Guild Wars 2

It is a very obvious, no-brainer solution, made even more practical by the many ways the game can scale content. That’s why I have to wonder what the motivations are for the dungeon redesigns. It’s seeming like they want to make dungeons exclusive to Elite players. Even a level 80 with exotics and a fairly competent player can find AC has lost any resemblance to “fun” and this IS the entry level dungeon.

Expert mode versions seem to me a much, much better use of Arenanet development resources, expanding the appeal of the content, rather than gating it to all but a small portion of the player base.

I honestly can not understand the motivation.

The old key spawn rates worked better, because it gave players a frequent taste of what’s inside and gave them the opportunity to look at the buffs as something worth using, rather than something you stick in the bank “in case you need them some day”.

Not only are they rarer drops/rewards, but they seem to drop from unlocked chests a lot less frequently as well.

The “Big Fish” who will spend $100+ dollars on keys seem to be the only thing they care about. Bragging rights for “how much money some of our players have paid in one month” seems to be a bigger priority than generating more steady revenue through smaller purchases by a greater number of people.

The gem store is a pretty sad story in potential revenue lost pretty much across the board. I fully expected the store to be packed with cosmetic skins and items by now, with at least a half dozen new skins added monthly. Even MMOs with much smaller ongoing budgets and skeleton staffing have managed to devote the required asset development time needed to fuel very steady income via cosmetics.

I really don’t get it. Seems like fleecing those with poor impulse control and deep pockets seems to be the driving force here, rather than offering items that will entice large swaths of the player base to make small purchases on a routine basis.

Disappointing.

1. Ice Shelf NE of Watchful Waypoint in Frostgorge Sound.
2. Tarnished Coast.
3. 2/28/12 3:40PM EST to 4:00PM EST, but still ongoing.

Not only bots, but teleport hacking bots that move across the terrain in little hops, faster than any character can normal travel the distances involved.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

Yeah, there’s a few bugs I was grappling with that we thought got fixed – there something weird with the FPS that seems to have to do with shaders (investigating), but aside from that the only issues I’m seeing are with Detha and the Ghost Eater. We were seeing some of the same problems with the traps, and I was fixing them as much as I could – but it seems I didn’t fix them up good enough. her getting stuck and the traps sometimes not firing are known things – try leading GE out of the trap and then back into it – that might help for the time being.
And… well… Detha is Detha, lol. I’ve been at it trying to fix her, but the issue where she doesn’t start rebuilding the traps isn’t 100%, and we’ve not been able to get a solid repro.

As for things players feel the spy kits were necessarily to get through, we’re watching the feedback and will make sure to give them some extra QA attention to ensure they are in line with what we want players to experience.

Maybe you should be clear about what you want players to experience. AC should be the “intro Dungeon” and should be level appropriate for the minimum level requirement. It was already very difficult for those new to Dungeons, now it’s difficult even for level 80s in Exotic gear. This is good for the game how?

Dungeons should NOT be tuned to developers and QA teams that have been playtesting the game so long they could probably do most dungeon paths blindfolded. AC should be tuned for level 35s new to dungeons, Arah should be tuned to experienced players with full exotics and all the dungeons in between should provide a steady increase in challenge between the two extremes.

The food was too powerful, but nerfing it, with out profession improvements to address the design flaws that made a high rate of dependence on the food and kits such a necessary “band-aid” is just bad game design. Timing it to an adjustment up of the difficulty level of the first tier Dungeon is a bit mind-boggling.

If you guys would rather the game be a niche title for elite players, than the title of mass appeal and financial success it has been, let us know so those of us not elite enough for your sadistic dungeon design plans can start to look elsewhere. (We can only assume that if the new AC is your idea of entry level, that it won’t be long before you redesign all the other dungeons to make them as completely inaccessible as possible).

I’ve been a huge fan of the game, but the contempt for non-elite players that has become apparent is enough to make this fan worry about where this game is heading. I’ll stress apparent, if that perception is wrong why don’t you correct it with an explanation of why racketing up the frustration levels for an already challenging game is good for anyone but the elite among the player base. (Ruining the game for the majority because of pressures by the elite that there be more of an “end game” is not an excuse. The elite always complain about end game and move on. Even if you buy another month or two of time for the elite, that’s nothing compared the the losses among “the rest of us” as you tune the game to the wrong portion of the population).

These comments, along with the retuning of AC, the “tutorial level 30 Dungeon”, into something that apparently is making even experienced level 80s with full exotics rage quit, makes it clear that at least one dev at Arenanet wants a big portion of the game to be “for elite gamers only”.

Add this to the “Elitism by Design” of the new Guild Missions system, and it appears that a number of Arenanet Devs want this to be a game “For Elite Gamers in Elite Guilds Only”.

People who LOVE the game are buzzing about the apparent change of direction for the game. It seems that being an “Elite, Niche Game” is more important for certain egos than the game being a mass appeal best selling title.

To allow Warriors to tank, they really should revamp the Shield.

Shield4 should work like Sword5, but instead of “stop blocking to gain adrenaline”, it should be “stop blocking to bash your foe with your shield and stun them”. Shield5 should have it’s cooldown reduced to 25 and there should be a trait to allow it to proc protection on each block.

Then x/shield warriors could spec for a bit more damage and provide a tanky role with moderate damage, rather than a “sort of tanky” role with poor damage.

Better trait/sigil/food support for blocks would make Mace MH/ Sword OH and Shield all more viable.

Poorly developed defensive weapon skills and lack of proper defensive trait options are really the core of the problems with Warrior. The food was a bandaid. They removed the bandaid without fixing the gaping wound it was plugging.

There are other builds that are viable. I don’t think that anyone is saying that there aren’t. However, Arenanet developers admitted last month that a big problem with the game right now is that there are too few end game viable builds for all the professions. Some professions are worse than others, but all around the choices just aren’t there.

If lack of build variety is a problem, wouldn’t it make sense to offer an appropriate survivability boost for builds that are no longer viable after a big nerf? The food was a bit OP’d with one build, but there were at least two other high crit WAR builds that relied on the food not to be OP’d, but to just be viable.

So, now the number of WAR builds viable for end game content is greatly reduced, putting us in the same category as other professions with only two or three cookie cutter builds to chose from.

I re-geared to a high toughness, high power healing, cleansing shout build and did just fine in FotM tonight. I actually felt I had better survivability than with my crit-heal-food S/W build, with only a modest drop off in DPS. The new build is less fun, with much more time having to be spent at range.

Maybe Arenanet will rework the profession so we can melee tank better and no one will miss the dependence on expensive food to accomplish this. In the mean time, there is even less build diversity as a result of a nerf that wasn’t accompanied by any other changes to establish a new balance to the Warrior meta.

Putting cost for unlocks aside, I’m now confused by the pre-requisite unlocks for Guild Missions.

We were told a few days ago that Art of War V would be needed to unlock Bounties, which would be the “First” guild mission category. The implication was that you needed to unlock Bounties first and that Bounties, requiring AoW V, meant that AoW 5 was required to unlock progress through GMs.

Now, I see that there is a guild Mission Type that can be unlocked for each of the existing trees. Are the other, non-bounty Mission types even in the game right now? If so, why let us believe that we would need to unlock AoW V in order to even start the process of unlocking GMs? If not, why not be clear that Bounties are the only type currently in game?

It’s a big, confusing mess for no real reason. I hope someone can answer these questions:

Are Bounties the only Guild Mission Type in game at the moment?

If the other mission types are in game, do you need to unlock Bounties first, or can you just start with one of the other Mission Types?

(For the Developers): If the other types are in game and can be unlocked independantly, why did you give us the impression that we better start working on unlocking AoW 5 ASAP if we wanted to be able to unlock Guild Missions?

Why wouldn’t FotM count? It is a dungeon, isn’t it? Also, the question remains, does it have to be unique paths to count? If we somehow manage to fit another run in, I’d like to know if it actually will count ahead of time.

Vorch.2985:

bluewanders.5297:

Nobody is arguing that large guilds should not be given content for large guilds. I fully endorse that.

I also fully endorse large guilds having cool things they can guy.

What I do oppose is not being on equal footing on launch day…

Also… I oppose the idea that some rewards might ONLY be available when content made for 500 people is completed. Rewards should be based on expenditure, not the exact content completed. Meaning that a small guild could save up for that big reward if it wanted to. And I do realize we don’t even know much about what forms the rewards are going to take, this is purely in response to your previous question asking if larger guilds complete content for larger guilds they should earn rewards of better quality than a small guild can in no way complete on it’s own. Cost isn’t the issue… people are willing to save up… equality is the issue.

My 20 man guild should be on equal footing with EVERY guild in the game when the new content is released. If we don’t have enough influence to research that upgrade, so be it… but gating it in a tree we have no use for is kitten poor treatment. Making the upgrade cost tens of thousands of influence to research isn’t the issue either… if you want it to cost the same as getting all 5 tiers of AoW… I’m fine with that… as long as on patch day I have the same opportunity as every other guild in the game to research that upgrade.

We don’t appreciate being told we aren’t equal… that our only choice is to pay the tax, wait a few weeks, and bleed players….. or dissolve a guild we have pride in to join the collective and tattoo a number on our neck.

Correct me if I’m wrong. I do want to understand the problem.

One issue is NOT that it requires tier 5…it’s that it requires tier 5 Art of War, a tier you have not invested in.

You would be OK if it required tier 5 in the other trees because you already have invested influence in those.

I’m assuming you would also be ok if they made it require a completely separate and new tree, since everyone would start at the exact same point.

What you are NOT ok with is the fact that other guilds will be able to experience the content at a maximum of 16 days before you, assuming that you are starting at 0 AoW. This is because you would not be on equal footing on day 1 of the patch.

There should not have been a prerequisite based on existing Guild Trees. Arenanet have already said that most large guilds not only had full unlocks, but were sitting on a stockpile of influence. Well, guess what, many smaller guilds not only have no stockpile, but have had to be very careful where they put their points because it can take a month or more just to earn the points for a full tech tree branch.

The pre-req means zero to large guilds, but it’s a pretty big barrier to entry for small guilds, especially if they weren’t WvW oriented Guilds and thus wouldn’t, (and still don’t), have any need at all for Art of War.

It’s not just build time, for many small guilds it’s also earning the influence to unlock a tree that is USELESS to them. That’s the other issue, forcing guilds to unlock a tree that is only useful to WvW guilds. All the other trees are useful to all guilds, even WvW guilds. Either T5 in ANY tree should have fulfilled the pre-req, or there should have been no pre-req. Tying it to AoW just guaranteed it would be a burden to the majority of small guilds that actually have to be careful of where they spend their influence.

So, yes, all guilds should have started on equal footing, given that the new Guild Mission system has it’s own tiers of unlocks and influence sinks. If not, than any pre-req should have been minimized. The absolute worst thing to do is to make the tree that most small guilds save for last, if at all, as the prerequisite.

So, our small Family and Friends guild finally has five people of level to run dungeons. All we needed for the monthly was dungeons, so we spent the last week running dungeons towards the monthly and we got to four. One member missed AC story mode, so we repeated it with him and got no credit towards the monthly. (Neither us nor him).

So, we had this one last night to complete a Dungeon. (Other commitments will prevent us from assembling the members for a dungeon run on Wednesday or Thursday). Our, lowest level member is 38, so we decided that FotM was a safer bet than CM. (We had one branch of AC left to do, but we didn’t want to waste our one last night before the end of the month after reading that AC was made a lot more difficult with the patch).

Second time through, though we got a different mix of Fractals than the first run. We went is at difficulty two, so had the Jade Maw on top of it. Fun evening, we are all playing better in dungeons, great night for all. At least, until we got out of FotM only to find that we had not received credit towards the monthly!

So, is this a bug? Or does FotM not count? Do only runs in a different dungeon/wing count towards the monthly? If so, why the heck doesn’t the tooltip reflect this?

It’s bad enough that Dungeon runs were part of the monthly, but to then have restrictions on what dungeons count towards that monthly is just sadistic.

Question: What actually counts towards the Dungeons requirement for February’s Monthly? Does FotM count at all? Did it have to be completed runs of unique dungeons/paths? If so, why isn’t this made clear in the tooltip. If it’s a bug, is there any way to get proper credit rewarded for our efforts?

Heal on crit food was nerfed into the ground today, so you need to build with out it.

Glad I’m not the only one. I already was running a pretty tanky build, but needed the food to be able to melee in dungeons with my Warrior. Even with the food, reliance on ranged was heavy, but at least I could occasionally switch to melee, do an alpha strike and survive well enough to make the risk worthwhile.

I’m good at kiting with the bow, but if I wanted to run a kiting build in dungeons, I would have gone with a Ranger or Shortbow/pistol-pistol Thief!

This is what is known as a “ham handed nerf” and it’s the type that can kill a game. If you look just at the food, it was disproportionate in what it could provide. However, in the big picture it was a hugely important band-aid that compensated for the lack of the developers ability to provide viable melee dungeon builds for Warriors. (There are also builds from every profession, in a game where the developers have admitted there are currently far too few viable end game builds for most professions, that are rendered non-viable by this change. It’s not just Warriors).

You don’t nerf something this big with out designing offsets to allow viable build variety while eliminating the abuse (whirling axe warriors I-win button).

Oglaf.1074:

Redscope.6215:

Oglaf.1074:

“Food items that give special bonuses upon a critical hit now have an internal cooldown before they can produce the special bonus again.”

This could potentially mean that Omnomberry Pies/Ghosts will be nerfed quite a bit. All speculation on my part, of course. This would prove devastating to certain ’zerker builds, as it is what keeps them alive.

It means all the fools who thought that the “Whirling Axes” and “Omnomberry Pie” combo was going to stay around forever just got a nice dose of balance changes.

Its probably a 1sec cooldown that won’t effect most builds outside of the one mentioned above.

Sorry guys, I won’t say “I told you so” because I never made a post on the subject…but I’ve been reading the warrior forums about the axe builds lately thinking: “These guys are going to flip when they nerf ‘on-crit’ food…”

As Stewie Griffon would say: “Well, go on! … Start flipping!”

Now hold your horses, mate. I’ve been a Hammer Warrior for ages, and Pies have been a staple ingredient in my PvE build forever. They essentially removed a lot of Warrior sustainability, for what? Warriors did not get anything resembling a tankyness buff this patch. Warrior sustain is horrible as it is. Us other Warriors sorta needed this, only ’zerker Warriors abused it.

This.

I relied on heal on crit foods for my Sword/Warhorn Longbow healing shouts build. Forget to refresh food? Survivability drops through the floor. A one second internal cooldown might have kept it some what viable while eliminating the whirling axe abuse. Maybe.

Now I have about a few hours to totally rebuild my warrior for Fractals, so that our small guild can get the dungeon part of the monthly completed on the last night that we are able to assemble and play. Fun. Fun.

Yeah. Anyone have suggestions on respeccing and regearing crit warriors in the least painful way possible? Need my last dungeon run for the monthly with our guild group tonight and my Warrior is suddenly non-viable in current form.

The problem is that they have offered no offset and have thus eliminated a number of builds from the list of “end game viable”, which for many professions was already a very short list. This problem has been acknowledged by the developers, with the admission that they want at least 5-6 viable builds for each profession, but many are currently stuck with one or two. You can now scratch at least one “end game viable” build from each profession with this change, maybe more.

This is the kind of nerf that always irks me the most from MMO developers. Looking at the heal on crit food effect in isolation, it may have been obviously disproportional in it’s impact on the game. However, when taken in context with the greater whole, it had just become an “unintended” FIX for an aspect of the game that was clearly BROKEN, which was variety of end game viable builds.

So, yay to the developers, you managed to snatch some very low hanging fruit, while making the game the worse for it by pushing the change with out the needed fixes to professions that would have made the food effect redundant.

The problem is that many builds absolutely depended on the heal on crit effects to be viable. After hearing about how much they want to improve the professions to ensure that each profession has at least six viable end game builds, rather than the one or two that some professions are stuck with, they now have wiped out a number of the existing viable builds!

Many crit builds are now worthless, along with all the crit gear people spent a lot of time/effort/money/gold acquiring.

This food effect was disproportionately powerful vs. other proc on crit effects, but it had become an essential effect for a number of builds. With no healing boost to compensate, the meta is negatively impacted by this “fix” to a significant degree.

This is no longer a WvW only issue. Guildies had culling issues in Dungeons yesterday and I’ve had major culling/asset loading issues in world PVE all day today. Sounds and models and even NPC chat text taking forever to load. Something has been seriously off since the extended maintenance a week or two ago and seems to be getting worse on a daily basis.

If Guild Mission content is Tiered, with tiers ranging from content requiring 5-10 people to content requiring scores or even a hundred+ participants, then there is no good reason to gate the low end content from smaller guilds. Those guilds will likely never be able to unlock, launch and complete anything but the lowest tier of Guild Mission content with their guild. Why the heck would anyone one want to stick the low tier content that small guilds could actually enjoy behind such a ridiculous gate?

I’m all for cost/time/difficulty of each subsequent tier of a guild mission type being difficult to impossible for small guilds to accomplish, but all guilds should have some reasonable path to unlocking content appropriate for a guild of their size.

Iason Evan.3806:

Toxyn.9608:

Cuchullain.3104:

Please stop adding gated content. For the life of me I can’t understand why you put up so many barriers to having fun in GW2. Is this a game or job?

Just let guilds have fun and do the missions without prerequisites . How hard is that?

This is the other end of the spectrum that I also disagree with. If content wasn’t gated in some way, the content would be consumed within a week and then everyone would be asking for more.

The same could be said of the development team. If they aren’t tasked with creating entirely fun to repeat content, said game is doing it wrong. Gated is a lazy way to do it.

Exactly. If they are going to create a new framework of guild content, which they have, why gate it with the old framework of guild content, which they have and why the heck chose the one tree that non-WvW guilds with out a ton of extra influence to burn have absolutely no use for?

It appears that guild missions will have tiers of difficulty, which need to be unlocked, with each tier giving access to more difficult versions of said content, of larger scale and requiring bigger guilds to complete, while offering larger rewards. That, I’m fine with, as long as you aren’t hiding the low tier iterations behind gates that are extremely difficult for smaller guilds to get beyond. Large guilds are already rewarded for being large with their ability to earn influence and the ability to provide enough active players to even contemplate doing the higher tier content.

That said, why the heck is Arenanet so determined to deny even the low tier guild content to small guilds?

If a small/new guild wants to start unlocking Guild Missions before even touching the other Guild Upgrades, they should be able to do so. There is really no point to gating even the intro level participation in this content, especially not by gating it with T5 in a tree that has no use or appeal for a large portion of guilds in the game!

BTW Arenanet, if you are gating because you don’t think the game could handle hundreds of guilds on a server doing the new content all at once, you could just say so. If the gating is because you don’t think the system will ever be able to support more than a handful of guilds per server, then maybe the system isn’t actually ready for prime time. If you are gating because Bounties are the only missions ready for deployment, then you should have been clear about that from the start. If gating is to hide the incompleteness of the content, then that’s just plain underhanded dishonesty.

I’m really hoping that this was just another PR misstep resulting from a coy, confusing answer from a developer.

I guess it is possible that Guild Bounties will be the first, and only, Guild Mission type introduced this month and that one happens to be tied to Art of War, while the other Mission Types are tied to the other current trees.

That will be better than T5 AoW gating the entire new system, but then we have to wonder why they would promote the other mission types if they aren’t going to be available with the pending update? We also could question their judgement for deciding that the one gated by the least used tree should be the first to be introduced?

Please let this be a misunderstanding, so I can be only marginally disappointed with Arenanet, rather than being disappointed to the 100th power…

Krag.6210:

But what does that mean “The first one is Guild Bounties”?
Does that mean there’s an order to unlock the missions or that we won’t see the other guild mission modes in the coming patch.

Are the other guild missions tied to the other upgrade trees?

Apparently, the new Guild Missions are their own progression tree, but the prerequisite to even start down that path is to have T5 in Art of War.

I’m getting a really bad feeling about the entire Guild Mission system…

Waage.2047:

ORGH The amount of whine and WOE is me is over the top.

Everybody sit down and relax this is what we know.

1. There different events that have different difficulties and need for numbers. Bounty was a Multi-zone event so chance’s are you will need to be in a BIG guild for it to work.

2. The different events size might coincide with different levels of the tree. A 5 man event will need tier 1 and 20 man event needs tier 5.

3. There is no talk about it only being in the Art of War tree. Only that the Bounty one will be in that tree.

4. It is something to work towards. It is a thing that will take effort and planning from your guild. IT is not meant to be a easy way for you to get loot. Yes your 2 man guild will have a hard time doing things and that is why there is the multi-guild function.

5. It is a very short passage so keep your impotent nerd rage in check until we actually know the entire picture and stop being so dam reactionary.

6. The people complaining about having to go into the wvw tree when they don’t wvw. I have to do kitten Dungeons for my monthly and Fractals for ascended gear.

IN the end relax and let’s see what happens before you blow the top of your head off in pure anger.

You don’t seem to understand the issue at all. To even touch the new Guild system, your guild first needs to unlock the Art of War tree all the way to Tier 5. It sounds like the new progression system itself is going to be pretty onerous, which is another issue entirely that we don’t have enough info on to make a judgement.

Obviously this will mean nothing to guilds so large that they have unlocked every tree, nor medium sized WvW centric Guilds that mad the AoW tree their priority. However, it’s a major kick in the teeth to probably the vast majority of guilds, those that have had no need to have unlocked anything in the WvW tier to date and for whom the 36,500 influence needed to unlock a tree they have no other use for might as well be a million influence!

Of course, guilds could always spend 63 Gold to buy the influence, which may be what Arenanet is hoping for, as a way to drive guild members to buy gems for gold for influence? (The guilds for whom 63 gold is no big deal are also likely to be the same guilds for whom 36K influence isn’t a big deal either).

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Each guild mission type becomes available through an upgrade that is researched in the guild tech tree. The first one is Guild Bounties, which does require Art of War level 5.

Wow, just wow. That is just really, really, really bad game design. I won’t even argue the issue, it’s so obviously horrid.

I don’t know what else to say. Disappointed in you guys times infinity?

I actually feel like I was punched in the gut and then kicked in the head for good measure.

Rather than a chance to crit on each tick, there should be a crit system for conditions that is checked for when the skill first hits. On a crit, the crit damage percentage would be applied to the duration of any stacks applied on that attack. i.e. on crit, with a 100% crit damage bonus, (the cap), a skill that applies 3 5-second bleeds would instead apply 3 10 second bleeds, or, Poison (7 seconds) would apply Poison (14 Seconds).

As to the problem of stacks hitting the 25 stack cap and diminishing returns there after, one solution would be to add new “mega-conditions” that wipe out and replace a 25 stack. Let’s say that at 25 stacks of bleed, the next bleed stack wipes out the 25 stack of bleeds, but adds a stack of “Hemorrhage” which approximates the DoT of the stacks of bleeds it replaces, with one additional bonus effect. (Cripple, Confusion, or what ever seems appropriate).

I’m going to guess that the tapped author either had issues that have prevented it’s completion, or completed it, only to have it rejected and had to do a major re-write. If it was determined that it was time to find another author to pen the book, that would definitely push back it’s release.

I guess they could also have decided to make it tie in with the first paid expansion, especially if the book contains major spoilers on said expansion. That theory isn’t exclusive from the others, since clearly the book was originally intended to come out around the time the game released and the nature of the book itself would probably have had to have changed in order for it to have raised spoiler concerns.

interpol.2397:

Nauda.3678:

Oh yeah so now we have to force some people to guard the Keeps/Towers …
And guess who will guard these tower: dedicated wvw players. Meanwhile the normal players still zerg around happily.

I can totally see this happening. The dedicated WvWers will be stuck in the towers, maybe on a rotation, being bored and doing skritt-all for most of the time, missing out on drops and badges, while zergers keep zerging. Seems perfectly fair, and balanced toward strategic play /sarcasm

I know ANet is trying to encourage people to think tactically with the Orange Sword removal, but like you, I suspect that it will only lead to more zerging (now stealth) in slightly smaller groups.
Hopefully, though, guilds will organize themselves enough to run smaller operations.

It can only work if they find a way to properly reward guarding/scouting. Given that they currently don’t like to reward anything in WvW that doesn’t involve running with a zerg, that would require a huge shift in their thinking. Even if they decide to reward guarding/scouting, there is still the problem of how you do so with out making it possible for someone to sit AFK some where or just run randomly around the map and get rewarded for it.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

Just a quick note—I said the odds of it dropping was closer to .005 than the 1 in a million or so that was tossed out. Those aren’t the exact odds, but if my math is correct, 10 players running the event every day might expect one staff to drop after about 7 months. (And we haven’t been out that long.)

You seriously can’t see a problem with that drop rate? Really?

Exactly what is the point of wasting the resources to create a model that’s so rare it hasn’t dropped for anyone in the game yet after almost 6 months?

The dearth of armor and weapon skins in the Gem Store represents possibly millions of dollars of lost revenue potential, but you have time to make skins that maybe 10 people will possess in the lifetime of the game and it’s expansions?

It really feels like some things you do are for “MMO developer bragging rights”, rather than for the good of the game. “We had this awesome item in our game that was sooooo rare, only three of them dropped, ever, and one was salvaged for ectos by someone who was clueless as to what they had actually found”!

It comes off as pretty disgusting to some of your fans, maybe a lot of them…

I just wanted to reply to the post from Gaile to point out that the blacklist is actually more extensive than was outlined in her post.

I think the blacklist was more expansive than you believe. My password was not used for any other game or site, was randomly generated and contains a mix of upper and lower case letters and numbers.

I have a second account that used a different password, with similar characteristics. With the mandatory password change coming up, I decided to swap the passwords for the two accounts, so I wouldn’t have to learn new, complex passwords.

Each password was blacklisted.

So, I generated a new password, intending to just use the same password for both accounts. The new password worked with the first account, but when trying to apply it as the new password for the second account, it came up as blacklisted.

Apparently, in addition to a blacklist of “hacker compromised” passwords obtained from online sources, you guys also blacklisted all existing GW2 passwords, whether they were on “hackers lists” or not, plus are also instantly adding new passwords to the black list, so that no two accounts can contain the same password.

To me, that’s going way too far and doesn’t make much sense unless someone at Arenanet was concerned that stored GW2 passwords had been compromised at some point in the past.

Playing the game progression from 1-80 can and should be a very fun part of the game. This is not the traditional MMO, where leveling is just a barrier to “end game”.

I now have six level 80 characters across two accounts and plan to round out a full compliment of 8 level 80s, one of each profession, with in the next two months. I’ve had much fun leveling all of them.

Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t sympathize with some of your points, because I do. I have started to get a bit impatient to unlock skills and builds with the most recent three characters I’ve leveled to 80. It’s not because I am tired of the game world, I’m not. (I still like to explore all levels of the world with my level 80s). It’s just that I really want to get to the point where I can experiment with and play full builds.

If you really want to “get over the hump” a few times while leveling, and skip ahead to the next gear/trait tipping point, do some crafting. Leveling a crafting profession to 400 will gain you exactly ten levels for your character, though the progress is heavily back loaded to the higher end of the crafting progression.

If you’ve been gathering and saving mats from previous characters, you should have the money and mats to do a fair bit of crafting, with out having to buy all the mats from the TP. There are numerous 1-400 crafting guides online and most crafting professions can be leveled to 400 with somewhere between 4.5 and 8 Gold in mat costs, much, much less if you’ve been gathering and hoarding mats.

If you want to stick to non-crafting pursuits, I still find doing full exploration of game zones, killing mobs, gathering and doing every DE in sight along the way, the be about the most efficient way to level via PvE. I also find it a lot of fun, which is helpful.

Pretty much every difficult vista in the game has half a dozen or more youtube videos showing you the correct path to take. If you have trouble with a vista, check there to make sure you aren’t trying to take a sub-optimal or impossible path to the vista.

If it’s purely a jumping issue and you just can’t master it after reading the various tips above, I’d echo what many others have said, ask a mesmer for help. When I play my Mesmer, I’m always more than happy to help people along via Portal. Usually, unless I’m seriously pressed for time, I’ll even linger for about five minutes, hopping portals back and forth between the objective and some easier point of access, in order to aid any players who might be coming in behind me for a complex vista/jumping puzzle.

It’s fortunate there is at least this option for people who just can’t get some jumps. (I’m far from perfect, I miss a fair number of jumps myself, but fortunately, I guess, I’m pretty patient with my failures).

Well, I’m glad they kept digging. However, the response also saddens me a bit. Veterans still can not drop loot and, wait for it, Champions only guarantee you at least getting a BLUE! Gimme a break. Blues are vendor trash and that Veterans only have a somewhat better chance of dropping anything is just sad.

Champions are just pointless to fight, Period.

People should have nearly the same earning potential doing world PvE as doing dungeons. They should also be able to play lower level content via scaling and have nearly the same earning potential as they would have doing level 80 world PvE content. There should be some incentive for tackling the more challenging content, but in the end, the game should reward and encourage any form of game play that keeps players playing and having fun.

So, yeah, it’s nice that the community was vindicated, but there are still much deeper issues here that aren’t being addressed. GW2 wants to create a new paradigm for MMO play, but it continues to be held back by developer resistance to it’s true potential.

As to vets and champions, I get why they might not want a new flood of Masterwork+ items, so maybe it’s time to start considering other rewards for Vets and Champions, in addition to the current loot tables? In any event, vets should always drop something and Champions should always drop the equivalent of a fairly generous chest, i.e. 2-4 rolls on the loot table, plus some guaranteed reward, like maybe something akin to the Orrian Jewelry Box.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

As mentioned above, I believe I found the issue—Brogun could die to a condition (bleeding, poison) in between events, which prevented him from kicking off the next event. He was immune to direct attack, but not conditions, and it’s fairly rare—you have to kite a mob with bleeding attacks onto him—so we had a heck of a time trying to reproduce the issue. I’ve fixed that, but I don’t have an ETA for when it will be applied to Live, sorry!

This makes me wonder if this might not be related to why a number of other events get stuck as well? How many other key NPCs die to condition damage at points where they aren’t supposed to die?

BTW, aside from Maw having issues with getting frozen, I think the biggest issue is that the event is now way, way too easy. It used to take about five minutes to take down the final boss. Now it seems to take about 20 seconds, or less! Last night those of us destroying the portals were barely able to get back to the Shaman before he was dead! Something is very wrong with that part of the event now!

One big question.

Will there be some Guild missions that are appropriate for small guilds, (with a little help from other players), or is this feature really meant only for guilds that can field 10-20+ members for a Mission? (Also, are there some that take place in lower level zones and don’t require a guild of level 80s)?

I’m really hoping the system offers something for guilds of all sizes. If this is just something for level 80 mega-guilds, I will be very unhappy.

The forum monster ate my longer reply.

I’ll shorten it.

GW2 uses Umbra middleware for visual and sound culling. I had zero culling issues during beta with Umbra turned off via the shortcut command line. If Umbra can’t be brought to heal, maybe it’s time to cut their losses and refine their in house culling routines, rather than trying to make something work that just doesn’t want to.

The “rules” as to which abilities work and which don’t seem very arbitrary. Is there really much functional different between a teleport and a “rush” ability? Why would Ride the Lightning be ok, but infiltrator’s arrow not? To me, the difference has always been style, rather than function. This may not have been the case back when teleports could actually teleport you places with no pathing, but when that ability was removed from teleport skills, they just became glorified “rush” abilities.

In beta, Dynamic Events scaled very well to more players. The fights were actually challenging even if they got zerged. I don’t know why they changed it. Well, maybe they got complaints that scaling for DEs made them way too difficult, but if so, the system just needed slight tuning, rather than the current system where mobs die in less than two seconds!

This is one thing about the game that I don’t like. The game was better when events scaled better and the fact that you could fight hard and still lose an event made the events more meaningful and exciting.

Add my vote for skins. Armor skins, Weapon Skins, Town Clothes.

I’ll be honest, I am completely dumbfounded that the gem store isn’t already filled to the brim with these. They should have two or three talented artist/modelers working full time doing nothing but churning out new skins for the gem store.

$millions of potential revenue gone because they can’t manage to produce skins in a timely manner? I really don’t get it.

Big Boss.7902:

From November 15th patch:

The drop rarity of Rare and Exotic weapons from certain places in the world (champions, veterans, and players in WvW) has been increased. Rares and Exotics should be much more likely to drop and every champion should be guaranteed to drop loot. This was to ensure that world loot drops were not a significantly worse way of acquiring rare and exotic items than crafting and running dungeons.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/Game-Update-Notes-November-15-2012

Latest thread by Anet concerning this:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Share-your-data-about-perceived-strange-drop-behavior-here/page/27#post1397411

So far there have been about 50 pages of comments (a lot on deleted threads) about this and the general level of open world loot. Most people feel that since the November 15th patch open world loot was nerfed or DR got bugged for a lot of people.

It’s been 3 months and Anet haven’t fixed anything yet, champions are still not guaranteed to drop loot.

Exactly. You know, it’s bad enough that they continue to make world PvE the worst option for earning gold/loot, by a pretty big margin. Making it worse is that they keep telling us they are fixing this, but the fixes they have touted seem to not really exist and, if anything, the situation has gotten worse.

I love the game, just passed the 900 hour mark between two accounts, but there are a few things that continue to frustrate and boggle and this is one of them.

BTW, the apparent decrease of greens+, in favor of blues and vendor trash, just adds inflationary pressures. How? Greens+ are more likely to be traded via the TP, salvaged for runes/sigils or end up in the MF, rather than being sold to vendors. Items that have no use but to be sold as vendor trash (including blues) just create new gold in the economy.

If the decrease in world drops has been meant to counteract inflation, it’s having the opposite effect.

SadieDeAtreia.8912:

Fiontar.4695:

SNIP.

Some very very good ideas here. Unfortunately most of this will require a major time investment from Arenanet so the chances of us ever seeing anything like this is probably extremely small. Also, even with a gold sink as described it would not even begin to compare to the current gold/item sink we have in game. It may become viable when more ascended gear comes onto the scene, requiring even more ectos to be disposed of. It seems like its a very delicate balancing act, trying to keep the economy in check while keeping your player base happy…

I don’t think it would take nearly as much development time as the Scavenger hunt they are talking about. Also, remember that purchasing a Precursor off the TP is not much of a gold sink. There is the 15% cut, but essentially it’s just taking money from one unlucky player and giving it to a lucky player or big money market speculator. An alternative money sink related to the MF, to compensate for the money sink provided by the TP “cut”, would really be preferable.

The idea of allowing the precursors to be sold on the TP was probably related to the desire to fuel cash for gems for gold transactions. However, the cost of precursors has really put that out of reach for 99.9% of the player base and, IMO, no respectable AAA MMO should seek to encourage any player to drop $300+ on a virtual item. Never. (Besides, the current prices almost certainly are fueling illegitimate gold purchases that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise).

I want to reply to another point made by another poster as well. Having a predefined, time commitment alternative to acquiring precursors will not lead to everyone having a Legendary. Most players are just not going to devote the time, gold and energy into a long, expensive process. MMOs have often had some elite status symbol items that can only be required with much effort and even when the path to acquisition is pretty clear, those items still remain rare in the populace, because most people just care to bother with a process they don’t see as being anything other than a virtual job.

If things continue to build every few days until the February Update, I’m cool with that, but I wish Arenanet would be clear that there will, (or will not), be incrimental changed through out the month.

If the current state is basically all that we will be seeing related to the Living Story until the February Update, IMO that’s a fail. You can’t hook people on an ongoing story and then have no progress in the story for a month. People will get tired of roaming the two involved zones looking for changes and by the time the February Update rolls around, most people who who became active again to participate in the Living Story will have given up on the whole concept entirely.

So, please, let there be new events and minor landscape changes at least every few days and if there are such incremental changes planned through out the month, please make that clear so players will know whether or not they are wasting their time checking into the related zones on a daily basis looking for impending changes and new events that may not even exist.

I would take precursors off the trading post as a start.

Then I would double the drop rates, double the proc rates, add precursors to the Laurel Vendors for 120 laurels and add recipes to the Mystic Forge that allow you to convert any precursor into your desired precursor. (Recipe 1 precursor, 1 MF vendor item priced somewhere between 20G and 40G, two additional modestly priced mats, the combination of which determines which precursor you get. Just an example, Gold sink, opportunity to exchange a precursor you obtain for one you want at a reasonable premium).

I’d also add other alternative ways of getting precursors that would make sense, ensuring that people who play Dungeons, play WvW or play world PvE all have the same mean time played before obtaining a precursor as any other play style. There is no reason that precursors should be much more available for dungeon grinders than WvW or PvE players.

Taking them off the TP, along with the other methods of obtaining the precursor you want, go hand in hand. If there is no longer a way to sell a precursor, precursors can be added to reward systems like Laurels with out representing wealth. The MF exchange system adds the needed gold sink.

Laurel Cost for a precursor set to around 120 would represent a major time investment, while still providing a guaranteed path for dedicated players. Three months of 30 completed dailies and 3 completed monthlies would be the quickest route. (Arenanet are planning to add Laurels for Achievement Points, with the exchange rate TBD. 120 would be my recommended cost based just on dailies/monthlies as a Laurel source. This could be adjusted upwards a bit to account for the ability to earn Laurels via AP).

I don’t think any of the above is unreasonable. It would provide a path for any dedicated player to obtain a precursor with a significant, but predictable time commitment, in the event that they aren’t blessed by the RNG gods in the mean time. Players would still have to obtain all the other ingredients for their Legendary, which also requires a big commitment by players. This all would just mean that any player willing to work extremely hard could get their legendary in 3-4 months, while also recognizing that the number of players who would be able to complete the task in the minimum time frame would still be a small percentage of the population, preserving the rarity of Legendaries in the community. (A casual might realistically be able to acquire a Legendary in a year, but even then most players would not have the follow through to actually obtain one).

The new dailies are great and they will be even better when they implement the ability to pick and choose from the daily achievement list to complete the day.

For people with less play time, dailies offer some direction for 20-60 minutes of play time for which they can earn progress towards a tier of rewards they would not be able to earn otherwise. For people who have more time to play, progress is likely to be made on most of the list just by playing as they normally play, with only a slight detour to fill in anything they’ve missed before the end of each day.

If you can’t do your dailies every day, big deal. Do them when you can and you’ll eventually have enough laurels to get what you want. The monthlies only require you to complete five dailies, making that element one of the easiest achievements on the monthly list.

I’ve done my dailies both ways, either knocking them out in a concentrated session, or just playing the way I normally play for a few hours and taking 20 minutes to finish up things on the list I’ve missed. I really don’t see the downside here and I really appreciate what Arenanet is doing here.

Also, remember that Arenanet will also eventually start awarding additional Laurels based on Achievement Points earned. They haven’t announced the exchange rate yet, but if they find the sweet spot, then Dailies may not provide the majority of Laurels in a month for active players, which would be great for the game and it’s players.

If level scaling works well, then there is no reason not to raise the level cap with each expansion. I would stress the “if” though. If scaling can allow a level 80 to still find low level content challenging and rewarding, then there is no real detriment to a level cap increase.

I’d probably prefer an alternative progression, were the expansion would open up new skills to unlock and a way to increase the trait point cap with out a base level increase.

What are the perceived negatives of raising the level cap? If scaling can accommodate level scale increases, I guess people are then worried about having to reacquire max stat gear. For the most part, the stat side of exotic gear isn’t that hard to obtain. The gear that requires the most cost or effort to acquire usually doesn’t offer a stat advantage over cheaper exotics, it’s all about the looks and those looks can easily be transferred.

I think Arenanet has been clear that there will be gear progression tied with full expansions, so once that is a given, I don’t see why there would be a problem a level cap increase to go along with that. Once again, assuming that level scaling can successfully fold the new levels into the game.

Dropping theory and just addressing the issue of precursors, offering players other ways to obtain precursors would help to bring the inflated prices back into check.

Honestly, I don’t think that precursors or legendaries should be traded on the TP. In order to give people who get a precursor they don’t want/need some path to getting the precursor they do want, rather than selling one to fund the purchase of the other, I’d add Mystic Forge recipes for converting any precursor into any other precursor. The added ingredients heavy on vendor sold MF items, to act as a gold sink and provide some premium for the swap.

I’d also add precursors as Laurel items, with a high enough cost in Laurels to associate a proper degree of effort to the task of obtaining them. Since they would no longer be tradeable, there would be no concern that offering them as a reward would have a huge gold equivalent attached.

This combination would also eliminate the ability of gold sellers to sell precursors, which is something that is happening now. (If for no other reason than this, the changes should be considered).

The Mystic Forge, via conversion recipes, offers a viable alternative to keep all sorts of overpricing in check, with the added conversion costs being adjusted as needed.

Gold sellers need to get their gold some where. A lot of it is via gold farming and not all gold farming is botting. The demand for gold is needed for there to be a business for gold farmers to tap. Before the game’s launch, the $$$ for Gem for Gold exchange was touted as a way to decrease the demand for gold seller’s business. On paper, that sounded good. If players could pay a few bucks to get their exotics a little faster, they would be more likely to do so via the gem store, rather than risking a ban doing business with a gold seller.

This goes off the rails when the cost of level 80 exotics, precursors and other high end items completely outstrips the ability of players to afford them via normal game play or even via kitten to Gems to Gold exchange. Precursors specifically and all high end tradeables in general have increased the demand for illicit gold, which encourages gold sellers to do more farming, which pumps more money into the economy. Farmers aren’t playing to play. They aren’t earning to fund their own purchases. They are creating gold for gold sellers to sell.

The value of items and resources most available to “the ordinary player playing the game” have deflated, while items with enough scarcity and demand have allowed speculators to artificially inflate the prices of “luxury goods”.

I’m sorry that attempts at logic are labelled “diatribes” and that ideology trumps reason. MMO economies are not real world economies. How many game developers have tried to apply RL economic theory to their in game economies, only to have them self destruct under the weight of run away inflation? Pretty much all of them.

(Eve Online is, to a degree, an exception, because there is a mechanism for an economy of scale and the need for large corporations that “employ” players to earn profit for the greater organization).

Speculators and market manipulators are driving inflation on high end goods. These prices are much higher than one would anticipate based on “fair value” when considering time=$$$. These greatly inflated prices on the most expensive goods provides exactly the level of demand gold sellers need to make the game a title worth bothering with.

I don’t care what economic ideology you adhere to IRL, most of it needs to be tossed right out the window when considering how an MMO economy actually works, and much more importantly, how an MMO economy SHOULD work to ensure the game remains enjoyable and playable for the player base on the whole.

GW2 is not some laboratory where one gets to test out their economic ideology. It’s a game people play to have fun and when the economy starts to become a barrier to that for the majority of players, that is something that needs to be addressed.

Yes. The cost inflation of “luxury” items does indeed incentivize behaviors that then directly lead to inflation.

However, it’s more than that. Speculators can and do cause prices of goods being speculated on to increase due to the artificial demand created by those same speculators. The greater the wealth accumulation by the wealthiest players, the greater those players have the ability to manipulate the prices on the TP.

There have been numerous examples of real world markets that have been manipulated by speculators to levels that have nothing to do with consumer demand and consumers end up paying more for those commodities than they would if there were no speculators manipulating the markets.

As I stated previously, it’s worse here because there are no real world pressures to keep prices in check. Ordinary players can either grin and bear it, become speculators themselves, buy gold or quit the game. None of that effects the speculators and manipulators and even if things should reach a critical mass due to a player exodus from the game, causing the in game markets to collapse, they don’t lose anything other than imaginary money.

Inflation in this game is not because ordinary players are earning too much money. The same can be said about the US economy. Lower and middle income earners have seen wage stagnation or deflation over the past decade or more, yet real inflation has been increasing steadily. Ordinary Americans are not driving inflation, they are just getting by with less and less for every hour worked.

The same thing is happening in GW2.

When players that play actual game content see their earning rate remain stagnant, while the price of goods increases rapidly on the TP, then there is something wrong with the economy. When players feel they either need to play the market for profit or buy gold just to afford to play the game, there is something wrong with the economy.

The 15% “tax” on TP sales and the listing fee are gold sinks, but it’s still a much lower “tax” than in game gold sinks impose on players who actually play game content to earn currency. Not only can you earn a lot more money per hour playing the TP than playing game content, but you get to keep a much higher percentage of your earnings.

Scarcity just increases inflation. It isn’t a hedge against inflation. It also creates the environment for speculators and manipulators to earn the currency needed to truly demolish the economy.

Tightening supply of costly goods just rewards speculators, while making life more difficult for people just trying to play the game.

Centrally managed economies have no place in the real world, but if you are going to have a full time economist running your in game economy, that’s exactly what you would want. Tuning of supply, (and money sinks), to ensure that prices remain in a narrow range and limiting the opportunities for speculators and manipulators to push inflation.

I can see the value of a game that is an economic simulator, but that is not this game and the current economics of GW2 seem destined to eventually ruin the play experience of many players, seemingly just to preserve the right of the few to enjoy the role of market profiteers.

I’d quickly add that ordinary market forces don’t apply in a game they way they do in a real economy. The risks for market manipulation and manufactured inflation have no real world consequences for the speculators and the manipulators. There are no laws to break and the gold they accumulate is a score with no real value.

Who does pay the price? The ordinary players and the publisher. Players who find it takes more and more time playing the game to earn the gold needed to buy what they want/need and the publisher, who loses the income from people who become frustrated with the ever increasing effort needed to get by and just quit the game.

No real mouths to feed. When the “working class” of a game community gets fed up, they can just completely walk away from the game.

The manipulators aren’t going to care if they kill a game, it’s all just a score and there will be other games they can move onto if their egos need to be satiated by the ability to make imaginary money.

Well, let me quickly explain why it is an issue.

It is really not practical to earn the money for a precursor through ordinary game play. You might get lucky and have the RNG Gods shine down on you, getting one precursor you can then sell to fund a large portion of the cost to purchase the one you do desire. However, the only way most people will be able to afford a precursor is to either buy the gold from a gold seller, or play the TP for profit.

People playing the TP for profit start small and build their wealth over time, being able to step foot into more and more lucrative markets as they go. Raw cost is not always the determination of most profit. A precursor may provide the most profit for a single sale, by far, but those sales can be few and far between. Active, hive volume markets can be very lucrative due to volume.

The higher the price of precursors goes, the more out of reach those items are to players who actually play the game, rather than play the TP. This drives more players to either buy gold from gold sellers, play the market for profits themselves, or just quit the game in frustration.

The goal of being able to afford the most expensive items on the TP, either for personal use, or as “an investment”, likely drives a large portion of inflation at all levels of the game.

The inflation we are seeing is largely due to the concentration of wealth into the hands of the few. Most players playing the game are not earning more money, they are just seeing the time it takes to earn the money to buy their leveling gear and level 80 exotics take longer an longer.

Inflation in the game is mostly driven by those playing the TP for profit, with the “market cap” increasing as ordinary players bite the bullet and buy things they need at higher prices and with longer intervals between purchases.

The highest price items just allow for those most successful at playing the market to earn more and more money doing so. Those players don’t stop playing and manipulating the commodity markets. They do, though, eventually reach an amount of wealth that allows them to easily manipulate the market on commodities and necessities.

The biggest hedge against such levels of manipulation was to be the “global” nature of the TP. Surely the markets would be too big to be manipulated by an individual? Well, goods selling for well over 20G have given them the mechanism for earning the wealth needed to eventually manipulate the global markets.

There a limit to how many orders a non-cheating trader can execute in a day. If the richest markets were ordinary exotics and T6 mats, that limit on how many orders a player could successfully manage would limit the rate of growth of TP “business”.

Precursors and other high priced items make levels of wealth accumulation practical that would not be practical otherwise. Don’t forget, they also provide the incentive for players to stop playing the actual game and start playing the TP, as well as for players to buy gold or pre-cursors from gold sellers. The highest price items fuel the behaviors that lead to inflation and these pressures can not be solved via ordinary money sinks, as those money sinks really only effect people playing the actual game, not those botting for gold or playing the TP for profit. It becomes a vicious, inflationary cycle.