Guild Wars 2

BTW, I’ve heard that some gold sellers are now selling precursors directly for cash, rather than gold. How do you catch those transactions? Have it be ok to sell pre-cursors on the TP, but not trade them via mail?

John Smith.4610:

As soon as you begin referring to luxury goods as an inflationary issue I start skimming instead of reading. Within the last hour I’ve specifically said that you’re mistaking inflation for what is not inflation. Precursor prices aren’t changing due to inflation.

They are providing the mechanism for exponential earning of wealth via the TP, which, yes, indeed is driving inflation.

Goldsellers are a plague, but, contrary to hopes and expectations, the GW2 economy does not seem to be being managed to thwart rapid inflation, with said inflation making it possible for gold sellers to keep on selling, even as you increase your efforts to crack down on them.

We’ve already seen you create mechanisms to raise prices on goods that became over abundant, I think it’s about time you also take serious steps to adjust supply on items showing run away inflation in a way that will knock those prices back down to sane levels.

If this happened regularly with high ticket price, often manipulated item markets with in the game, then maybe the speculators would be a little more cautious with their efforts to corner the market and set prices.

I’d suggest such efforts would also be good for the legal $$$ for Gems for Gold trade, as current prices likely price out a large number of “whales” who might otherwise have been willing to pay cash to Arenanet for the gold needed to buy their legendaries.

This all comes right back around to gold sellers. Buying 900G via Arenanet may be way out of the question for many, but some of those who would otherwise have been willing to go the legit route may feel forced/justified/incentivized to take the risk and get that 900G a lot cheaper via illegitimate gold sellers.

Market manipulation based noninflationary pressures are probably the biggest thing currently supporting gold sellers. The demand for massive amounts of gold provides them the margin to absorb the losses of time and money when their efforts are thwarted.

What’s the solution? As I said, better anti-inflationary measures would be an obvious start. Items showing highest inflation should have their drop rates increased until inflation is brought under control and speculators are brought to heel. Limits on the total gold value of listed items an account can have on the TP at any time would also greatly slow down efforts to manipulate the market. It would also apply the breaks to to insane rates at which some of these people are accumulating wealth. Wealth accumulation that, at that level, can not help but be destructive to the game.

Accumulation of wealth through game play seems too stingy, but could be accepted if it was actually succeeding at keeping inflation in check. The market manipulators are providing huge upward pressure on inflation rates while providing no value to the game or the game’s community. Those of us playing the game, rather than just sitting in front of the TP all day, have seen drop rates and earning power decrease, while insane levels of wealth accumulation via the TP remain untouched. Seems like someone’s priorities are a bit backward!

Another important step is to crack down on market traders who are using scripting and botting to support high volume transactions on the TP. We’ve seen confessions of former market players/manipulators recently that confirm that they were using prohibited means to make their efforts more productive until they finally just got bored with the entire thing and quit. Rates of transactions that could not be performed by a real person should be identified, flagged, investigated and lead to bans when sufficient evidence is accumulated.

There are other methods as well, but these would provide a start.

All MMOs with active AH/Trading posts attract and support players who focus on little to nothing else other than wealth accumulation by playing the market. Few have allowed the ability to trade items that could even hope to support the insane price levels we are seeing now and that has been for good reason. Pre-cursors and legendaries being tradeable on the market puts even more pressure on Arenanet to ensure that anti-inflationary, anti-market manipulation mechanisms are in place.

If you want to understand how gold sellers can keep turning a profit even with high efficiency at cracking down on their gold earning efforts you don’t have to look any further than the way the economy is being managed at the high end. In fact, my guess is that a number of those active in high end market manipulation are gold sellers or those earning money working for them. Why not? It appears it’s by far the most efficient way to earn gold in the game and since Arenanet seems to believe that such market manipulation is legitimate, the only danger to the sellers is in being caught in the actual act of selling, not in the act of accumulating. That’s a big plus over running obvious bots out in the game world.

Someone needs to wake up over at Arenanet and recognize that there are differences between what’s healthy for a real world economy and what’s healthy for an in game economy. Real world economic ideology should not dictate how an in game economy is run and taking steps to crack down on those accumulating massive wealth via the TP will say nothing about one’s real life economic beliefs.

It most definitely should require 3/5 for a kick vote. I really can’t fathom why it was ever decided to allow 2/5 to kick, or why this hasn’t been fixed after so many complaints against those who are exploiting the system.

There should also be a penalty for kicking someone past the half way mark, with a warning if a kick vote is initiated stating what ever that penalty might be. Stiff enough to greatly reduce the trivial use of kicks, but still allowing the group to kick someone who is being a real problem. (obviously, a big enough problem for it being worth kicking someone).

Upon “exit to desktop” from the game, the application appears to close and is removed from the applications list in the Task Manager, but the process remains active. Trying to launch the game launches another GW2.exe, but does not start the launcher or application.

I had to manually close the GW2.exe processes to relaunch the game.

Fay.2735:

I was kind of expecting a lot more from this patch. Mainly because Anet is always very vague about patches and only reveal a small portion of the things that end up being implemented.

So, I didn’t expect the things they revealed would be quite so literal in amount. Still even if it isn’t a huge amount it’s still an improvement on many fronts that I can tell so I can’t complain. Plus I’m sure it took a lot of work to code all of these things and we still have February patch to look forward to.

Also, I see nothing about Guild Missions in the Patch notes :/ Also what happened to the AOE adjustments? I’m guessing they are both scheduled for February patch?

(P.S. Buff Mantra of Pain!)

Yeah. I expected more as well. They made clear most of the new content was put off until February/March, but the expectation was that there would be a lot more meat instead, meant to set the foundation for the coming content updates. We got the beginnings of the new daily/monthly system, fixes for Fractals and a revamp for Orr, all with potential to be huge pluses, or major failures, so that’s all good. However, the rest of the notes don’t offer anything to be excited about. Most disappointing is that once again, profession balance/improvements are put off for yet another month.

I just finished reading the patch notes.

Glad for the Fractals fixes. A+
New Daily/Monthly rewards? On paper, good, but if the changes make dailies even more of a chore and less accessible to all players, I will rage. TBD.
Orr fixes look good on paper, but will reserve judgement. TBD
Profession Changes, pffff. Another month and still none of the improvements they have supposedly been working on for months now. D-
Excitement factor? Limited. C-
New Gemstore additions/changes. This was hyped beyond what we got. Implied more new items than the Quaggan Backpack. Looks like only the Quaggan Backpack. Can we get some more skins please? C-

The “Living Events” and any changes to the two effected zones better be spectacular, or this months update will overall be a let down.

FlyingK.9720:

I think a lot of us were expecting the timeline to be a little more like this:

Friday – Finish patch
Saturday / Sunday – mild QA / downtime / load patch
Monday early morning – Patch goes live
Monday – have all day to fix any unexpected problems

I agree that should always be the goal. In fact, the goal should be to have the patch ready for release the previous Wednesday, with Thursday and Friday for intensive QA testing and last minute fixes. Monday, noon Pacific should always be the “patch by” time, with the hope of pushing the patch a little before that time if everything looked ready on Friday.

That said, I also want them to actually be ready before they push the patch, so I’m not going to moan about the perceived “delays”. The point, though, is that they should never cut things so close that they almost always need more time on Monday to finish up before deeming the patch release worthy and they should always release it as early in the day as possible if it is redeemed release worthy.

Ideally, all these big updates would be finished and debugged by mid week of the week before the announced release and the scope of the content/fixes should be nailed down with that intent. I get the impression that they are always working to cram some last features/fixes right up until the last second, which is never good. If something just barely misses the deadline, better to push it in a mini patch during the coming week than delay everything, imo. (Especially since the game is so “hot fix” ready, requiring no real downtime for the patching process).

Xavion.6580:

Fiontar.4695:

Benkei.6293:

i love how we gota checkmark unfair policies but Anet cant even provide maintenance times for patching, one day gamers will stop being stupid and start asking for fair treatment from this kind of companies

Are you serious? The game has almost zero downtime and when the game patches, usually by the time you download the patch, the servers are ready for you to log in.

Maintenance times for games where downtime can be 1-5 hours is important. For a game with almost zero downtime, not so much.

Assume much? Zero downtime eh? What server have YOU been playing on? My server has had plenty of downtime. But I expect that- it’s a new MMO, nature of the beast. =/

Really? I think there was only one example of actual down time since launch, when they had to change out some hardware. Other than that, in my over 800 hours of play time, I’ve never had unscheduled downtime and I’ve never had the server not ready for me after downloading a patch (on my 25 Mb/sec fiber optic connection).

I’m on Tarnished Coast (US). My play times usually put me live during patching.

Here is what I ended up with for my Human Thief and my Norn Ranger. I broke the Trench-coat mold, but really wish I had more options:

Faze.6948:

Direwolf.7812:

Everyone knows that most of the GW2 armor is ugly, those that defend it are just blantly delusional and try to justify by saying it’s just personal preferences.

The real issue though is that GW2 does not have enough armor skins, they keep recycling most of the armor, even later in the game.

Compared to other MMO’s, GW2 lacks so much variety in terms of different Armor quantities.

There has been NUMEROUS, ABUNDANT complaints about the lack of armor in GW2. These complaints just don’t come up for no reason, sure many of the whiners complain because they haven’t reached ‘max’ level to see all the armors yet. But many of us who have done everything in the game already will also know that GW2 lacks armor skins.

http://dulfy.net/2012/08/09/gw2-pvp-armor-collection/

There’s something like 30-35 armor sets available to each character. You can mix and match to taste. There’s hundreds of different shades of dye and each piece of armor takes 1-3 different dyes, usually 2 or 3.

Maybe I just have lower standards, but when it came to deciding on my end-game look I felt like I had plenty of choice, considering this is such a young MMO. My main (male sylvari ranger) has the vigil medium set with duelist pauldrons and Ebon Vanguard weapons, and (I think) with the right dyes he looks badkitten.

But yes, they did overdo it with trench coats and face masks for medium. And for light it’s not skimpy armor that is tasteless, it’s the fact the female is skimpy while the male gets voluminous robes for the same set as it appears blatantly sexist and removes the style choice from the player.

On average, the armors in the game are pretty ugly. I’ve mixed and matched to get looks I’m happy with, but it’s sad how few attractive combinations there are. On top of generally poor design, there is a huge amount of repetitiveness. Heavy and Medium armor in particular gives you only the slightest variation on a theme and if you don’t like that theme, you are left with little acceptable choice.

I honestly don’t get it. Some where there was a serious failure of imagination/talent. I hope this will be addressed with future additions to the game and I pray that the armor in the first full expansion makes huge leaps forward in quality and variety.

Acquisition of cool looking armor/weapon skins as a progression incentive really could have worked if the skins in the game had actually been desirable.

The game is incredible, but calling out areas that do need serious improvement can only make the game better. Armor skins are probably the biggest failure and to a degree that is in-congruent with the quality of the rest of the game.

Nurse.1085:

I’m sorry, but the majority of Medium/Leather armor in GW2 is not attractive and unflattering on Female characters. There are hardly any feminine options (I’m a woman, I don’t want thongs, I just want pretty and feminine.) There are too many trench coats.

Take a look at GW1 Armor sets : http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Ranger_armor
It feels like they went backwards with GW2’s armor design.

I completely agree. I’d be fine with the addition of the new styles if they had also had more armors based on the GW1 styles. If trench coats weren’t so dominant, they would probably have been a welcome addition. Instead, we have overkill on one theme and lack variety.

At least they did a good job this the Gem Store medium armor. It’s true to the original and came out well in conversion. The Gem Store light armor on females is probably the ugliest armor in any MMO I’ve ever played and botches the conversion from the original to a degree I would never have imagined possible.

X The Manimal.5293:

The common armors are the ugly ones. That’s why you run dungeons for the juicy armors. Or save up for cultural.

There is not a single dungeon set I like enough to work for. Most I wouldn’t even wear if I could get them for free. Most of the T3 Cultural Armors are nice. The T2 is hit or miss. Most T1 are just as bad as most of the other armors in the game.

I’ve been able to mix and match looks I’m happy with, but to my eye, a huge percentage of armor skins in the game, even the skins you really have to work for or pay big money for, are just plain bad.

I’ve been able to find looks for all my level 80 characters I’m happy with.

However, I would agree that a very large percentage of armors in the game are ugly/redundant. Most depressing for me is that I might be able to mix and match one set of dungeon armor for each armor class I’d be happy with, but 90% of the dungeon armor, IMO, is ugly.

I know that MMOs typically have to limit the variety of armors to some finite number, due to rendering performance issues. I absolutely hate that such a large percentage of that quota is filled with such ugly armor. Even if they hired some incredible armor artists/modelers, there may be limits on how many new sets they can add to the game, which is sad.

I’d love to see the worst half of all armors scrapped and replaced and if it where up to me, I’d send almost every dungeon armor set back to the drawing board.

I love the game, but when you want aesthetics to be an alternative for stat inflation, you need much, much better aesthetics. There probably would have been no need for Ascended gear if Arenanet could have delivered on desirable end game gear skins.

Honestly, I don’t understand how they can create such a beautiful game, filled with exceptional environmental, character and mob models; but deliver so poorly on armor/weapon design.

I really, really hope they have new talent working on armor design for the first expansion!

(Seriously, I love almost everything else about the game, but armor looks are a huge disappointment in context with the rest of the game. Most of the game’s armors might be acceptable in an average MMO, but they do not befit this awesome game).

Benkei.6293:

i love how we gota checkmark unfair policies but Anet cant even provide maintenance times for patching, one day gamers will stop being stupid and start asking for fair treatment from this kind of companies

Are you serious? The game has almost zero downtime and when the game patches, usually by the time you download the patch, the servers are ready for you to log in.

Maintenance times for games where downtime can be 1-5 hours is important. For a game with almost zero downtime, not so much.

I try to do them every day. Sometimes on both accounts. I do skip the monthlies, though, since I hate being forced to do things I am not really interested to do at this point. If it was only WvW, or only FotM in one monthly, I might try to complete it. Both in one month? No thank you. I play a lot of hours monthly and if by playing naturally I can’t even half completer the monthly, then it loses all value as a play incentive.

I really hope that the “bucket of choices” coming in the future for dailies also applies to monthlies. I’ve always hoped that monthlies would be a
complete four of these eight" sort of affair, so it would encourage players of varying playstyles to play the game more, rather than trying to force more players to play content they just are not very interested in.

Levetty.1279:

I like how Mesmers keep getting lumped in with Warriors and Guardians as top tier just because people can’t be bothered to learn how to defeat them in sPvP. Willing 2 buy a PvP/PvE split please.

Either way Ranger is the class that still needs the most work.

I actually love playing my 80 mesmer more than any of my other professions. It’s not only a capable profession with a number of viable builds, but it’s fun, if you learn how to play one well. (I tried Mesmer in the final beta and hated it. Gaining experience in playing the game in general, with three other professions to level 80 and four other professions to various levels before starting my current Mesmer, really prepared me to play the profession. I had no problems leveling up and the profession is a blast at 80. For me anyway).

I do agree on PvE/PvP split on skills that have always been fine in PvE, but have been deemed “broken” for PvP.

Stop the PvP-related nerfs to the PvE profession and I think I could say that, for me, Mesmer is one of the best designed, fun to play professions.

BTW, capable doesn’t always mean fun-to-play. Guardian is very capable, but it can be pretty boring. I never had problems accomplishing things with my Necro, but that’s another very boring profession. Getting the professions that really need work development priority is something I agree with, but a number of professions could use some tweaking, at some point, to make them more fun to pay.

I don’t understand or believe that what the OP stated is even possible. If you rush through the zone, don’t harvest nodes, don’t craft, never repeat a DE you’ve done before, don’t do your personal story and only kill things that are part of a DE or Heart, then you can end up with the need to travel to another starting zone. (Well, not really “need”, since you can also stick around in a starting zone, killing things, harvesting things, repeating DEs, etc… and gain a lot more than 15 levels).

However, the OP claims they did the other things and still came up short. Sorry, it just isn’t possible. I have 5 human characters, all leveled up initially through Queensdale and I’ve never had this issue when I have not just rushed through the zone doing the bare minimum.

Now, maybe Arenanet would be well served increasing the frequency of DEs in some of the starting zones, to minimize the chances that someone who skips sources of XP they may not be aware of, like harvesting, crafting, exploration, etc… will “run out of things to do” short of the level requirement for the next zones over, but I don’t think they need to make the 1-15 leveling process quicker than it already is.

To be clear, I know that some new players to the game can indeed miss a lot of sources of XP, not realize how easy it is to journey to other starting zones and feel like they’ve hit an impasse. However, the OP claims they did all those other things and only hit level 12 and I just don’t believe it for one second.

What does one have to do with the other? I can imagine that paid server transfers may have some guilds, likely those with a history of hopping around, looking for a permanent home, but Guesting has nothing to do with WvW or home server choice.

MF stats on gear needs to go.

MF should just be on consumables, with the stat re-calibrated accordingly.

It’s a selfish stat to build around, which is fine for solo play, but destructive for group play.

Besides, there have been a number of MF data experiments that have many wondering if the entire stat isn’t completely broken, which makes MF not only the selfish choice, but perhaps the “fool’s choice” as well.

Definitely Ranger.

I never could find a ranged build worth playing or that fit my play style. My level 80 Ranger runs a melee-centric build that actually flows pretty well, even if it still feels a bit less capable than my other level 80s (Elementalist, Thief, Mesmer).

Nothing wrong with a non-ranged Ranger, but there definitely needs to be a lot more viable builds and all Ranger weapon skills really need review, because the common trend for ranger weapon skills is that they seem to have much poorer synergy/flow than most other profession weapon skills in the game. (Sometimes it feels like they developed the ranger skills first, then just randomly distributed them between the weapons).

IMO, there is an imbalance between AoE and Single Target damage in the game. However, it is not a universal “all AoE skills are OP’d” problem, nor is it a “nerf all AoE by 50%” sort of problem.

Any across the board cuts should be gradual, no more than 20% and then several passes should be made to fine tune individual AoE skills, up or down, in much smaller increments.

Some games have taken a really ham handed approach to the same problem, taking somewhat OP’s AoE skills and nerfing them into uselessness. Usefulness of AoE should not be based on them only being useful vs. 4 to 5 opponents. Single Target skills should always be the best skills for 1 vs. 1, but AoE should always be better when facing 2+ opponents.

To be honest, I was a little surprised by the AoE nerf announcement, because I’ve seen a number of theory-crating examples for numerous professions since launch that make the case for sequential, single target killing builds over AoE builds as the most efficient strategy.

Just out of curiosity, how much money does one need to spend to trigger the limit? The seriousness of this issue really depends on that number. Also, I wonder if there is a limit to applying gem cards? If not, that might be the best way around it for the really big spenders.

ColinJohanson.2394:

I just want to quickly clarify to set expectations, nothing in the blog post, nor nothing we’ve said anywhere has said you will be able to buy precursor items directly for crowns, this is not the case. We’ve simply said we’ll try and find some other places to add a chance to get them to the game until we’ve implemented the eventual precursor scavenger hunt.

Long term we’ll be working on the scavenger hunt concept to track down and earn a precursor item as a direct form of earning the reward. We’ll discuss that in more detail in the future once a design and implementation has been finalized.

Recently you guys said that no one is currently working on the Precursor scavenger hunt and implied that you were working on other alternatives for getting precursors. Now you imply that the only non-uber-RNG way to get precursors will be the Scavenger Hunt, (which, one would suppose, is still not being worked on by any developers).

I love you guys and find the recent information from you guys to be largely positive. However, I must say that I find it odd that you guys seem to have established a trend of teasing features that the community goes wild over, only to then clarify that you aren’t actually working on them, while we get features and content that the community would give a very low priority to.

If you “float a trail balloon” and the community gets excited over it, you might want to make those things a top priority, rather than continually teasing things that may, or may not, receive development time “sometime this year”.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Pinkus.2860:

Fiontar.4695:

Fozzik.1742:

It all sounds really good. The only thing that is a tiny bit frustrating is the TONS of achievements I’ve already completed and gotten nothing for. I wish I could do them over again once they are worth tokens. =\

Indeed. There better be a way to get rewards on previous achievements, because we can’t reset achievements and veteran players will really be at a pretty big disadvantage.

Either retroactive rewards, or a reset of completed achievements, with the current AP totals not being effected would be fine. I don’t mind having to revisit achievements I’ve already finished, but retroactive token rewards would be nice to have. (I’ve been focusing on achievements recently, now I have to wonder if I should stop that until there is some clarification on this).

They have explained in another post that once the initial system is implemented (Daily/Monthly for crowns), they will retroactively reward players with crowns for their already completed achievements. It WONT be part of the initial release though.

Since I think all of this can be a little confusing until seen in practice, and because some of the details aren’t yet fleshed out, a few points to help clarify:

• Previous daily and monthly achievements will not be reward retroactively with crowns, it will be newly completed daily/monthly achievements only. (January achievement if completed after the release will not give crowns, monthly from February on will qualify.)

• We will develop a separate reward system you’ll see later for other types of achievements, this system hasn’t been finalized, it’s entirely possible this system will not reward the crown currency at all. This system will retroactively reward achievements you’ve already earned (except dailies/monthlies) and may possibly cap out the rewards you can earn from infinitely repeatable achievements, so no one has an unfair advantage.

Hope that helps a bit, more info once we’ve finalized more of the details.

I hope the general achievements rewards use crowns as well. IMO, the entire Crown currency isn’t really needed, just an expansion of Karma rewards, but I can see the reasons for the new currency as well. However, I think you should really try to keep to Crowns for all Achievement related rewards, because splitting off into yet another currency just seems redundant. I’d hate to see the game a year from now with another half dozen or more additional alternative currencies.

As to the infinite achievements, I could understand the rewards being cut a bit for each repeat of the tier, or an increase in the effort needed to fill out repeats of the tier, but I’m totally against disqualifying repeats from the reward system entirely.

I do want to thank Arenanet for working on alternative rewards for world PvE play and also for the fact that most of the rewards appear to have nothing to do with a power curve gear grind. It takes a lot more effort from developers to provide non-gear grind rewards and it’s very much appreciated.

Cirroq.2531:

Wesley.4590:

Lot of negativity here, let’s see how the first half of the year goes first. Then see if there are reasons to complain…

I think one major source of negativity towards the game at this point was that it attracted lots of hardcore MMO gamers that went through the content shortly after the game went live and are now bored/disappointed at the direction the developers seem to be wanting to take the game in 2013. If the game was originally intended to be targeted towards casual gamers they should have said so in Beta so people that spend 30+ hours a week grinding PVE content could have saved $60.

I disagree with that statement entirely. I’ve been a fairly “hard core” MMO player for 14 years and this is the game I’ve been waiting for since I played my first MMO. I’ve logged almost 800 hours so far and I’m still enjoying the heck out of the game.

I’m very happy about the new reward systems and other measures to try to incentivize players to take advantage of the massive, detailed game world. However, it’s pretty clear to me that they’ve had to turn their focus to this because too many players lacked the imagination and sense of adventure needed to break out of their old MMO mentalities and see exactly how much game play GW2 actually offers. With out some sort of carrot, too many players were just failing to understand or appreciate just how much content there is in this game.

I’m very glad that they intend to eventually allow dailies to be completed by choosing from a “bucket” of achievements, rather than forcing players to do a specific set of tasks. Expand that to Monthlies as well and the game will be much better as a result.

I hope this will be prioritized to be part of the new system as early as possible. IMO, the new variations of daily tasks should not be introduced with out this part of the equation. I don’t want to miss out on dailies because the list has something I can’t/won’t be able to complete. The current dailies can be completed by people with fairly limited time and by characters in any level range. It’s important that doesn’t change.

Erasculio.2914:

The ideas are good, but it’s the execution that remains to be seen. This has always been ArenaNet’s main issue.

I’m really curious to see how are they going to make people play in the open world. Unless the daily achievements are very specific (“Do X events in map Y” or “Do X events in region Z!”), players are just going to find the most effective place to do a given task, and flock there leaving the rest of the world empty. For example, if there’s an achievement for “Do x dynamic events!”, people will find the single map with the highest concentration of events and farm it once a day, instead of spreading through the entire world. This kind of thing would hardly benefit the game as a whole.

I’m also not exactly happy with the “Guardian Gear” and similar boxes. We don’t know what they are yet; I am strongly hoping, though, that they are not something we open to get random pieces of equipment useable for a given profession. The game already has waaaaay too much RNG as it is, for ArenaNet to introduce an achievement tokens lottery in the game.

This would actually be an improvement on RNG, by trying to insure that the items being rolled on would at least be armor class and weapon types usable by your profession! I really wish this was expanded to include things like Zone Completion rewards.

Fozzik.1742:

It all sounds really good. The only thing that is a tiny bit frustrating is the TONS of achievements I’ve already completed and gotten nothing for. I wish I could do them over again once they are worth tokens. =\

Indeed. There better be a way to get rewards on previous achievements, because we can’t reset achievements and veteran players will really be at a pretty big disadvantage.

Either retroactive rewards, or a reset of completed achievements, with the current AP totals not being effected would be fine. I don’t mind having to revisit achievements I’ve already finished, but retroactive token rewards would be nice to have. (I’ve been focusing on achievements recently, now I have to wonder if I should stop that until there is some clarification on this).

ColinJohanson.2394:

This project was delayed in favor of having the specific folks required to build it skill-set wise working on solidifying the core of the game. You’ll hear more about our ecosystem in the future, but we’re not actively working on this project, in favor of making sure the core game itself is as fun and rewarding as possible.

Edited to add: We’ll discuss what sort of projects we’re doing instead in more detail in the blog post later this week, and even in more detail as the Jan/Feb/March releases get closer.

Shouldn’t you have had additional employees, with the very specific skill sets needed for this, completely separate from your core programers, working on this from the start? Why would it be put at the bottom of the basket of tasks for your main programmers when benefit/demand should have very obviously supported a small, dedicated team devoted to this project?

You could probably have even outsourced it to a proven mobile app development team and avoided the hassles of hiring new employees completely. That is still something you should very strongly consider.

Some times it feels like Arenanet doesn’t really want the game to fulfill it’s potential, but would rather just coast along on “well, that’s good enough”.

sostronk.8167:

Not sure about everything you said, but one thing that really irks me is the lack of character customization and skins for weapons and armor. Which is funny, because I was amazed about character customization when I first started this game, then after seeing the 500th player who looked exactly like me I QQd. Now I research skins and possible ways to make my character look and feel unique, but the content just is not there.

I would like more skins, but there are actually a lot of “rare” looks you can achieve via mix/matching and the use of transmutation stones. Compared to games like Warhammer Online, SWTOR, TERA and Rift, the variety of looks I see while standing around in Lion’s Arch are refreshing.

Now, if I enter the realm of my own subjective opinion, I’m a lot more disappointed with the lack of desirable/cool/quality among the variety the game offers than the amount of variety. Of course, almost daily I see people wearing a combination of armors I considered poor that actually look pretty together, so sometimes the individual pieces fare better off set. (I bought some leg armor two days ago for the stats, expecting to use a transmutation stone to transfer my then current look, but I actually liked the effect the new armor had on the overall outfit and kept it as is).

The previews don’t always do the armor justice, but I really wish they would add previews to the Trading Post. I think being able to easily try out different combos would lead to a lot more mix/matching among the population and add a lot more diversity.

I was ticked off because I had just finished gearing for the shatter/might spec just 30 seconds before the server went down for the patch. 4 Gold on Runes completely down the drain!

However, I spent a couple hours in a build tool trying to find a solid build that would appeal to me. I found it and I actually kill faster and end combat in better shape than I did with my Shatter/Might build Mesmer while leveling the last few levels to 80 over the past few days. It sucks I can no longer support my party with a hefty buff share, but it’s also nice to not be a buff bot.

I’ll post the build tomorrow. It’s a Sword/Sword : Scepter/Focus Phantasm build with regenerating, confusing Phantasms and Retaliatory blocking skills. Less frenetic than the previous build, more tactical and deliberate, but I really enjoyed it for the first hour of testing tonight.

Tomorrow I’ll try to find a Champion to solo, to see if it can still be done. Also want to test it out in more varied situations, but there are other viable builds out there.

BTW, I do hate ham handed nerfs. I wish the “fix” had been a little more deliberate, but I can still hope that they will revisit the nerfed build in the future with an eye towards making a more balanced version viable.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. The monthlies need to be restructured. The monthly achievement and reward should require the completion of four out of six to eight related achievement paths, so that players can pick based on their play preferences, rather than being forced to do WvW or Fractals, etc…

I have 700+ hours of play, complete my dailies almost every day, but I have NEVER completed a monthly, because I refuse to do content I hate because Arenanet arbitrarily decided I need to do it for a monthly.

People don’t mind working to earn a monthly, but many resent being forced to do content they loathe. What happened to “never forcing people to do a form of game play they don’t enjoy” in order to get an equivalent reward?

If you run with a regular group or guildies you trust, none of this is of concern. If you are going to pug it, you need to accept the good with the bad. People will still request players in a particular level range, so you really only have to worry about people who lie there way into a higher level group.

If the votes for level of the run are shown next to each person’s name, it will be easy to figure out if you have someone lower than the advertised requested level range. If they are shown with out the name attached, at least it will be a heads up and the party can go from there.

I think it’s a good system as described. I’d rather deal with the headaches of this system than have to deal with mechanisms that feed elitism.

Assuming ANet can keep people playing and also not completely disillusion people with the value of the gem store market, prices should continue to go up over time. The ~30% spread just means it has to be a long term investment. No quick flipping to make a profit on the gem to gold exchange! There is always the risk, though, that something will stop the inflationary pressure on the exchange rates, so even if you invest long term, it’s not with out risk.

Rates have more than doubled in under two months, if I recall correctly, but that doesn’t guarantee that prices will double again in the next few months. The buy/sell gap is large enough to ensure that this will always be a high risk area for investment.

The game actually follows Last In First Out for like priced TP listings, specifically to discourage people from continually driving prices down, 1C at a time. The only thing wrong with undercutting by 1C is that it isn’t actually necessary.

As a seller, it more important to select a selling price that will appeal to buyers. When I go to list an item, I look at how many people have listed at the current lowest price before deciding whether to just match that price, or undercut it. I may also monitor the listing for a few minutes to get some idea how active sales are at the given price and how volatile the pricing is. Low sell through, an inventory glut at the current price and/or great pricing volatility are all warning signs to me that I may want to undercut.

Stephane Lo Presti.7258:

Hi everyone,

The statistics reported on the wiki pages for the Wintersday Mystery Box drop rates are incorrect, due to the method being used for calculating them. Some of our item packages use more than one loot table to determine what you get from opening them. Whenever you open a Wintersday Mystery Box, it randomly drops items selected from 2 tables, each having specific items and their own drop rates.

We’ve seen people mention the low drop rates of Foostivoo from Wintersday Mystery Box and would like to remind people that the primary way to obtain this miniature is from the Mystic Forge, by combining other minis (wiki link).

Thank you.

A couple posts up corrected the error. It would now cost an average of $50, rather then $65. Still pretty ridiculous. Not to even mention that someone with bad luck on the RNG could spend much more than that.

The greed is as sad as it is short sighted.

I think pretty much the entire gem store suffers from overpriced items, which severely limits the appeal. Much revenue is probably lost to this. As the exchange rate between Gems and Gold increases, the value of items in the gem store suffers further. If I want to support the game financially, trading my gems for gold is almost always the best option, which is a shame because a fairly priced cash shop with items worth buying represents a huge, untapped revenue stream.

VikToRiuS.5426:

Aye.8392:

Having played Guild Wars 1 I would have sworn that A-Net was one of the best game designers in the world, but this company, as it exists now, isn’t very good at what they do.

Wow, and all this because they didn’t make one activity perfect on the first try? Who are we to decide that a game company can’t make small mistakes too at times? They are only human.

In my opinion the one and only real reason why people are upset about getting in already running games is the achievement.

Sure, it would be fun to do with a group of friends too. And I hope they’ll implement it at one point. But I seriously doubt that this one activity would be a game breaker for any reasonable person.

Only real problem I have with it game design wise is that it takes too long to complete, and the pause between waves isn’t enough to do anything. It needs some more balancing.

And the achievement and dead doylak problem could be remedied easily as well by resurrecting all of them after each wave and giving out points for every good wave, as I’ve stated before already.

It’s just one more example of what appears to be a great company falling into a serious slump. It gives the impression that some designers/developers just have no pride in their work and are oblivious to the customers they are supposed to be designing content for.

They seem to like to insure us that they did indeed anticipate some of the issues ahead of time, so we don’t think they were blind to the obvious, but then that always raises the question “Then why didn’t you do it the right way from the start”?

I’m very happy that this rather large event was pretty much bug free. They also did listen to some of our input from the Karka disaster and from Halloween. That’s good and I applaud them. However, this tendency to do things they apparently know are going to cause ire among the community is just baffling and is the next major flaw that needs to be addressed with the live teams.

Look at things from the player’s perspective and design to them. If you really do realize in advance that a design decision will annoy and anger, usually for no good reason, than redesign it or avoid such designs in the first place!

It was obvious that friends would want to play this together. The universal lack of grouping support for activities is baffling to begin with and should be addressed. These are activities you play for fun, there really isn’t much reward associated with any of the activities we have seen since launch. They pretty much all have much more appeal to players if people can join with friends. So, the design flaws related to this go back a long ways and have only skated by unaddressed for so long because of the general lack of the promised number of activities that were hinted to be available at launch.

The best investment of resources might have been to fix that flaw of the activity system so that Toypocalypse could have been a party supporting activity. Barring that, it should never have been set up as an activity in the first place and should have been set up in the same exact frame work as the various other Tixx instanced events!

We all know it was doable. Why it wasn’t done properly is the question that digs at the fans and sours what should have been a fun experience.

KorKor.9452:

Halloween also kinda fell into this but in different ways so does Wintersday. People may have complained about the Clock tower but it was purely optional. You needed to stick to your guns and keep that level of hard jumping puzzles around. It didn’t give any special gear to do it. Just give people more time with it like you did with the Wintersday puzzle and maybe take race into account when grouping people. As a single Asura with around 7 Norn really stinks as it becomes more about muscle memory and luck then fun ‘n’ skill.

~The skins for Halloween were amazing and giving people the recipes to craft them was a good idea for later in the year. Just drop the mat requirements out of mini-legendary but still keep it harder to craft. Also put it up in the gem store for X amount of time during the holiday giving people every option to get the item during the holiday Should they not with all those options? Tough cookie!

~Keep the quality differences in the skins the same. During Halloween each skin was amazing in that it stood out from the others. Especially the chainsaw yet all the Wintersday skins are pretty much exactly the same. I know keeping them all the same makes quote -everyone happy- but in truth it makes us all clones and hampers your creative juices.

(This one is rather long.) ~RNG has it places out in the world during year round things and with things that are not soulbound/account bound. It does not however make anyone happy to be denied any fair shot at all with the pets like with your Wintersday boxes just because you want to cater to the whales.

Which do not lie that is what it is really about super greed in burst profits instead of steady long term. You had it right with Halloween in letting us get 3 pets for X amount of gems. You even made it so people could combine pets to get another cool pet from that box. It was also at a price that didn’t make you feel ripped off as you got THREE pets. Wintersday hits and you make each toy cost the same as 3 pets gotten during Halloween for a single! Then you cater to the whales by putting even more in a bloody pets in a RNG box.

It’s like you want your loyal fans to stinking quit just so you can make a quick flash buck. That is how that makes me and everyone I’ve talked to feel. It makes me look at you instead of a developer trying to change things for the better but instead a gaming copy of COMCAST. That or yet another terrible Korean (Well aware of your parent corp) company catering to addict Asians that never leave their kitten homes instead of the rest of the bloody world. This is how they treat their kitten customers! Be more Valve less EA/Ncsoft. That or become as irrelevant as SquareEnix in the western market when people get tired of the same abuse.

---

I do not understand why as an MMORPG you lack things at release such as group play for this holiday event. You said it yourself that MMORPG’s are social games that should bring people together. Not make us bitter to see them because our friends are forced away from us.

I completely agree with the comments on the gem store RE: Wintersday. I too feel as if they they are so obsessed with seeing how much money they can squeeze from the few individuals willing to drop $100+ dollars/month that they just don’t care how many fans they drive from the game. I spend $20-$40 a month to “support the game”, but apparently they don’t want people like me playing and paying.

It may be exciting to be able to laugh with fellow employees about how “one person this month actually spent $300 in the gem store”, but many of those people are starting to express that even after spending $100 on things like RNG and black lion keys, they have come away feeling they were completely ripped off and will never buy again. Why would you sacrifice a stream of steady income from happy customers just to chase the flash in the pan big spenders? Is the new business model to fund the game by fleecing those with deep pockets and impulse control? Or to tap into the members of the playerbase with actual gambling addictions? (We all know the RNG boxes are just lottery tickets).

Who ever runs the gem store just doesn’t get that the box price and the expectations of fans for a AAA MMO means that they have to design the store to provide long term value and ongoing incentive to contribute among a wide swath of loyal fans. This is not a F2P game where for every sucker who gets disillusioned and leaves, another two stumble in the door of a “free game”, being nothing more than the “next mark” to the publisher of the game. Keep treating loyal customers as if they are disposable and it won’t be long before this game has no sustainable revenue to stand on!

Kagosin.8521:

Fiontar.4695:

Kagosin.8521:

The event just started, and people act as if everyone is going to understand it straight off the back.

Out of the 5 runs i did, only the first 2 was failed, but after the 3rd+ run we started keeping all 5 alive.

The problem i’m seeing with people on here is lack of patience nor teaching. I get that people are disappointed that they can’t run with their friends and that’s fine. What gets me is people shutting out the idea to run with random people.

I log a lot of hours. My friends have a lot less play time. When they do have time, they want to be able to, shocker, play with their friends! It’s pretty simple. In fact, it was an oft touted design principle. We got level scaling, which does work, but guesting is AWOL and now we get a big holiday event clearly best enjoyed with friends and there is no way to actually play with friends.

You can not tell me that they couldn’t apply a queuing system to this that could keep a party together. They can send party members to the same story instance, the same dungeon instance and the same overflow server for a zone, but they can’t send players to the same activity instance? Sorry, I don’t buy that there would be much programming involved at all.

(BTW, why are activities designed with out this functionality by default? Activities are for fun and people have more fun when they can play with their friends. All group activities should have offered party linking by default. That the obvious functionality is still missing, leading to the issues with this particular event, just shows bad planning).

Back to the game. Guess I have to hope my friends with limited playtime don’t decide to log on during the next hour and not looking forward to explaining to them why we can’t do this together. The game is wonderful, but some nights I have to make excuses for the developers I just shouldn’t have to make…

You know that statement wasn’t meant for those with legit complaints about not having a queue system. It was for some of those that comment about never wanting to socialize with PUGs. On a side note, programming can act in many ways you wouldn’t expect, so it slight annoys me when people say “X thing can be easily programmed”, cause you mess up 1 thing, it can cause a domino effect for something else.

Thing is they never said they could never do it at all, it’s that they can’t do it at this time being.

What I don’t get is why don’t people stick around, since it restarts right then and there when it fails? It refers to my patience line earlier. The 2 that i failed from my earlier example, was cause of people starting to learn it, but by sticking around, you understand how to do things. This is by no means an excuse for what’s put in place, but to me some have to learn how to adapt to current situations, send note to devs, and work around for that moment.

Sorry, hope you didn’t think my ire was directed at you. I had no problem doing this with pugs. 4/5 first try, as soon as the event went live and an easy 5/5 on the second run with a different pug. For me it’s the decision to separate people who want to play together that is frustrating and actually contrary to the stress they put on the game removing obstacles for people who know each other to play the game together.

I realize now that with us so close to Christmas, we probably could not expect a fast turn around on this issue. That just makes me more frustrated with the developers who obviously anticipated the issue, but chose not to do anything about it when they could have done so.

Kagosin.8521:

The event just started, and people act as if everyone is going to understand it straight off the back.

Out of the 5 runs i did, only the first 2 was failed, but after the 3rd+ run we started keeping all 5 alive.

The problem i’m seeing with people on here is lack of patience nor teaching. I get that people are disappointed that they can’t run with their friends and that’s fine. What gets me is people shutting out the idea to run with random people.

I log a lot of hours. My friends have a lot less play time. When they do have time, they want to be able to, shocker, play with their friends! It’s pretty simple. In fact, it was an oft touted design principle. We got level scaling, which does work, but guesting is AWOL and now we get a big holiday event clearly best enjoyed with friends and there is no way to actually play with friends.

You can not tell me that they couldn’t apply a queuing system to this that could keep a party together. They can send party members to the same story instance, the same dungeon instance and the same overflow server for a zone, but they can’t send players to the same activity instance? Sorry, I don’t buy that there would be much programming involved at all.

(BTW, why are activities designed with out this functionality by default? Activities are for fun and people have more fun when they can play with their friends. All group activities should have offered party linking by default. That the obvious functionality is still missing, leading to the issues with this particular event, just shows bad planning).

Back to the game. Guess I have to hope my friends with limited playtime don’t decide to log on during the next hour and not looking forward to explaining to them why we can’t do this together. The game is wonderful, but some nights I have to make excuses for the developers I just shouldn’t have to make…

All the other content in the workshop is party based. The mechanics of toypocalypse are not that different. Why was it set up as an activity in the first place? It was obvious people would want to play this with friends.

I usually roll with the punches on stuff like this from Arenanet, but “we’ll do better next time” does not really cut it. We still have two more weeks of Wintersday. Take how ever many programmers you need to make this work with parties. No reason we couldn’t see a fix with in three days, including testing. Then go back to what ever else everyone is working on.

The reaction was totally predictable and I just don’t get why it wasn’t designed correctly right from the start…

I agree with the OP. Why the heck can’t we join this event with a premade party? I want to enjoy this with guildmates and there is zero reason why this shouldn’t be allowed.

Tonight, me and some others in our instance were sent back to the beginning of the puzzle with out actually having fallen. We were successfully transversing the puzzle only to be instantly sent back to the start platform with a much, much shorter load screen than on a fall. So, yeah, something is wonky.

I mostly play either solo or with RL friends, but I had no problem getting a group for these holiday events and had no problems with the people I grouped with.

Just “LFG Tixx” and you’ll get an invite. If someone advertises a group needing more, just type /join Character Name, substituting the name of the person advertising an open slot.

These types of boxes are just thinly disguised lottery tickets. That’s it. The average return on each box is only a tiny portion of the cost, unless you luck out and get an item you can sell for a ton of gold or get that ultra-rare you are dying to acquire.

I’m done with them, but as long as there are people who will drop $100+ on stacks of these, they will keep selling them. These are for gambling addicts with deep wallets, nothing more.

They can also be used at the Mystic Forge for other recipes than the toy recipe.

I think this jumping puzzle is a failed design. Here is why:

People who are good at jumping puzzles find it too easy. People who are not so good find it impossible, due to the disappearing platforms. The crumbling flakes and exploding presents mean absolutely nothing to those who are really good, because they are well past them before they disappear, but the mechanic makes the puzzle near impossible for those who need split second pauses between jumps to reorient.

End result, no one is happy.

In the future, please, offer different difficulty levels with scaling rewards and make the lowest difficulty level something that people, with patience, but lacking in lightning fast reflexes and a surgeon’s dexterity can accomplish, ok? Very frustrating for an event that is supposed to be “fun”.

The armies of toy soldiers and the added element to defeat Toxx were welcome, but the rest seemed like a random mish mash of all the previous event elements. They should have eliminated half the repeated steps and tossed in a couple more unique elements, or at least twists on previous elements.

Hate to say it, but the people willing to buy 200+ boxes are the reason they keep making the damn things! I bought ten, just to see if they had improved the contents based on community feedback, but it seems they are just as much of a rip off as before.

These things only serve the role of a lottery ticket. If you buy a few and get something that sells for 400 gold on the TP, you won the jackpot! If you buy stacks in the hopes of eventually getting the jackpot item, there is a good chance you will just waste your money.

How these things don’t qualify as gambling under various laws is beyond me.