do you get the exp for the skill points without RNG?

How do you explore the entire world without encoutering the RNG?

You cannot swing your sword, loot or salvage an item, play a DE, or interact with anyone without enountering a RNG. It is everywhere. People only complain when the odds of a desired outcome are low. The fact that the result is random doesn’t bother them until they don’t want to pay the price. If it wasn’t random, the complaint would be that the price is too high.

If the availability was increased, the value would drop.

As it stands now, these are amon the onyl recipies that have any value asociated with them.

You started off complaining about the revenue stream that people have, insisting that you should have access to it as well. To do this, you would have to increase availability, but that would make the recipie valueless, so what you really want is to hvae the recipie yourself but deprive othrs of it so it retains value.

At the same time, you make the opposite argument, saying you want access to the finished item, but not at market rates. To accomplish this, you propose increasing availablility of the recipie while removing the product from the market. This way nobody can profit from good luck, they are simply roped into learning a tradeskill and purchasing a recipie.

Did I get that right?

It really sounds like you want to be a member of an exclusive club, and we plebians aren’t invited. You make conflicting arguments for your point, you are incessantly tossing around your achievements as if they somehow matter in a game design discussion. You consider 5g “gouging” yet you own a bifrost—I don’t have anywhere near enough resources to own a bifrost but i do not consider 5g to be gouging at all.

Edit: They never abandoned their core philosophies; they made a few mistakes in delivery, but they have not done anything in violation of the manifesto.

I see so much passive aggressive rage in this thread…

Ask yourself: Is it fun? Progression aside, is it fun?

If it isn’t, then no number of bugfixes will make it fun. It is supposed to be fun; progression through fractals is not meant to be limitless, it is meant to have an end. So eventually you will hit the wall (currently at level 50, I’m told), and if the content isn’t fun then, you’re just going to be frustrated again and have the added rage of so much wasted effort.

If the content is fun, realize that bugs are frustrating but instead of wasting 90 minute on ciffside, think of the fun that was the added challenge. I remember very fondly a botched Onyxia raid where only 6 people survived a deep braeth attack and we still managed to take her from early phase 2 to dead (5 survived the fight). The fight was more fun for that mistake.

Frustration should make you log off, but good content will have you coming back the following night. If you hit a streak of bad luck with players disconnecting, or bugs, or what have you, frustration is understandable, but these things are limited in scope to a single run, so you should be coming back for more good times, hoping to avoid the bugs. If you don’t enjoy the core experience, however… you’re still not going to enjoy it after the bugs are fixed.

From the sound of it, you don’t enjoy the content, you force yourself to play it because it is the “in” thing to do. I faced down this very logic after 4 months of farming SolRoA in EQ. 4 months of hardcore farming and I finally realized the game was boring; I wasn’t having fun, I was just doing it because I didn’t want to invalidate all the work I had done previously.

Just to add another voice, what Nashaan said is very true. I don’t mind if you’re under the recommended level for a dungeon, as long as you’re within a reasonable tolerance I’ll accept you. My elementalist did AC explorable for the first time at 33, and we rocked the place.

Fractals recently stole a lot of the usual dungeon crowd, so finding groups can be difficult. The good news is that you can run fractals at any level.

You will always find people who insist on all 80s for a group, or particular builds, or anything else. The simple truth is there are people out there that are jerks and you can’t avoid them all.

I joined an AC Explorable group on my 34 elementalist to be greeted by one member proclaiming “too low.” I attemtped to explain that if my level is an issue, i can switch to my 80 guardian, but he didn’t seem to get it, his response was “you have an 80? good for you. you’re still too low.” This is obviously an extreme case, but there are people like that out there—put them on ignore and move on.

Feel free to look me up for one more for a dungeon—I can’t always guarantee the time, but my wife (ranger) and I are more than willing to run dungeons, and we don’t care about your level so much as we care about your attitude (positive, friendly attitude is worth more to us than anything else).

zencow.3651:

The fact that you can grind endlessly due to the extremely low chances and never get it and you can’t obtain it otherwise makes it exclusive. It may sound like I am for abolishing RNG totally but no, I am merely pointing out there they are unfun so they can be fixed.

Endlessly, really? The game released less than 4 months ago. The recipie was not available at release. Has there really been enough research into the drop rate to establish what is a reasonable timeframe for acquisition?

These recipies provide access to a new revenue stream, but it won’t last. Supply will increase and demand will fall. It happens all the time. A shiny new item gets attention but after a month it is no longer anything special. The value is not in having it, but in having it early. I would rather have the capacity to be lucky than relinquish it in the name of being “fair.”

zencow.3651:

zencow.3651:

As I said I’m actually fine with 1-time massive income drops, as per VS/Froggies/BDS/EEs in Gw1.

The difference is these and precursors are mostly cosmetic (tainted by q9/legendary stat value) AND you had/have the alternate choice to grind for them.

Recipes are exclusive gold mines and FotM stuff affects your stats. For the latter, no-one complained about not having a Superior Rune of Vigor as would no-one complains about not having a full set of Divinity Runes. The exclusivity in the RNG and the fact that these are account bound makes them unreasonable.

You have the same chance as anyone else. What makes this exclusive?

Abolishing the RNG means everything becomes currency-based with fixed currency drops and no item drops.

You do get upscaled. It was upscaling in the new level 80 zone that was removed.

Based on the research that I have heard of and participated in, scaling is far simpler than most people realize. There is some minor variation, however, barring the influence of ascended gear (on the to-be-evaluated list, but currently estimated as a paltry 3% boost over exotics), a player in a full set of top-shelf gear for their level will scale to a player in a full set of top-shelf gear for the scaled level.

The curves for the impact of different stats at a given level are not constant; trait points have the largest effect around level 38-39, which means an upscaled 38 gains more impact from their traits than a level 80 does, desite having fewer points to spend.

Higher level players gain acces to more major and minor traits, but this comes at the cost of specialization.

Higher rarities of gear are used to offset declining contributions from other facets. Exotic isn’t better, it maintains the status quo.

If a level 11 character puts 1 trait point into a line that benefits power, these 10 points of power scale up to 147. A level 20 with 10 points in the line would get 738. A level 80 will only get 300—because they are capped at 30 points in the line.

Looking at a rune of the eagle, a minor gives +10 precision for the first ability, while a superior gives 165 total across 5 runes. The minor rune can be equipped at level 1 at which point it scales to +381. By level 20 this has fallen to a scaled 73, but it is worth noting that you have 4 unused rune slots available if you are comparing a full set of runes—mking it effectively +219 when you count the other 2 sets of runes you can wear (obviously you need to wear different sets).

Where do you have actual differences?

Before level 30 you don’t have access to all of your skill bar—no stats can compensate for this.

A sub-80 character tends to not wear top-shelf gear. It is prohibitive to upgrade every level. that said, it can be done, and a close approximation is still close.

An 80 has access to more major and minor traits which can provide benefits that create build synergies, which augment stats instead of contributing to them.

An 80 tends to know more about how to play the class and the game effectively than a lower level does. Not a guarantee, but there is certainly a correlation between time played and skill.

Boon duration, critical damage multipliers, and other stats that are not available on gear (crit multiplier is not available on very low-level gear although it is available on higher level items) don’t benefit as well from scaling. (I believe but need to confirm they do not scale at all).

Sub-80s will probably have trouble in fractals with agony resist. Assuming you don’t need it, however, there is no reason to reject a player on basis of level. My daughter plays a level 13 warrior in fractals and she has better defensive stats than an 80 in full defensive exotics.

Disclaimer: to date, downscaling has been the focus of my group’s efforts, but the limited upscaling we have looked at is consistent with the downscaling model.

Magic Find Gear = Hard Mode. Increased challenge + rewards. I thought this was common knowledge?

Oghier.7419:

Does Onyxia deep breathe more?
Are my J-Boots slower?
Ectos nerfed?

Eternal questions, all!

My favorite answers:
Yes, all the smoke in her lair is causing her breathing problems, so without an oxygen tank, she has to take deep breaths. In just a few patches she’ll be dead before you arive.
No, your boots aren’t slower, you’re just getting fatter.
Ecto drops rates weren’t nerfed, but the effectiveness of tinfoil hats was lowered 10%.

I’ve had no luck making it past level 3 fractals because I am always stuck helping random strangers at level 1 and 2.

I would recommend elementalist.

Warriors are good for laying down combo finishers, but not so much so the combo fields. Mesmers have a couple, but you’ll shine as an elementalist in that regard. Drop a water field and have the warriors pick up and place their battle standards to heal everyone in the area a ton, or do the same in a fire field to give everyone a full stack of might buffs.

Guardian would be my second pick—you have a lot of support from your shouts, but you’re putting yet another person in melee and only light and fire fields—not bad, but the elementalist is more versatile.

I do agree that you should pick something that is fun instead of just picking one for the synergies, but there is something to be said for the reduced stress that well-balanced groups tend to bring.

At level 30 the skill disparity in WvW will disappear and you can fight on relatively equal footing.

You don’t need to channel a spell to deal a killing blow—you can just attack them until they die. I’ve killed many a downed player with a ballista bolt to the face.

You don’t need to roam WvW with a guild, just a group. Any half-organized server should have a few commanders roaming around with a zerg—just tag along. If you want something smaller but more organized, I seldom have trouble picking up a small team to harass towers and take suppyl depots.

Sanctum of Rall hasn’t bugged in a long time and we owned it about an hour ago.

Kalizaar.4729:

Would love for dyes to be account-wide, but would even settle for a gem option. Although I suppose that would then dry up some of their current “pay gems for dyes” funds.

It isn’t about the gem revenue, it is the character progression. Appearance is the end-game progression, so to make dyes account-wide is to eliminate one of the more meaningful measures of the effort that has gone into a character. When you see somebody wearing expensive colors, you know there was effort involved.

I heard that the rainbow particle effect on The Dreamer is going to be tied to the /fart emote. I don’t know if it is true, that is just something I heard.

I haven’t delved into this as much as I would like, but the quick-and-dirty numbers I ran suggested to me that power was the best way to maximize damage.

That said, you get to have a nice boost to 4 stats from traits and 3 from gear, if you want to specialize. Power/Precision/Critical damage can all be boosted without issue. I haven’t looked for a sweet spot on this, but given the limited choice in gear, berserker armor and maxing relevant trait lines is the practical “sweet spot.”