I have a Phenom 2 X6 @ ~4Ghz and a GTX570. I haven’t noticed a frame rate drop, but I haven’t been looking at the numbers, that’s just based on not experiencing any sensation of frame issues.
However, yes, load screen times? 2-3 times longer than at launch and worse after the latest patch, but they’ve been getting worse for weeks now.
I did notice that some of the flashing terrain issues have returned for me this week as well, though they had disappeared completely by the end of the first week.
Someone is messing with something and it’s been for the worse, not the better.
Laundry list of mostly ill formed, not entirely accurate, over exaggerated and oft repeated criticisms. When I see one of these that hits all the same points, I always wonder if the author spent more time reading gaming forums than actually playing the game before coming up with their “review”.
The cincher is the agenda to tout another game as an alternative, “better” option.
The game isn’t perfect, but it’s ten times the game as it’s competitors. How many weeks after you move onto Planetside before you post a similar post on their forums about all the mistakes they made and start touting the next great game?
Some people are chronic MMO quitters. If someone can’t find plenty of reasons to stick with this game, then maybe MMOs just aren’t for them, or maybe forum wars are the only thing that they really enjoy about the genre? Each game providing more fodder for the endless stream of cynicism?
I’m at 470 hours and counting with the best, most engaging MMO I’ve played in my 14 years in the genre. I think most people who give up on this game didn’t try very hard to find things worth liking and worth playing for. The game is full of things for people of different tastes and play styles.
So, yeah, what ever.
I don’t have any data, but anecdotally, I seems to see an improvement in rare drops from an even modest MF boost from foods. However, MF from armor or items has appeared to either have zero benefit, or has actually decreased my drops, even if combined with food.
Could food MF boosts be working, but item/gear MF be broken; either non-functional or actually bugged to the point where they are offsetting any positive benefit from food?
In any event, other than food, I avoid the MF stat completely and I would never spend a dime on the cash shop MF boosters, with the value of MF appearing to be extremely questionable.
BTW, it did seem to me that the MF food had a much bigger impact during the first week or two, so something may have changed; either they “fixed a bug” that made MF “too valuable”, or they broke it intentionally or unintentionally.
I’d love to see a test using only MF boost foods, to see if there really is a disparity between food and item based MF.
I’d also love to see something official on MF, what it’s supposed to do and if it’s actually working as intended.
Closing in on 470 hours played and still having a lot of fun. I fully expect to still be having fun when I hit 1,000 hours, which will take several months, as I’m reducing my weekly hours to attain a healthier balance with RealLife.
So, yeah. More than my money’s worth. I’ve had to settle with most other MMOs in recent years being worth the box price if I got more than 40 hours of fun from them. In comparison, GW2 is a feast of fun and value too great to have imagined.
Nice to have an MMO that is actually worthy of being played for months and years, rather than days or weeks.
I have 117 Black Lion Chests sitting in the bank. That’s been acquired over the course of over 450 hours played, with all keys found being used to unlock chests along the way.
The extreme rarity of keys from game play actually have de-incentivized me from buying any keys in the cash shop. I haven’t opened enough chests to establish any sort of habit for using the contents. The contents are so rare that they have become relics taking up bank space, waiting for some day when I “really need them”, rather than something I want to use, then, when they run out, I want to get more of.
The stack of 117 chests just makes it plainly obvious the kind of game they are playing with the chests. They don’t want to let me open half the chests I find for free, they want me to open maybe 5% for free. So, I look at those chests, calculate the cost of opening them, vs. the value of the content inside, which due to rarity I actually don’t use at all and just have to laugh at the absurdity of it all.
IMO, they not only have shot themselves in the foot, they have blown the metaphorical leg right off. They don’t give players enough of a taste of what’s in the chests for free for them to want to pay gems, (via cash or gold exchange), to open them. You want people to get in the habit of using those buffs, so they want to keep using them and when they run out, they are willing to pay to get more.
They would probably have sold ten times as many keys in the shop if they had matched the availability of keys in game so that, statistically, most people would have opened half the chests they had found for free.
Now, most players just see the chests as trash and no one is going to spend cash to open up chests they feel are trash.
I agree, some form of unified token currency is needed.
If they still want to require you to run the given dungeon at least once first, they could make it so the first successful run of a dungeon unlocks the armors from that dungeon for purchase via a universal token.
They could also award a single Dungeon Specific token for a successful run, along with the current number of tokens in the form of UniversalDungeonTokens. Have the armors each cost 1XSpecificDungeonToken and a number of universal tokens. That way, you have to run a dungeon at least once to get a piece of armor for that dungeon, but the rest of the token cost could be earned in any dungeon.
Of course, I would really prefer the original concept they floated last fall, which was that each dungeon would have more than one armor design for each weight class, you would earn one token per run and each token could buy you one one piece of armor. I’d even be fine with a hybrid system, where each dungeon had two sets per armor class, one that could be purchased at one piece per run, and another that would take multiple runs for each piece.
I’ve avoided dungeons completely, even though I had been really looking forward to them, because I really am not happy about the reversal of course from “Dungeons will not be a grind, we want you to have fun and get a reward for each run” to “Oh, yeah, we decided to make it a grind after all and it’s one heck of a grind, so we hope you’ll forget what we said last year and embrace grind, grind, grind”.
That’s what it feels like to me anyway.
BTW, I’m approaching 470 hours played. I’ve only done a little WvW and almost no sPvP. No Dungeons. I’m still having a blast and expect to get well over 1,000 hours from the current non-Dungeon PvE content. The game could have worked this way for everyone, if they had stuck to their guns that “the entire game is end game and there is no gear grind in GW2”. By adding a mega-gear-grind at launch, they just prevented most people from making the jump to the new paradigm and just stuck most of the prolific players back on a treadmill that many are getting bored of already.
The game didn’t need a gear grind. It probably would have been ok with a very minor gear grind for players who like those sorts of carrots, but going full tilt, carrot on the stick treadmill grind, they may have done serious harm to the game’s longevity. I understand that would be ironic, because the treadmill development trap always stems from a fear that with out the treadmill people will get bored and leave. However, Arenanet had spent a fair amount of time in recent years correctly explaining why there shouldn’t be a grindy treadmill, so I’m really scratching my head over what happened…
I don’t get the point. I think we are all against bots, but why would that effect your desire to play Rangers? Also, just as a note, Short Bow isn’t our only good weapon. I’ve been running a S/WH A/D melee build for about 25 levels now (Ranger just hit level 61) and I love it.
There is no need to make all three zones level 80. Level scaling works in this game. If level 80 players aren’t playing in the other two zones, it’s not because they aren’t level 80, it’s because they lack in the rewards dept. for players at the level cap.
Putting all the highest tier crafting mats and resource nodes in Cursed Shore is part of the problem. Who ever thought that was a good idea?
If level 80s could get almost as much progress towards their “end game progression” in all the level 70-80 zones in the game, level 80s would be less concentrated in one zone.
The rest of your ideas are interesting, but it would make more sense for the lower level zones in Orr to become more rewarding than they currently are for level 80s, rather than trying to scale everyone else up to level 80.
I’ve chosen not to play the game as if an “end game gear grind” is a necessary part of the game. I still play my level 80, but I spend more time playing in the broader game world than I do playing in Orr.
So many level 80s swarming Cursed Shore shows that most players have not made the paradigm shift away from the “end game grind is the end all be all goal” mentality to the “now, the entire game world is my playground” frame of mind.
Of course, Arenanet didn’t help in this regard when they panicked and introduced a steep end game grind “for those who want it”. It’s obvious that many people who don’t really want it and don’t like it feel compelled to participate in it because they don’t really get that there is an alternative way to play a level 80 character in this game.
For me, I play GW2 like some massive Skyrim, rather than playing it with Cursed Shore and Explorable Dungeon grinds as a substitute for the “same old, same old” Raid based “end game”. I think I’m playing the game as it was originally intended, but I fully understand why I’m probably a rare exception.
Anyway, if all of Orr was seen as rewarding, there would be no reason for all the level 80s to ignore the other two zones. No need to level scale anyone up, which would just create it’s own problems with even more people rushing to reach Orr and making it their sole focus of play.
We thought we should put in our 2 cents as well.
Guild Wars 2 is a game about freedom. We want you to be able to explore the world and engage in a huge variety of activities, focusing on whatever best suits your tastes.
Some players have run into “diminishing returns” thresholds we put into the game to provide a safety net against unanticipated economy-breaking issues. We do have these thresholds in place, but it’s not our intention that normal players should ever run into them. We’ve recently had bugs and imbalances that have caused normal players to hit thresholds, and we’ll fix those.
These systems are put in place to protect the economy from botters and exploiters. We will close exploits as quickly as we can. These thresholds help create a safety net to keep the economy safe when we aren’t there to deal with the offender. It’s important to have a safety net in place. It would be bad for everyone if, for example, a group of players learned how to speed-clear a dungeon in 5 minutes, with full rewards each time, and then repeated that continuously. When one activity emerges that’s order of magnitudes more profitable than anything else in the game, it forces everyone to either engage in that activity or get priced out of the economy.
While we need a safety net to stop unanticipated economy-breaking exploits and botting, we have no desire to stop farming. Farmers are a part every online economy and when they are doing normal game activity they do not cause any harm. If a player finds a normal game activity fun and would like to keep doing it, that’s fine with us.
Initially we have to rely on smaller data sets, instinct and some guesswork to find the correct cutoff. What this means is that some players are going to bump into the edges of these systems for a while as we get them sorted out. Please bear with us while we gather more data and lower the safety net until it’s only providing critical economy protection. Looking at the numbers this morning, we believe some of the threshold systems are just too harsh empirically and we’ll be adjusting those systems within the next few weeks to ensure that fewer legitimate players are being impacted.
I hope this helps to explain why a game like this needs systems such as this to protect its economy. I also hope it gives some insight into our philosophy about botters (BAD) and exploiters (BAD) vs. farmers (GOOD). Thanks for your support and we will see you in game.
Jon
Loved this post until the part about fixing it in “the next few weeks”. This should be adjusted daily until it’s no longer effecting normal players. If we have to live with the game cutting off rewards for normal players doing normal things for a “few more weeks”, many may decide to go elsewhere.
Jon, lowering the net where it obviously needs to be lowered needs to happen now. Fine tuning after that taking a few weeks? Fine. It may even be an ongoing process for as long as the game is live, but a few weeks to fix some obviously unfair DR triggers is not acceptable.
I’m hoping you just meant that the entire process would take weeks and that the obviously needed changes will happen in the next couple days, if not tonight.
I wanted to inject something, because it’s very relevant to the entire concept that players need to be prevented from advancing too quickly, or playing too much.
I hit the level cap with my Elementalist at around the 135 hour mark. I have now logged almost 245 hours with that same character. I haven’t touched a dungeon yet. I have only done a little WvW and even less sPvP. I have never sat in one place grinding. I’ve bought or crafted the more easily available Exotics as I’ve been able to afford to during normal play, currently two accessories short of a full set of exotic armor, accessories and three exotic weapons.
I haven’t played to pursue the End Game Gear Grind. I’ve played to have fun enjoying the game world. I still only have map completion in the 60s. I play the game like it’s one massive Skyrim and have been having a blast doing so.
The original design was correct. The entire game is “end game” There is no need for an “end game gear grind”. It doesn’t matter one spit that I hit the level cap in two weeks, or that I have over 365 hours of total time played on my account. I was still having a blast playing the game as it was originally intended!
The original design worked! I can not say it too many times or stress it enough.
What ever panic mode the developers got themselves in over people getting “too quickly” to the level cap or logging hundreds of hours, well, they need to just quit it! There was nothing, I repeat nothing to panic over. Nada!
The original design worked! Go back to the original design concept and get off of the two generations gone concept that you need an end game gear grind with this game!
Creating a gear grind was a completely wrong turn for the game. You created demand for RMT gold that never would have existed if you had just had faith in the original design. Making the End Game Gear Grind even more difficult, by implementing a DR system that effects real players, is just digging the hole even deeper. Stop it!
The game does not and never has needed an End Game Gear Grind. Period. There doesn’t need to be ANY artificial limitation on a real player’s ability to play as many hours a day as they desire. Period.
The game, as originally designed, is and was good for several hundreds of hours of play with a single character and the replayability and fun factor was indeed large enough to allow people who played one character for 300-400 hours to embrace the idea of doing so again, and again, with additional characters!
Stop the “OMG, people are playing the game too much and hitting the cap too quickly” panic. It’s a relic of the past and was irrelevant to the game, until you MADE it relevant by creating a massive grind where NONE was needed!
The Original Design Worked! Stop finding ways to break it, wound it or kill it!
Some of your players have made the paradigm shift, why are some at Arenanet failing to see the paradigm shift the game’s design created?
(edited by Fiontar.4695)
There was never, ever supposed to be an “End Game Gear Grind” for this game. Ever. They need to go back to that.
The game doesn’t need it. I hit the level cap on my main at the 135 hour mark and now have almost 245 hours on that character. I still only have 63% map completion. I still haven’t done any dungeons. I’ve only barely touched WvW and sPvP. I play the game like I would play a massive, extended Skyrim and craft or buy the next piece of Exotic Gear when ever I can afford it.
I’m two accessories short of full exotics. I’ll probably eventually outfit myself with an alternate set to support a different build type. I’ve ignored the really grindy exotics. They are just pointlessly grindy and the grind isn’t necessary to provide hundreds of hours of enjoyable play for a character that has reached the level cap.
The original design worked. There is no need for an End Game Gear Grind, which has just created a market for illicit gold sellers, attracted botters and resulted in DR, which will just further increase the demand for illicit gold!
Botters will just adjust their botting to game the DR system. They can much better afford to have 24 accounts that each run an hour a day, circumventing the DR entirely and also making identifying them as botters pretty close to impossible, than a normal player can afford to deal with the very negative repercussions of a restrictive DR system.
DR will kill the game. It’s really the only thing that can kill the game. that and other bad game design decisions that abandon the original design concept and fall back on things like an “End Game Gear Grind”, which actually isn’t even needed!
I’ve been playing the heck out of this game, but I’ve also been spending more than the $15/month I would be paying for a subscription fee with another MMO. Do you really want to drive people like me from the game, when your entire business model relies on people like me playing and paying?
There is no inflation any where in sight in this game, beyond the end game cost inflation you have implemented. Even with all the botters, crafting mat costs are still high, to the point that I wonder how the economy would even function with out the influx of mats from farmers.
Go after botters, not players. Examine the impact that the “wrong turn” you made in creating an end game gear grind has created and consider reversing course and removing the “need” you’ve created for RMT gold for some players who would otherwise have not even been tempted. Get authenticators and the new blacklisted password reset in place to drastically reduce the incidence of hacked accounts, which are the life blood of illicit farmers. Finally, stop punishing legitimate players for playing the game!
I can’t even comprehend what the developers are thinking. They are indeed punishing people for normal play. There have been a number of reversals on the original game design and they have all been to the detriment of players AND the game.
They advertised a game with no grind. All was good. Then they jacked up prices and time commitment on everything worth perusing, forcing players to grind to chasing carrots, which they said they would not do. Many of us love the game, so we shrug our shoulders and start to grind for those carrots they’ve decided to make us grind for. Then, they start to punish us for doing the grind they have forced us to do? Ok, yeah, that makes sense.
The ultimate betrayal is the tightening of diminishing returns to the point that it is having a clear impact on people just playing the game the way it was originally intended, before they introduced the need to grind.
I’m sorry, but this is just completely wrong and could completely destroy the game, the first game since WoW with the real potential to grab a huge portion of market share and hold onto it and grow it over time.
I’m fine with DR for sitting and farming the same spot for more than an hour or repeating the same DE more than three times in an hour. However, I should be able to spend as many hours as I want roaming and playing the game in a normal fashion as I desire, with out triggering any sort of diminishing returns. I should be able to sit down for four or five hours to complete a zone, killing things along the way and doing all the DEs I encounter, with out DR.
If someone wants to play 12 hours a day, they should be treasured as a dedicated fan, not punished for being an avid player. That the DR is effecting people who play much, much less than that just shows how insanely absurd the DR system is.
Is the game too popular? Is that the point? I just don’t get it.
As to Bots, which one would presume are the reason for DR in the first place, most farmers/spammers rely on stolen accounts to be viable. Why not actually deliver on the security promises made a couple weeks ago? Where is Google Authenticator support? Why weren’t authenticators available at launch? Why haven’t you implemented the forced password changes with the extended password blacklist in place?
Also, farmers need people to “need” more gold than they can earn through normal play in order to have a market for their illicit services. Don’t you realize that the insane costs for End Game Gear, (Yes, despite promises, you have created a massive end game carrot on a stick gear grind for this game) has actually created a demand for illicit gold that never would have existed if you had stuck to the original design for the game?!?!?!? The costs are so insanely high on so many things that the legal gem for gold exchange isn’t even viable for someone who might be willing to pay you for a bit of a short cut.
None of that makes illicit gold buying right, but the fact remains that you took a game that shouldn’t have even had a market for illicit gold buying and created a market for it! DR for normal play will drive many players from the game and others, figuring they have nothing to lose, since the game has made it impossible to earn things they want through normal play, will take the risk of buying gold from RMT sellers, seeing it as the only way.
Bad decision on top of bad decision is just making things worse, not better, while risking the loss of a huge chunk of fans, while also giving those against the game the ammunition they finally need to knock the legs out from under the game.
Give us real account security protections. Force the password resets, with the extended PW blacklist in place, as promised. Go after actual botters with better analysis tools and more properly trained staff. This may cost more than some piece of DR code, but it goes to the source of the problem with out punishing actual players for playing the game!
Same issue with me. I can join my friend on order of Whispers personal Story elements, but he can not join me for most of my Vigil story. Getting very irritating. We are in the same map, standing next to each other. Dots show us in the proper places, no blacked out portrait.
Relogging, dropping party, etc… haven’t fixed it. We are on the equivalent story elements for our respective factions. I can always do his, he can not do mine, if they are direct equivalents. i.e. key story line events, like defending the beach at Lion’s Arch or now Under Siege.
I was able to help him defend the Order of Whispers HQ, he can not help me with the Vigil HQ.
Same issue. I’ve been able to join a friend in their Whispers Personal Story, but they have not been able to join me for most of my Vigil Personal Story. Annoying!!!!!
We absolutely welcome the creative efforts of role-players, but we feel that these efforts should be managed by the players.
Sanya Weathers, a veteran industry community manager, laid out very well and pretty clearly just how huge an undertaking it is for a company to provide role-playing servers and more importantly what is involved in doing it right in this article.
I’m sorry, but even considering that article as part of the decision making process is horrible. It’s hyperbole and disgusting over-generalization, combined with exaggeration and deliberately inaccurate memes. You guys probably all know the author, but that doesn’t make her right. The article would probably be considered hate speech if it was directed at a group other than role-players. It would also be considered a trolling post if it had been posted by a fan. It also fits right in with the nature of the most disgusting of political smear ads.
Roleplayers are smeared in that piece in a way that would be unacceptable of any other group, but I guess we fall into a category of people that it’s ok to hate?
The vast majority of roleplayers I have ever known would scoff at almost the entire list of things “needed to do RP servers right”. The entire piece would get a pass as grossly overstated satire, if it weren’t for the fact that you guys have based your decisions on RP servers largely on this article.
You guys are very bright, socially and politically sensitive people, which makes you buying this article as valid foundation all the more confusing.
I have over 220 hours with my Elementalist and I pretty much agree with everything in the OP. I could quibble over some specifics, but in general it’s right on and the profession would be much better with these changes.
I’m trying to be patient, but there is one thing I don’t understand. After a couple weeks, the TP was finally working at about 98%. There were only occasional issues and it was actually fully functional. Why, with all the other issues that need to be fixed with the game, would you then mess with what you finally had working, to the point of breaking it even worse than it was broken at launch? Also, why not revert to the way things were before you broke them and work on figuring out what went wrong with the update that broke them on the side?
The frustration isn’t just the loss of functionality, it’s the appearance that it’s all unnecessary. If you could answer the above two questions, that understanding may help with keeping the players patient while you work to fix it.
I haven’t once had diminishing returns on a DE in over 270 hours of time played, even in areas where there are a couple that repeat very often. I’m still watching for it, but I have never once experienced it. So, at this point, I call shenanigans on those claiming this.
Challenging Dungeons means you have to work at it and pay attention to get through with out dying. You know you’ve crossed well over that threshold when the “challenge” of each dungeon becomes “can I finish this and actually earn enough to cover the cost of running it”. That’s frustrating, not fun. What is wrong with you guys? It’s like there is some machismo ego thing going on where success=satisfying the most hard core players that dungeons in this game are very difficult, no matter how many of the rest of us you drive from the content and possible the game!
I agree with others, it’s like in this one area of the game you’ve lost complete touch with the entire design philosophy of the rest of the game AND have ignored every single lesson one could learn from dungeon content in other games!
I think the salt in the wound is the token costs. Some people might be willing to do a half dozen, extremely hard runs to earn a full set of gear. Only the most masochistic players will want to GRIND insanely difficult content over and over and over again to get rewards that just are not worth the effort.
If you want insanely difficult, why not implement an extremely difficult Expert Mode, with double the reward and give the rest of us something with a proper amount of challenge?
Oh and listen to the community. The consensus on Dungeons is very clear and the points have been made in a very even tempered fashion, by genre standards, because of the cache of respect Arenanet built up while developing the game. Don’t be so quick to squander that cache by turning a deaf ear to the fans. You will turn respect to disdain and take the game down with you, just because of an obsession with having dungeons known for their extreme level of difficulty, regardless of what the player base wants.
Same. Booted about six times last ten minutes, maybe more.
Did they issue a warning? I didn’t see one. just “poof”.
Keeping inflation in check would be fine, if they didn’t also ensure that the ridiculously high costs for all level 80 gear wasn’t so insanely inflated. They are forcing people to find ways to maximize money, just to be able to acquire the level 80 gear that was supposed to be “fairly easy” to achieve with “no end game gear grind for stats, only skins”. Then, if people find a way to actually afford their level 80 gear with out having to log another 100 hours once they reach the cap to do so, they nerf those avenues.
Look. I want a balanced economy, so if there was a loophole that allowed earning gold at a much higher rate than doing other things in the game, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
The problem is that the pricing of level 80 Exotics is completely unreasonable, people knew they were completely unreasonable, but the people who wanted to cut Arenanet some slack were able to point to dungeon runs as a reasonable path to earning the money needed for their exotics. Now, with that avenue nerfed, they not only are forced to grind and grind and grind for gear that was supposed to be “fairly easy to obtain”, but a lot of those people feel like idiots for telling others who complained about the prices to “Learn to Play”. Double betrayal.
The fact that the earning power of characters only progresses slowly, based on level, would be good for the economy, if Arenanet hadn’t broken the promise that there would be no grind for max stat level 80 gear, but only for rare skins.
It should not take more than 20 hours after reaching the cap to get that gear. After that, the grind for skins can be adjusted so that people find it challenging, but not completely frustrating or even futile and life will go on.
Given all the costs at level 80, earning 1 gold per hour does not seem unreasonable. If it’s meant to be a lot less than that, then level 80 costs; waypoints, repairs, gear, etc… all need to be cut significantly.
I agree with most everything in the Original Post.
I’m still loving the game, but I’m now actually worried about it’s longevity, as they have essentially broken every promise they have ever made about the game once you reach level 80.
What ever happened to “having to grind is not ok”?
The lack of end game gear grinds for max stat gear was a selling point, but they some how have managed to take a game that was designed not to be grindy and found a way to make it a grind. What?
If it’s about trying to get people to pay more money on gems, go back to your original philosophy that making sure the game is fun is the primary goal and the more players who actively play the game, the more money you will make. Not “let’s see how much we can squeeze out of the most dedicated players and to hell with everyone not willing to pay the big bucks to play our game”.
Someone at Arenanet seems to be trying very hard to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and ruin what is otherwise maybe the best MMORPG ever made.
Added a system to limit the experience and gold that players can receive from speed-farming dungeons.
Posted by: Fiontar.4695
What’s confusing is that they were telling us forever that getting your Exotic Level 80 gear wasn’t going to be that big a deal. The impression was maybe another 20 hours of game play and after that, the rewards you pursue will mostly be cosmetic skins and achievements.
Really? I think I’ve played my main about 40 hours since reaching the level cap. I have two Exotic Weapons and one piece of Exotic Armor. All my jewelry is still Masterwork, my Runes are low end and I’m not really seeing the path to outfitting myself that doesn’t require massive amounts of one grind or another.
The game doesn’t need an end game gear grind, but somehow they managed to give us one.
I love the artistic style of the zones of Orr, so I disagree there, but I agree on most of the rest of it.
The negatives may have been balanced out if the mobs offered reasonable loot tables for all the effort, but the two hours I spent in Orr a couple nights ago didn’t even render a quarter of the income I get playing in the regions leading up to Orr. I earn more gross income from running level 40-60 zones than the 70-80 range for Orr, the net gain (loss?) isn’t even close. The first zone has some reasonable risk/reward in some areas, but the deeper into Orr you get, the worse it becomes.
I haven’t been to the Northern higher level zones yet, I’m hoping they offer a better risk/effort/reward ratio. There is something wrong when the gold sinks skyrocket in the upper levels, while the rewards don’t come close to keeping pace with the rewards.
I was with a group in Orr that passed on most DEs, because others in the group expressed that they were not worth the effort. If DEs aren’t worth the effort and kills aren’t worth the effort, what’s the point? That should be a warning sign that things are not right in Orr.
The entire region needs a major overhaul, but the most immediate fix should be to the DE rewards and the loot tables. If it was even near worth the effort, people might have been a little more forgiving of “highly challenging content”. (Things are so out of whack that a four fold increase in crafting mat drops, three fold increase in gear, a doubling of Karma and a ten fold increase in coin would probably be a good starting point).
The sad thing is that it throws up a huge barrier to enjoyment at what is already a very difficult threshold to cross for most players; the point where MMO players are supposed to “get over” the idea that the game stops at the level cap, except for very limited “end game content”. I went into GW2 knowing that the game is supposed to continue, but I still needed a couple days off from my main after hitting 80 to recommit to playing my main past 80, rather than jumping immediately to leveling up an alt. If you want people to embrace the new paradigm GW2 represents, you don’t slap them hard in the face with annoying level 80 content that is also massively unrewarding while also being just plain annoying!
(edited by Fiontar.4695)
I guess this shows how differently people play. Even vendoring items over a certain price threshold and selling the odd drop that actually sells for more than the vendor price on the trading post, I must go through at least 25 salvage kits an hour during average game play! I never leave a vendor that sells salvage kits with less than two full stacks!
If you try to grind this by buying items to salvage, yeah, that would be too expensive for a monthly. However, you should be salvaging enough through normal game play to get this with out really having to try to get it.
There are a fair number of salvage specific items that drop. If you salvage those and also salvage all the whites that can yield cloth or ore, you should be well on your way. (Wood sells for peanuts, so it’s often better to just vendor items that yield wood).
You can use the cheapest salvage kits for most items, there are no level thresholds where you need better kits.
I agree. The level 80 zone in the Orr region is horrible. Mob placement is scattershot, with no point other than to ensure that you can’t aggro just one at a time. (This is completely “Old School” mob placement, which is completely contrary to the mob placement everywhere else in the game). The CC in the zone makes it even more frustrating to play and to top it all off, the rewards for kills are pathetic.
If they wanted to ensure the zone is only and I mean only good for zergs, mission accomplished, assuming the DEs there are actually worth the effort to put a zerg together for, otherwise the zone is just useless for everyone.
Bad, Bad, Bad even compared to “stale Old MMO design”, but when compared to the entire rest of the game I just can’t even begin to fathom what they were thinking when they placed mobs in the zone, designed the loot tables and granted the mobs all that annoying CC.
The environment is absolutely stunning, but everything about the mob placement and related details needs to be completely redesigned, IMO.
I agree. I played it during beta and it was very fun before the far tossing. I don’t know if the exploit was there but not discovered, or if it’s new since launch, but it’s ruining the mini-game.
I want to apologize. Mob placement brings back nightmares of scattershot, old style MMO mob placement in some areas, but not the entire map. A good portion, so far, seems fine. I’ll explore the entire region before commenting further, beyond the point that some locations should be fine tuned for placement and density, but it’s hardly a region wide issue.
As someone who worked extremely hard on one of the Orrian maps, I can tell you that DusK has the most accurate comment.
From a lore perspective, the risen continent was once a living nation full of all sorts sorts of people and creatures. Now corrupted by the undead dragon, most of them walk the land as monsters. But you’ll still see a lot of the sentient inhabitants mindlessly continuing on the tasks they performed in their old lives. Some of them farm and mine, others lie around and weep in agony.
The coral soldiers, on the other hand, are more direct servants of the elder dragon. They take a more active role in defending the continent, so you should see them patrolling, standing guard, attacking players, etc.
Sorry, but that explanation doesn’t cut it, because the density is so out of whack with the rest of the game. Also, even if you can come up with a lore excuse, it doesn’t account for the “laziness” of the way the mobs are tossed onto the maps.
I agree with the OP, this does break immersion, along with not being very fun. It also brings us right back to the traditional MMO style of mob placement, which is completely incongruent with the rest of the game.
I’m a huge fan of the game and have logged over 225 hours since release, but I’m not going to pretend something is ok, when it isn’t, because then the game can’t improve.
Sorry, Human Storyline for me.
Same Issue. Seems like someone accidentally removed the linking on a lot of the dialogue to the sound files and lip sync files. This dialogue was working before the patch.
What would I suggest?
Overall costs at the upper levels need to be lowered, one way or another. The band-aid fix would be to cut the current scaling in half.
A proper fix would be to cap the cost of each waypoint to what it would currently cost for a character of the level the area around the waypoint scales characters down to. I’d be fine with it being the current cost to go right to the level 70-80 areas, if the cost to go to the lower level areas was much, much lower.
Another proper fix would be to rework the scaling based on distance. At lower levels, cost/distance seems to scale well. At the higher levels, there seems to be an additive modifier on top of a multiplicative one. There should be no additive modifiers! Waypoint travel closest to your location should be maybe 20% to 25% of the cost of going to the farthest locations, not 80% of the cost of going some where all the way across the map!
I understand how this may have happened. The economy is pretty broken atm and it’s hard to know how much of that’s because it’s still early and how much is because it’s really broken. Level 80 blues and greens are often only worth 3X the value of level 20 blues and greens, which just amplifies the cost of cash sinks that seem to be based on players making a lot more money at higher levels. However, even then, the cost for higher level characters to travel to low level and near by waypoints is just silly. There probably should be a cap for a waypoints cost based on the level of the area it’s located in and there most certainly should be better scaling based on distance, with the nearest waypoints costing only 25% of the current costs and proper scaling from there based on distance.
Once again, not hyperbole. This issue alone has sucked the fun out of the game for me with my level 80. I like the idea of the earning curve being more shallow, in order to slow down inflation, but money sinks need to be toned down to match that reality. When earning power increases 4X, but money sinks increase 10X to 40X, there are serious problems that need to be addressed.
Failure to address this would point toward the possibility that the game has actually been designed to require people to convert cash to gems to gold, just in order to be able to afford to play at the higher levels. I refuse to believe that’s the case, as it would be the kiss of death for an absolutely amazing MMO. This game is perhaps the best MMO every produced, but there some issues hobbling it and this is one of them.
(edited by Fiontar.4695)
I’m going to be completely honest here. No hyperbole or exaggeration, and no, I’m not prone to whining about things in MMOs, (or anywhere else, for that matter).
I just surpassed the 200 hour mark of played time since live yesterday. I also playtested 150 hours total during beta. I’ve been playing MMOs for almost 14 years. That’s all just for background and foundation.
Ok, that all said…
I don’t play my level 80 character anymore. It’s not because I’m not willing to break old habits and embrace the paradigm that the game doesn’t stop once you reach the level cap. I very much planned on playing my level 80 until I had explored 100% of the world, earned my epic gear, played a lot of WvW and found ways to have fun at 80!
I don’t play my level 80 anymore because the waypoint costs are insane. It has sucked the fun right out of the game for me.
I gave into the temptation of enjoying a little crafting along the way and with crafting being such a big money sink at the moment, that may be part of the reason I’ve been constantly low on funds, but I’ve tried to go hands off on crafting and I’m still not really getting anywhere. I still can not afford my final trait tome at 2G and the cost for the cultural armor just seems like an extremely cruel joke.
The problem here, in the most general terms, is that the cost of waypoint travel scales up way more steeply than the average income per hour of play scales up as you level through the game. When waypoint travel costs 10x to 40x more at level 80 than at level 8, while your income is lucky to have increased 5X, it should be clear that there are some serious problems in the multiplier being applied to waypoint costs.
To break it down to a finer level, it’s a huge problem that even waypoints in lower level zones and zones close to your location have scaled up such that they are usually at least 70% of the cost of going to the farthest waypoints. You can’t even try to chart a slightly less convenient course to get places to save money. If you can’t afford the full jump, it’s not worth looking for a lower cost waypoint a little closer.
This leaves me to finding the capital city closest to my destination, cutting through the mists to Lion’s Arch and then trudging through multiple zones to get where I’m going. By the time I get there, I usually have little time to spend playing there, as I refuse to trivialize the trek by ignoring everything along the way.
I could write pages about this issue, but all that really needs to be said is that it has sucked the fun completely out of playing my level 80. The entire design philosophy behind waypoints, eliminating time sinks and barriers to playing together seems to have flown completely out the window now that the game is live! What the heck are you guys doing Arenanet?
Waypoint travel should never, ever be a major money sink. It’s a money sink that punishes players for using a system that was meant to remove barriers to having fun!
Continued…
(edited by Fiontar.4695)
I like the mix of skills we have underwater, actually. However, it takes me forever to kill things. My thief kills things a lot faster underwater than my Ele. I saw this in beta as well, where my warrior seemed to take about half as long to kill something underwater as my ele. If they just took a look at providing some buffs to damage for the proper skills, I think we’d be fine, but considering how low our damage output seems to be now, I think these would have to be some pretty major damage buffs.
Not really sure what happened in the design process. Almost seems like someone entered the wrong multipliers at some phase of balancing and never realized how low the damage output is in the game environment vs. other professions.
I’m satisfied, for now, but it is something that should be refined and expanded in the near future. The non-human races all need moe faces and I agree with the comments in the OP. The human faces? Yes, there should be more variety in textures to allow for some more older. weathered looks. The base faces would be ok, if there were more key slider options. There needs to be more ability to change the shapes of the faces. A simple thing that bothers me is the exclusion of a slider to adjust the width between the eyes and the height of the eyes on the face. Eye positioning is a key element of human facial recognition, but those options are absent here. (I had though it might have been for technical reasons, with the facial animations, but the Asura do allow adjusting the width between the eyes, so that goes out the window).
As to the idea that CC feels rushed, I think a number of the hair models prove that. Horrible clipping issues, poor simulated dynamics during movement and a couple of the long hair models for the human females have awful issues with the way the transparencies overlay segments at the back of the head.
Somehow the game does still manage to escape the issue that many recent games with sliders have had. In some games, no matter how many sliders, too many characters still end up looking alike. I’ve made a number of human females between beta and live and they all have looked different, even if they all invariably looked young and super attractive.
More options for the races that are lacking, a few more key sliders, fixes for clipping issues and other defects with the hair and some additional textures to allow a more weathered/aged look and things would be greatly improved.