Guild Wars 2

It is, less than intelligent, that they would have the fireworks only on Father’s Day weekend, with the cut-off at noon that Monday, to prevent people who were away for the weekend and working Monday from getting the reward. Even more disappointing that they wouldn’t also have fireworks the week of the 4th of July.

There is absolutely no story reason why they can’t have an encore of the fireworks and reward during the last week of the event. Zero, nada, none.

There are also a number of people who did watch the fireworks, in the proper place, a number of times and never got the reward. It would be great for those people to have another shot as well. (My first viewing, after sitting in LA almost an hour and watching the entire things from start to finish also failed to reward, but I was lucky enough to have it work on the next show).

BTW, there was nothing climactic about the fireworks, so it’s just silly to use that as an excuse, or to decide that it makes sense to even have a climactic fireworks show at the beginning of the festival, rather than the end of it.

IRL, Ive been to a number of events that have kicked off the celebration with fireworks and also closed the celebration with fireworks. Whether a weekend, week long or multi-week event, this isn’t uncommon.

Seems like a very simple thing for ANet to provide and make a lot of people happy. If they don’t, it’s really out of spite more than anything else.

DevonCarver.5370:

Orbs will never come back in the form they had as they simply were too easy to hack around. With that said, we are definitely working on finding a suitable replacement for the best parts of the orbs, while avoiding as many of the downsides as we can. It’s not simple task though, so it isn’t as simple as deciding to do it one day and finishing it the next. Our goal is to get a new and improved version out when we can, but we can’t say yet when that will be.

You know, you can get around the issue with hacks by having a dolyak carry the orb. The server wins through to the orb, which then spawns the dolyak with the orb to head to the nearest keep that can house the orb. Have a ring of control follow the dolyak, which is invulnerable due to the magics of the orb. To stop progress of the orb, the control ring needs to be challenged. To reverse course on the orb, another server must wipe the initiating side from the control ring and gain control. This would send the orb either towards the nearest suitable keep for that side, or back towards to orb spawn point.

Have a suitable time limit on how long this tug of war can go on before it resets and then have a cool down after it resets before the ordeal can be triggered again.

It might even be a good idea to have a timer on how long the orb can stay in a server’s keep before resetting.

This is just the basic idea. Having a non-player entity carry the orb will prevent hacking the orb to a destination. The tug of war over the orb could be an epic experience. A time limit on how long a side can maintain the fickle orb would make the thing even more interesting. having to fight over each orb, say, once a day, would recreate the reset day rush on a daily basis.

The home instances were really hyped as a key element of the game that would reflect the choices you made during the storyline and maybe even your actions in the game world. They continued that hype almost until the end of 2011.

Well, that hype was never, ever realized and probably never will be.

My guess? They probably did develop this feature for Human character’s and the home instance in Divinity’s reach. then they probably realized they didn’t have time to do the same for the other races, so they scrapped the concept entirely.

It’s a shame, because it was one of the coolest concepts they talked about that never materialized.

Another NCSoft title in development, Wildstar, will have housing right from launch and that housing is actually a meaningful part of game play. I think players wanting housing will have a shorter wait on Wildstar than they will have on such features making it into GW2.

This is the reason I’m still playing GW2. After over 1,600 of game play, I am starting to run out of things to do and the monthly updates haven’t done much to help there. however, there really isn’t much out there at the moment that I find playable after playing GW2 over the last year.

Recent betas haven’t been much better, but eventually one of the promising upcoming titles will be as playable as GW2. Eventually.

It’s ironic that the game with the biggest potential, Wildstar, comes from NCSoft as well. I guess it’s good for NCsoft if they are the ones that can offer the only viable alternative for GW2 players who need a break and something new. Not so hot for GW2 though.

Saldonus Darkholme.5680:

RusShiro.9241:

Ok, why are people so upset about a great game, I love the fact that they add new content at all. Free of charge. I do long for more things that I like specifically, but i am not the only person playing. These forums are inundated with trolls, and its upsetting. The amount of negative commentary forces the moderators to sift through so much to find a post that is on topic, and contributes to the growth of the game and community. This is the first mmo I have purchased, and I believe it was money well spent. I had no idea that the mmo community has a small yet very active portion that behaves with such disdain for an awesome game.

You know, just because there are people here that disagree with you, it does NOT make them trolls. NOR does it make their opinions less important or valuable. Frankly, it is my opinion that the negative posts have MORE value, because corporate mindset is “out of sight, out of mind: if we don’t hear anything, everything must be great!”

I’m glad you enjoy the game. However, there are many people out there that just don’t enjoy being herded like sheeple to specific locales for the express purpose of “kill 10 rats”.

Thanks for that comment. It’s spot on.

I personally still love the game. I personally think ANet still has it in them to get their collective act together and plot a successful and lucrative course for this game moving forward. I’ve been playing MMOs for over 14 years and GW2 is, in many ways, the game I have been hoping and waiting for since I first realized all the untapped potential for the genre.

A lot of my posts in recent months have been very critical. I say what I say because I love the game, feel the studio has fallen way off track and hope that the critical feedback from myself and others will get someone to wake up and get things moving in the right direction again.

If people sense building frustration in critical posts, it’s because many of us are getting more and more frustrated with where things are going.

People who call out issues with the game and the ongoing development are bigger friends of the game than those who gush on about how good a job they are all doing as the wheels start to fall off the ANet bus.

When the game launched, I proposed that the game, at launch, would provide at least 1,000 hours of game play, which was extremely impressive compared to the vapid junk passing as MMOs we’ve seen in recent years. I also posited that the game would need to successfully expand over the next year if it was to have a chance to snowball into a massive success.

Well, over 1,600 hours, between two active accounts and I’m still enjoying the game. However, it’s not because of the successful addition of content to the game. It’s because I underestimated exactly how much playability the original content that shipped with the game would provide. I now find myself “running on fumes” because ANet as completely failed at “filling the tank” since launch.

I’m hoping it was a lie when we were told ANet wasn’t working on an expansion yet. I’m hoping that 2/3 of the company has secretly been hard at work on a ton of new content. However, I have to assume we were told the truth. In return, I need to tell the truth as well. That truth is that ANet has thus far completely failed on the delivery of meaningful new content to the game world. The development time over the last 10 months re: the PVE world, has seemed an utter waste.

I could just play until I find nothing else here worth playing and just walk away, but I still have high hopes that ANet can turn themselves around and get the game back on track with productive ongoing development.

Some of us are attempting to bring attention to the myriad issues in an effort some what akin to an intervention, while others just continue to enable the studio’s “self destructive habits” through unconditional praise and knee-jerk defense against any negative criticism. Which do you think is better for the game and the studio?

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

Many of the events listed were added shortly before or after launch to make sure that low level zones could handle a large influx of players. They won’t become active if there aren’t enough players in the area. Over time we’ll look at lowering the scale requirements so they become more common, but GW2 is still in its infancy, so we haven’t adjusted them yet.

I find that explanation nonsensical. More much needed content that, essentially, was rendered “temporary”, due to these mechanics?

You guys are closing in on year one. The game is not in it’s infancy. It’s reaching it’s “make or break” point where lack of meaningful progress on world content may completely short circuit the game’s potential moving forward.

If you guys have been sitting on all this content that just needs to have it’s activation thresholds adjusted to become active, then I’d say you should have some people spend the afternoon and make those adjustments!

I don’t get you guys. Something is off the tracks when it comes to decision making on stuff like this.

It would have done a lot for you guys if you had given the explanation, apologized that you had forgotten to tune these and promised to fix this asap.

We were told the game would see an influx of new DE content across the world, with the number of DEs likely being increased two or threefold by the end of year one. Instead we’ve gotten all sorts of temporary content that has felt rushed and insubstantial and, with this revelation, we learn that there are actually FEWER active DEs across the game world.

You guys are all in the same ship, it might be time to demand someone find a rudder and plot an actually course.

BTW, looking at the list I can tell you it is not an exhaustive list of broken or stuck DEs. There are more that weren’t identified via the method the OP used.

Shadow Gathering.5649:

This is the build I use for serious WvW guild support + dps:

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=Vm;4BJVV0A5sMk43;9;69TT;42;048A47AWR;4V19cV19c60k91;2Fc-V6-C0G1MYRZX407WDk390;4s199c-9i;9;9;9;9;8Ek3j

It is a support/dps build, not solely support. It is highly survivable (the kind of toughness even a guardian would envy), can pump out huge damage (especially with 25 charges on the bloodlust sigil + might), and still brings a ton of support (water/fire/ice/lightning fields, cleansing wave on dodge, cleansing water, etc).

If you don’t care about dps and want to be 100 percent support, don’t use this versatility build. But you mentioned zerkers, so I thought you might be interested in a hybrid.

Almost exactly the build I use for WvW. I use a mix of Knight’s, Soldier’s and Berserker’s. I tuned the balance to my playstyle, starting with Knight/Soldier and then slowly bringing Berserker into the mix until I found what works for me.

I disagree that taking stun break from an existing skill to put it on Glyph of Elemental Power was a good idea. GoEP is an over time proc effect. It’s not a Signet, the 30 second proc window only starts when you activate the skill.

I don’t know what the proc percentage is, but it is a proc, not a guaranteed trigger. It also can only trigger once every five seconds on a given target. It’s something you want to fire off early in combat and forget. It’s not an effect that’s conducive as an “oh kitten” button. Saving this skill as a stun break kills the skills main, limited usefulness. That it’s additional effect has no value as an “Oh Kitten” situational ability makes this skill, as a stun breaker, pointless outside of a formal PvP match where you have intel on the opposing team and know you will be facing a lot of stuns.

Really, all they’ve accomplished is removed stun break from some skills where they made sense and put a stun break an a skill that will almost never find it’s way onto the skill bar as a stun breaker. Builds that already use the Glyph aren’t going to stop using it for it’s primary effect and since you usually are going to be spamming the skill when ever it’s off cooldown during combat, will very rarely ever provide any usefulness as a stun breaker.

emikochan.8504:

I’m not sure if the weakness duration reductions (across all classes) are a nerf, since weakness itself now applies to crits.

I think 25% is a bit too random though.. I’d prefer 50% chance of 25% reduction rather than the other way around, but time will tell..

Well, GW2 has decided to label them that way. usually when we talk about GW2 PvP, we are talking about Competitive PvP. Of course WvW is primarily a PvP activity, but that wasn’t what the person was talking about. It is clear that cPvP is the over-riding focus for profession balance in the game. Not all changes made for CPvP are good for PvE or WvW.

LordByron.8369:

r z.7261:

LordByron.8369:

looks like the usual middle finger to pve players to me…..

You realize you’re playing a PvP game?

no i realize that this is aPVE game and if pve players left the game it would die in a week, instead if pvp players left the game nobody would notice…..

So true. I know there are a fair number of primarily PvP-centric players, but based on PvP server activity levels when I do occasionally PvP, it seems it’s a very small percentage of the overall active player base.

The custom arena tokens may help increase revenue from those players, but I’d also think that they tend to spend a lot less on average per month on gems.

I love that PvP is a strong feature of this game, but it’s pretty clear that the vast majority of players and the vast majority of revenue, comes from PvE/WvW players.

Now, if you were to say that the ANet devs tend to balance the game as if it were primarily a PvP game, that might be more accurate. I get that balance is more important for competitive PvP, I also appreciate that they are starting to split some skills between PvP and PvE versions, but they still tend to mess with PvE balance much more than necessary based on PvP centric changes that should have seen skill splits, but didn’t.

Nikkinella.8254:

They should have given eles the anti movement condition instead of thieves. Would make staff ele a hell of alot better. Right now it’s still a free kill. That would atleast make it somewhat of a threat. Giving it to thieves was the stupidest idea ever. Standing still against a thief is suicide. now moving away from their stupidly OP burst damage will get you killed too thanks to a new condition. great job once again at balancing things Anet. And why still no reduction in our attunement recharge rate? we still have to spec into arcane because of that.

I agree. My head wants to explode trying to figure out why they would give it to Thief. Has to be one of the most baffling balance changes I’ve seen in an MMO to date. The rest of the patch looks pretty good to me, this is the stand out “what the heck are they thinking” part of the patch notes.

Staff is getting some nice buffs in the patch on the 25th. That, with hopefully better build diversity due to tweaks and additions to the trait lines, will give Staff Eles the bit of love they’ve been needing.

That said, I’ve been enjoying Staff Elementalist as my main for several weeks now. First in PvE, then in WvW. I also have been able to solo holos in high level zones. So, I’m really looking forward to the changes inbound.

10-0-10-30-20 currently. Gear is a mix of Berzerker’s (PP%), Soldier’s(PVT) and Knight’s (PPT).

Bloodstealer.5978:

Yep I already posted my comments on this in another thread…

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/dragonbash/Marjory-s-Journal/first#post2250304

Cant believe how poor the story was allowed to unfold and reach its end.. damp squib much…. I just hope there is another piece of the story still to land, and that this really wasn’t all we got.

from firework displays that either failed to display or couldn’t be viewed due to trash camera mechanics, a dragonball mini game suited to cheats, and time wasters forcing the achievements to be pulled from the bash totals, an RNG bird race aimed at reducing in game coin so that we would all feel we had to go play the “Press F” mini games whilst chasing the elusive special snowflake tickets. Of course ANET knew all the coin killing through gambling on birds, waypointing to locations and of course placing a fruitless grind of coffers would likely steer us all back to the gem store… and it has probably worked handsomely for them… least they could of done was actually put some effort in making the story more fulfilling and less anti-climatical imo.. but hey ho I await the next batch of RNG chest threads for the next event

When an event succeeds at creating significant cash shop demand, the exchange rate for gold/gems skyrockets, due to all the people trading gold for gems to buy the items. There was the usual spike associated with cash shop maintenance near the start of this event, (you can still exchange gems for gold, or gold for gems, but the ability to purchase gems with cash is offline during that period, which always drives the exchange rate up). However, the minute that was over, the prices plummeted pretty quickly and exchange levels have been where they were the week before the event for most of the event.

My educated guess is that this has been a bit of a dud for them. I certainly hope so, because the only way they will get off the RNG box exclusive skins and start also offering skins for direct sale will be if the RNG lotto/sucker boxes fail to drive revenue.

I think the RNG boxes and the flubbing of event content are finally turning people off. Most of us still love the game and would like to support it and the developers, but the disrespect for the player base they show with stuff like this is having a growing impact.

(Arenanet had such good will and such a high reputation with the launch of the game, that they would squander that before the end of year one would have seemed completely impossible to me last August).

Up until very late in development, ANet agreed with the OP. One of the developer blogs touted the fact that we would be able to change traits any where out of combat and gave an impassioned explanation of why that was the right thing for the game and for gamers.

I think it was shortly before closed beta that they reversed course and they never gave an explanation that made much sense as to why they pulled the 180.

The likely reason seems obvious though. Their obsession over dungeon difficulty/annoyance levels would not permit a scenario where players could adjust builds ahead of each encounter. This change and a lot of unnecessary nerfs since have been the result of this obsession. There was also the predictable whining by some in the community that builds needed more permanence to be meaningful, completely ignoring the fact that this just led to Flavor of the Moment coockie cutter build practices.

As others have pointed out, the cost isn’t as much an issue as the level of inconvenience. It’s obvious it isn’t a gold sink, because it’s too inconvenient to to be utilized anything but rarely.

We should have templates. That would be a good start. IMO, there should be no cost or need to visit an NPC, but templates plus trainers made much more common across the game world would probably be acceptable for many.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Very high level, you can find our over-all plans for 2013 here:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/colin-johanson-on-guild-wars-2-in-the-months-ahead/

We’ll put out an updated Gw2 in 2013 blog post in mid/late July that summarizes where we’re going in the second half of the year, and goes into greater details and specifics on systems we’ve talked high level about so far.

“To complement this concept of regular world events with strong stories and themes, we also need to build on and strengthen our existing open world and its persistent content. The more persistent events we can provide in a specific area, the less often each of the events in that area needs to occur, which in turn adds to the sense of an ever-evolving open world.

This means we need to give reasons for players at all levels to explore these areas, to reward them for their time, and to encourage them to play in locations where they will run into each other and experience the community-driven features that make Guild Wars 2 shine. Before we expand our world more, we need to make sure our existing world is as strong as possible, and that it gives reasons for people at all levels to go back and play and explore in the entire game."

So Colin, what the heck happened to this? We’ve had a lot of temp content of very mixed quality, but pretty much nothing mentioned in the quote above. What happened to doubling or tripling the number of DEs in the game world by the end of year one?

IMO, Living Story has been a dud concept. If you want a living world, you need to continually refresh Dynamic Events and that just hasn’t been happening.

The game has been out for 10 months. I’d be generous in saying that you guys have produces 1/16th of what you produced prior to launch in those 10 months. That’s only about a 33% rate of productivity post launch vs. pre-launch. Once again, I think that’s generous.

I won’t even get into all the ways you guys have compromised on the ideals and potential of this game.

Going from an A+ studio rating pre-launch to a D+ post-launch is of great concern for the fans of the game. I think, at this point, we not only need an update to development plans for the second half of the year, but some sort of mea culpa and plan of action addressing the drastic drop off in quality/quantity of work product. A re-commitment to realizing the ideals of the Manifesto would be great as well.

Amadan.9451:

reading the first part of the thread seems people forget there is not only pvp in the game, as a mesmer since confusion became a rare or even useless condition to apply, even more in pve i welcome the change, and i’m sure it will come with a price…
anyway, people manage to kill me in pvp quite a lot, it’s true there is some player i don’t even have to kite, but people can kill me (from each class also), an OP class should never be beaten i guess?

It might make sense for a Mesmer, doesn’t make sense for a thief, at all, balance wise.

Menaka.5092:

Ok I Did It.2854:

I play a Mesmer a good bit also, and from what they are saying we also get it, this could be devastating to say the least, again hopefully its traited correctly, if its not, WvW is going to turn into Necro/Mesmer/Thief only.

WvW isn’t only roaming… all organized guild groups (15+) I’ve seen on Gandara and the servers we faced run with all the professions, with a strong component of guardians and warriors

I play a staff Ele in WvW. I can often get away from a thief if I have somewhere to escape to, but it’s already an extremely difficult affair. I feel fairly skilled just being able to survive. If the thief isn’t very skilled, I can sometimes win a protracted 1vs. 1, but unless someone else stumbles along the best result is usually a draw, with me or them escaping.

Occasionally I encounter a really skilled Thief, like one I ran into yesterday, that can take on three or four opponents with a reasonable chance of success. That’s pretty insane and they are even more annoying because if they can’t win, they can almost always escape.

In these encounters, the only thing that gives me even the slightest chance of victory, or more likely escape, is mobility. This new condition seems like the fantasy ability for a thief that wants to play god-mode, rather than something that any MMO producer would actually implement.

If anything, a condition like this should be relegated to the least mobile professions, if at all.

I don’t get it.

juno.1840:

TheOneNOnlyGeneralBama.9586:

Two of the game’s strongest duelist gets exclusive access to the new condition , punishing those who make a subtle attempt at movement whilst they’re insanely mobile and potent in trickery.

#Keyboardturnersrejoice!

Yeah agree. I think warriors should have gotten torment instead of thieves and mesmers. Arguably maybe guardians but they are already in a good place. Thieves have no issue getting to a mobile class and jumping them from behind so I’m not sure why torment was added to their arsenal.

Apparently the 5% chance that a very skilled player can get away from a Thief ambush was too high. I don’t get this one either, at all.

When you finish the chain a reward is an object that let’s you replay the scene.

As to dialogue, yeah, it would be nice if you could repeat it. I remapped my screenshot key to an easy to hit button so I can grab screens during story events as well as action. As to video, I guess you really just need to plan ahead to record instanced content you think you may want to cap.

Agreed as well. Anticlimactic is the most polite thing I can say about the entire ordeal.

The opening cut scene was awesome, but absolutely nothing from that point on came with in a light year of being satisfying content in conjunction with the kick off. I feel bad for the writers and who ever put the cutscene together. They had an awesome concept, but the rest of the studio completely fell on their faces trying to implement content in conjunction.

Supposedly ANet isn’t working on an expansion yet. If that’s true, it’s hard to fathom how a studio that produced this game in five years, from scratch, suddenly can only manage to produce the most vapid of content. Think of how many Personal Story instances they produced for the five races in five years. They should definitely be able to produce 3-5 full story instances, with 5 to 15 minutes of action on top of the cut scenes, for each monthly event.

This event could have been and should have been incredible. Instead it was just one of the lamest fed ex style quest chains seen in the game to date and a sad departure from what one would expect from Arenanet and GW2.

Seriously, I mean seriously, what the heck is going on at Arenanet? The wheels seem to have completely come off over there and I think it’s time for management to figure out what’s going on and fix it.

The only reason I’m not that ticked off over this is that the “killer” isn’t interwoven into the investigation at all. There is no mystery you get to solve by trying to figure out clues. You just follow a linear path to suspects that deny their guilt and then, at the final stage, someone who wasn’t even on your radar is revealed as the guilty party.

Really?

The writing and the cutscene provided the foundation for something great, but the actual investigation was pretty much a hollow joke…

Danikat.8537:

The problem is fixing a lot of these issues isn’t a quick “tweak” that someone can do when they get around to it.

I admit I’m no expert on 3D animation but from what I do know fixing things like clipping during an animation like dancing would at best require moving the wings/weapons to a new position on your character. If a realistic and workable single position isn’t possible they’d need to keep moving with the animation – effectively scripting the weapons and back items into the dance. And they’d have to do this for every item on every race for every dance individually.

Alternatively they might be able to rework the skeletons to be closer to the actual image and let the physics engine do the rest, but that would mean your character would keep bumping into their own gear and the end result would look about as good as if you did that in real life.

Back when I dabbled with CGI I could hand animate something on par with this in a few hours. Once the full animation is done, tweaks usually require minimal work. The perfectionist in me might add an hour or two of additional time fine tuning things. It’s honestly not that difficult. I’d be shocked if one of their animators couldn’t fix this in half an afternoon, or completely revamp it in half a day. The “bones” and “joints” are now already in place, so it should be pretty easy.

If you watch the animation loop, there are two variations on the wings flapping that repeat 1:1. IMO, one of those motions looks fine. It’s the one that brings the wings in and up towards the character’s head that looks horrible.

If I were given an hour to fix it, I’d just resample the loop and have the good flap repeat 5:1 to the “bad flap”, or just remove the bad flap from the animation entirely.

The way I think it should have been done would have been to have the good flap while standing still and have the wings sweep back in a gliding configuration when running. The armors and hair in the game all have great dynamic motion. The wings should have been done the same way. Anyway, there are simple ways to fix these things with out redoing them entirely or spending too much time on them.

I love the writing too and I assume the writers could do a lot more with it if the rest of the studio could keep up. Given how many personal story instances they made in five years, it’s hard to understand why there haven’t been many more voiced story instances during these events.

Each step along the chain should have had cut scenes and they could have done some instances with some action as well. It’s ironic that these things are called Living Story because the writers aren’t given much of a chance to actually tell a story during any of them.

Agreed. The wings themselves are nice, but completely ruined by the horrid animation.

There are two major segments of the animation loop. One is further back from the body and looks ok. The segment where the come up and in towards the character’s back is the segment that looks horrible. I’d just clip out that part of the animation and just have them flap.

Even better would be to only have them flap when standing still and have them go into a gliding animation when you are actually running. Assuming you guys still have animators that know how to do dynamic movement.

lorazcyk.8927:

You can see her buttcheeks with vigil pants
You can see almost her entire exposed boob with human cultural armor

Isn’t that revealing enough for you?

We have lots of armor that’s not coats. For WOMEN anyway. So count yourself lucky if you play female!

Remember you can split the pieces and mix them with other armors, you can get a lot of pretty and/or revealing stuff like that.

http://i.imgur.com/j7WbV.jpg
http://imgur.com/AaoYp
http://i.imgur.com/B85i0hx.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/Ru057Ae.png
http://i.imgur.com/hOOJwUQ.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/PjQ73l3.jpg
http://imgur.com/a/21Ve2

http://argos-soft.net/GW2ArmorGallery/index.php?weight=2&race=2&color=10&sex=1

http://argos-soft.net/GW2ArmorGallery/index.php?sex=1&weight=2&color=10&race=3

http://argos-soft.net/GW2ArmorGallery/index.php?sex=1&weight=2&color=10&race=4

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Category:Cultural_armor

Posters like this are the reason we have such a poor selection of armors in the game, especially medium armors.

This is a beautiful armor set and should be adapted for players. That you would object because you feel it’s skimpy is just mind numbingly absurd. 80% of the medium armors are tailor made for those with the most puritanical clothing choices and the other 20% are very limited.

Every time I see a potentially beautiful piece of armor in this game that was obviously ruined by posters demanding prudish clothing sensibilities I want to vomit. (Light armors offer the most obvious examples, with armors that would have shown a bit of leg having ugly bell bottom trousers added below the skirts. Who the heck would wear pants with a gown or dress?!?!?!?)

Sorry for the harshness of my reaction, but I hate posts like this. The game is already tilted in your direction severely, to the point of ruining what would have been beautiful armors in appeasement to a vocal minority. Enough is enough.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Any updates to the fractals will need to include additional update to the reward systems as well, agreed.

As for the jet pack, those specific rewards are intended as limited rewards you can only earn during that time, thus making them valuable. It wouldn’t be fair to the people who did earn jet packs for us to bring them back, and suddenly undercut their value entirely.

And yeah that F&F dungeon updated for size would make a good fractal wouldn’t it? =)

Less time and effort creating limited availability “valuables” and more time creating stuff that the majority can enjoy, ok? You guys haven’t been very efficient since launch and the percentage of what you create that only gets very limited access and use is more than a little frustrating.

Variety of skins ensures novelty, while preserving access. You only need exclusivity if you are a tiny game studio that can only afford to pump out a very limited number of new assets every year. Even then, it’s just an evil of necessity, rather than an ideal.

The focus on “l33t stuffs” seems immature and not really worthy of a large, talented and well funded studio.

The entire event is one massive grind. Pre-launch, they seemingly would have agreed that grind in an MMO is just a clear sign of failed game design. That we get more and more grind with each monthly update just reinforces what’s becoming more and more obvious, post launch development has seen failed game design become an ever increasing hallmark of each update.

I don’t get it. Look at what this company created in five years. Divide it by six and compare that to what we’ve seen since launch. Productivity, quality and commitment to design principles all seem to have fallen right off a cliff.

I’m not 100% sure what you are trying to get at. I might get it, but I’m not sure.

I will say you are right that the economy has seen no signs of inflation. There are some high end items that have inflated, but most of the inflation is just a result of the speculator driven profits and eventually I’d think the bubble will burst on many of them.

In any event, it’s mostly people who speculate on the high end TP market that are effected by the inflation there. For most people and most goods, there has been almost no inflation and perhaps even a fair bit of deflation.

It is odd that such a renowned farming spot has been left alone, after the campaign that went on for months to squash most opportunities to earn gold at a reasonable rate where those opportunities could be found.

Maybe they just haven’t gotten around to it yet, or maybe they have realized they went to far in reigning in the flow of gold via ordinary game play?

I’m not really sure if the OP is genuine. Seems more like someone trying to provide an example of the type of customer that would make ANet think these things are a good idea, rather than an actual experience.

I know some people have a lot of disposable income, but I really have trouble believing someone would spend $800 a month on the gem store and not bat a lakitten doing so.

If it is real, then it’s probably an addiction to ripping off people like this that has prevented who ever runs the gem store from pursuing a more reasonable and likely more profitable cash shop strategy that doesn’t rely on those they must view as “suckers” throwing money at these horrible RNG boxes.

Galtrix.7369:

Umm, you’re going to be hard pressed to convince Anet to put more items into the gemstore that aren’t RNG. I don’t think you people realize that Anet is making more money with RNG than they have just putting skins into the store. People buy the RNG boxes, don’t get what they want, and they instantly buy more so that they will get what they want. (Which almost never happens.) If Anet puts skins in the store, people will buy them and there won’t be that continuous cycle of endless buying and the torment of opening a box only to find that there was a bunch of useless items inside. Anet will essentially lose a lot of money if they put skins in the store that aren’t rng. But if Anet does actually listen to us, I would like to see better weapons/armor skins in the gemstore that look much better than what they currently have.

I disagree. I think they would make a lot more money with direct skin sales. People who currently spend $50+ on RNG boxes to get one skin would likely spend that much or more to buy three or four skins directly. Then, you also add sales with direct skin offerings you would never get via RNG boxes. There are a lot of us who would pay $50 buying limited event skins at a fair direct price who will never buy an RNG rip-off box. Add in the fact that a percentage of people each month who get burned on RNG boxes will never buy anything again, it becomes a no brainer.

My guess is someone decided to mirror the RNG scam from Asian F2P games, rather than focus on direct sales and they are now scared that if they switch to direct skin sales and it makes a lot more money, it will make the original decision look horrible and possibly threaten their job. At some point, someone at ANet/NCSoft needs to step in and correct this, because it’s highly probably that the decision to go with RNG rip-off boxes has cost the company 10s of millions of dollars since launch and a fair number of once paying customers as well.

One compromise may be to offer skins via RNG boxes as a one month exclusive, clearly announced as such, with the skins then being added for direct sale for a month or two once the period of exclusivity has ended. I’d rather see the RNG boxes eliminated entirely, or at least have the odds greatly improved and the quality of the consolation items improved as well, but there is room for some middle ground.

I have to empathize with the OP and others like him. It was a holiday weekend. They knew more people than average were likely to miss out on game play this weekend. I just don’t get why they didn’t let the fireworks run right through to the start of the Effigies on Tuesday.

Today’s patch removed the Dragon Ball achievements from the event meta-achievment and also decoupled the game from PvP stats/achievments, so I’m not sure why anyone is still going AFK on this thing. Teams with an AFKer rarely win, so I can’t see that maybe one or two Dragon Coffers and four to six Zhaitaffy per hour is worth being a kitten over. Let alone the possibility of getting suspended/banned.

Insignya.8625:

To point out something that was missing from this conversation, the game’s main market is Korea. Koreans love grinding in video games and they love gambling. This puts an interesting twist because that’s a country where gold sellers flourish. You gotta wonder, maybe the devs foresaw what would happen to Guild Wars 2 so they put in all those restrictions on farming and DR? But then again, they left out CoF Path 1, so again, branching decisions with no way of explaining.

Umm.. the game hasn’t even released in Korea. the West is the primary market for this game. China seems to be next in line for their own version of the game. I’m guessing that the game hasn’t seen a more serious effort at localization for Korea because NCSoft doesn’t want to cannibalize the market for their intended Eastern flagship product, Blade&Soul, which, IMO is no where near the game GW2 is, which may just sting their pride back at the home office.

For me, the past tenth months have been frustrating.

The core game is still there and just as enjoyable as ever. However, very little done since launch has expanded on what makes the game great and a fair portion of it seems to be a direct affront to the Manifesto that informed the original development of the game.

I know at least a few key people have left Arenanet. I’m guessing a lot more have left that I’m not aware of. I just have little faith that Arenanet 2013 has the people or the principles needed to advance the game. This is a huge shame, because the game seemed a complete shoe in for reaching $1billion+ in lifetime revenue, but that potential long term success seems to be slipping through ANet’s fingers at an ever increasing pace.

I think aside from brain drain and surrendering of core principles, there has also been an ever more evident influence of crass, money motivated decision making, made all the more sad because those motivated by greed have actually been destroying the foundations of this game’s potential long term financial success with every passing month.

I’m beginning to suspect that NCSoft is exerting more and more influence over the ongoing development process and management of the gem store. If this is the case, they are just destroying their investment with their meddling. If this is not the case and this all just signals the new state of Arenanet, then we are all in trouble, because then it would appear that the studio itself has devolved to the point where they just won’t be capable of leveraging this game into the long term success it seemed destined to achieve back when the game launched.

The gem store seems to be designed now to disillusion and drive away as many paying customers as possible through the abuse of long odds RNG chests and an unwillingness to sell directly things people want and would be willing to pay for.

On the development side, we have seen a complete failure to build on the game’s biggest asset, it’s massive game world. Last Fall, they talked about doubling or tripling the number of DEs across the world by the end of year one, with the intent of making the game world feel alive via the constant evolution of Dynamic Event content with in each zone.

That was a recipe for success.

Instead, we have a focus on temporary content at the cost of the promised influx of DEs. We also have been told they haven’t even begun work on an expansion for the game, which just leaves me wondering how the company that produced this massive game in five years has managed to do so pitifully little since launch?

I’m still finding ways to enjoy this game, but that doesn’t prevent me from being disgusted at how poorly the gem store and ongoing development of the game have been handled since launch.

I’ve been playing MMOs for over 14 years and with GW2, it initially felt like this was finally the game I had been waiting for during that entire period of time. The game launched with the proper foundation and seemed destined to be on of the best games ever in the MMO genre and likely one of the most successful as well. The game is one of the best and one of the most successful, but with so much potential being squandered on an ongoing basis, it’s hard to imagine this game will ever become what it could have been and should have been unless there is some major change in priorities, design and work product in the near future.

For those only concerned with the bottom line, you might want to focus on what impact a gem store strategy that willing sacrifices long term revenues and customer loyalty will have on the long term success of the game. What the developers do for the game may seem esoteric, but the influence you have on perverting the core design philosophies at the foundation of the game, in addition to the poor management of the gem store itself and the scorched earth strategy of revenue through long odds RNG boxes seem to make you a disproportionally high part of the problem. You are damaging the brand and sacrificing long term revenue in the name of short term revenue, but in all likely hood the current gem store strategies have actually cost the company much revenue over the last ten months, in addition to potential future revenue that will now never be realized.

I really hope that senior management will seriously re-evaluate the way things have been handled over the last ten months and chart a new course before it becomes too late.

BTW, I do appreciate what good work has been done since launch. We see nuggets here and there that prove that a fair portion of developers at ANet “still get it”, but it seems their influence has been watered down significantly over time. Please keep fighting the good fight and doing what you can to keep the foundational principles of the game alive. If things are ever to get back on course, it will be people like you who will be instrumental in that recovery!

TempestMoon.5403:

Just call it what it is: lazy

I’ve always been pro ANet up to this point but enough is enough. Their competitive balance on mini games like this just plain sucks. As much as I hate the afk’s I can’t fault them too much in what is just a plain broken system. The rest of the game is fine but I almost dread these holiday events with mini games because they’re always broken.

Last night I played DB for about two hours. Every single match with out any AFKers ended with the two teams with in 60 points of each other. They need to prevent afkers and remove any incentive for going AFK. This mini-game is actually excellently balanced when two full teams play an entire match together.

snowdeano.2967:

Mostly its down to the achievement dragon ball devotee (play 20 games) which means you can go AFK, don’t play dragon ball and still get the achievement. Dragon ball boss is great because you have to help your team win 20 times to get it. so its pretty much down to A-Team to think of different achievements for pvp, where they get people to play the game, like kill 50 people in dragon ball! much better ^^

I agree. Achievement for wins, then an achievement that doesn’t require wins, but does require active participation, like kills. The rewards are so pitiful it’s hard to imagine someone would afk DB just to get a Zhaitaffy every 10 minutes!

Sieg.8439:

PurebladeProductions.4875:

Fiontar.4695:

If I see the same person AFK for two full matches, I’ve been reporting them using the botting tag.

I really wish we had a way to report afkers specifically.

What if the person in question was actually AFK and had no time to leave Dragon Ball because of something urgent? It happened to me a few days ago and ended up being AFK through a few matches.

People who do absolutely nothing in Dragon Ball, and thus being AFK, should be kicked to either Lion’s Arch or to the character selection screen after 30 seconds – 1 minute in my opinion.

All it takes to log out is to hit the Esc key and click Exit Game. Two things. Unless someone’s choking to death, I don’t see why it’s asking a lot of someone to have them click something twice.

Now this is going to be really awkward if ALL of these AFKers actually are saving choking people… Lol. What are the odds?

There is also the door icon above the mini-map that with one click will exit the instance. I agree, I don’t buy that any of these AFKers went afk to respond to some emergency. If they have kids and they need to be checked on, just quit the instance. I don’t care if the match is almost over. If you need to AFK, pop out of the instance first so you don’t waste everyone’s time.

I never report on the first AFK match, to allow for some minor mishap, like mouse batteries going dead, falling over in your chair, spilling soda on your keyboard, etc… If I see a pattern of AFK, I always report.

I agree, though, that the game should have better detection of afkers, or at least a mechanism where you can easily report afk and if more than two people report, the afker get’s a five second countdown to click a prompt showing they are not AFK before getting booted. Botting to overcome the prompt would be grounds for a ban and I’d hope there would also be a flag for investigation for anyone who triggers the AFK status frequently.

I think servers mentally psyching themselves out is a fair portion of the sense of being mismatched. I’m from TC and when we drew SoR last week, I saw a couple good commanders suddenly have no clue how to strategize and others that just didn’t bother to flag all week. Our zergs ended up half the size as is normal, which made SoRs large zergs seem even more overwhelming.

There are differences in participation levels, leadership and willingness to follow commanders between servers, but I think self-defeatist attitudes just multiplies any real gap exponentially.

I hope some of the recently discussed plans for the future of WvW will help level the playing field a bit. Better rewards strategic non-zerg actions, (like tower defense and yak protection) hopefully will encourage people to participate even when they feel they are outmatched.

If I see the same person AFK for two full matches, I’ve been reporting them using the botting tag.

I really wish we had a way to report afkers specifically.

Reasonable grinds for Aesthetics is one thing. Dragon coffers with a 1 in 2,000 chance of getting a ticket for a rare, limited time skin, or a cost of 100,000 Zhaitaffies for a cosmetic back item are something else entirely.

During a month long event there shouldn’t be a grind for cosmetics that will require more than 30 hours of grinding per aesthetic reward. Period. Even that may be excessive.

I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to actually earn 100,000 Zhaitaffies in one month, even if your account is manned 24/7 with the sole purpose of farming them.

At current rates, I think it would take most people over 60 hours to accumulate 2,000 Dragon Coffers and even then they would have a 33% chance of not getting a single ticket from those 2,000 coffers.

It’s insane.

The thing is they could make the odds much better to get a ticket and they would make more money.

Big spenders would likely spend as much as they do now, but with more of a reward for that spending and generation of good will, rather than ill will. It’s a virtual certainty that every round of rip-off RNG boxes has converted a portion of big spenders into zero dollar spenders. The current odds shred paying customers.

Much better odds would also encourage people with less money to spend to enter the fray, if there was a very reasonable chance of getting a ticket on their budget.

Another issue with these RNG coffers is that the value of the “consolation prizes” in these things has to be about as pathetic as we have ever seen. This greatly increases the ill will generated by these things and increases the odds that they will “shred”, i.e., lose a paying customer, who feels cheated after buying these chests.

gvaughn.4163:

I spent some gems on the rich dragon coffers understanding that there would be a good chance I wouldn’t get a ticket. However, I wasn’t prepared for how utterly lame it would be to get a few pieces of candy and a common food item. Hooray! Crap!

Then I went out and purchased / farmed about 1000 regular coffers and got nothing as well.

I cannot stress enough how incredibly lame and disappointing this is. I actually think these events are cool, but this RNG lameness has brought it down.

I certainly will never, ever be buying another gem from Arenanet again. They clearly have no problem taking their players money and giving them nothing for it. If feels like a really slimy scam.

Yeah, the RNG boxes are lame enough, but at least during events where they have put the rare loot inside Black Lion Chests you get some stuff worth having as a consolation prize. (I don’t find them worth it with no event specials, but at least with event specials it isn’t a total waste of money).

The utter kitten they put in the coffers is sickening.

They are definitely thumbing their noses at the customers, pushing to see just how much they can get away with before they start to demonstrably damage the game.

I don’t get it.

cocolu.7640:

when zooming my staff looks pixelated and ugly. These need to be high quality imo.

I’m actually fine with the staff on a minimum height human female character. It might not look as good scaled up for a bigger character. However, I’ve decided not to pursue a Greatsword skin because that one definitely isn’t textured very well.

Kudos to the modeler for the staff. The dragon’s body fits perfectly to the curve of my character’s back, which I thought was awesome.

Ping.5739:

I have experienced no decrease in the coffer drop rate.

HOWEVER,

the extra amount of health and seemingly ninja buff on the attack power those mobs got from the patch has relatively reduced my farming efficiency, which, make me feel the coffer drop rate has been nerfed.

Though there might be no official action on the drop rate, the fact that minions are harder to kill can be considered as some kind of nerf on coffer drop.

I think it’s more than that, but you are right on the effect of the mob buffs on efficiency.

A really good developer would increase the drop rate to compensate for the much longer kill time. A not so great one wouldn’t even think of it. A horrible one would think of it, but not do it to spite the players.

Lord Kuru.3685:

Lots of made up statistics in this thread. Anet has the real data. They use RNG boxes for every event almost certainly because their data tell them the RNG boxes make more money. They’ve probably even accounted for the ill will caused by RNG boxes and yet the RNG boxes still come out ahead.

Personally, I’m guessing that we’d all be shocked at how much a ticket is actually worth (in other words, the number of rich coffers sold divided by total number of tickets in them) and would never buy one at that price.

TLDR: the only way to stop RNG boxes is to not buy them.

What data would tell them RNG boxes make more money? The desirability of skins have varied from event to event. The only event that I’m aware of where they sold a full compliment of weapon skins directly was Wintersday. Those were not very desirable skins. They were highly seasonable which made them even less desirable. To use that as a data point vs. the revenue generated by RNG chests would be idiotic.

There are no other data points.

What would I have done differently with this event?

I’d double the chances of getting skins from the paid Dragon Coffers.

I’d add a Dragon Breath mist effect to the mouth of the dragon for all the skins purchasable via tickets and make them trade-able.

I’d sell the skins with out the dragon breath effect directly for 600-800 gems, account bound.

I’d have put “consolation prizes” in the RNG chests worth getting, so even people who don’t get as many tickets as hoped wouldn’t feel completely ripped off.

I’d also allow people to purchase a skin ticket with 50,000 Zhaitaffies.

Minimal additional effort. A lot more happy people and I would bet you that the total revenue would easily double what they will earn from the current paid RNG coffers. Potentially much more than double.

DeShadowWolf.6854:

Let’s say a player purchased 50 rich coffers (and I know there are plenty of people who have, or sometimes even more). This player wants to get 4 skins from the RNG. In order to get the SAME profit (note: same, not more profit) those weapon skins would have to be sold for 1,000 gems per skin. I don’t think most people in this thread would very much agree to that.

First, you will be lucky to get one skin from 50 rich coffers. Very lucky.

Second, you assume that only people willing to buy RNG boxes will be willing to buy skins directly. That is absolutely not true.

If 1% of the population spends an average of $50 on RNG chasing the dragon, but 10% of the population would buy at least one skin for $10, they would make twice as much money just selling the skins directly.

I’m guessing the discrepancy would be even greater. I think the ratio of people willing to buy skins directly vs. those that will chase the RNG dragon could be 30 to 1 and I think that a portion of those people would buy more than one skin. 30 people spending an average of $20 each greatly outweighs 1 person spending $50.

There is also a serious hidden cost to going the RNG route. It has squandered hard earned good will, built bad will and almost certainly takes a portion of people willing to spend money on RNG boxes and turned them completely off to making further purchases.

Short term cash grabs might work for some vapid F2P game that needs to suck as much money as possible from people before they realize the game sucks. GW2 is one of the best AAA MMOs ever to hit the genre and had the very real potential to be the most successful MMO since WoW. I always assumed GW2 was a guaranteed $1Billion+ title over the course of it’s life time, but that’s never going to happen if you borrow things like RNG boxes from F2P kitten kitten MMO business models.

I stand by my assertion that who ever is in charge of running the gem store and forcing the RNG boxes down our throats is costing NCSoft tens of millions of dollars of potential revenue monthly and those losses will only compound with the continued generation of ill-will. The long term success of the game is actually threatened, not only due to reduced revenue, but the unnecessary shredding of customers willing to spend money on the game.

I have 12 characters across two accounts. I would be willing to pay as much as 800 gems for one of these skins. I sat down last night and figured out how many skins I would actually want to buy across all my characters. Some I wouldn’t bother, some weapons I don’t think are that great, but I arrived at 12 as the total number of skins I would be willing to buy if they were sold directly.

That’s 9600 gems I’d be willing to purchase and spend to be able to buy the skins directly. How much will I spend on RNG boxes with a 1 in 100 chance at a skin? Zero, nada zilch.

Most people probably wouldn’t buy 12, but a think exponentially more people would buy at least one than will be willing to chase a skin via the rip-off rng boxes!

These things make no sense, have never made sense and have likely cost the company $100 million of lost revenue since launch.

Not to mention all the bad will they generate and the fact that a portion of people who are willing to spend $50 to $100+ on RNG boxes, only to fail to get the skin, will never spend another dollar on the game again.

Brilliant people they have working on the gem store…

Martin Kerstein.3071:

Let me explain how this works.

The firework event cycle (them happening every two hours) was started at 9:00 AM PDT. The event itself is tied to the ingame time and will happen at dawn (ingame). So your fireworks might not have happened yet, as it is not dawn ingame.

Apologies for us not communicating this more clearly. But the fireworks will happen every two hours over the course of the weekend, so plenty of time to marvel at them and get the achievement.

They don’t make your job easy, do they Martin?

Seems they are happy to troll you along with the rest of us…

I have to agree with others, this is just another sign of horrible game design. A two hour window. Not tied to real time, but to server time, where worlds and overflows are in no sort of sink. No way to check in game time, except to look at the sky to figure out if it’s day or night. Oh, wait, for this event the skies always look the same in Lion’s Arch, a soup of orange-ish haze. At Dawn. Who the hell would hold a fireworks show at dawn? (I’m guessing yet another fail by a programmer, since dusk would have made more sense).

With skies that look the same 24/7, even setting aside how silly it would be to have fireworks at dawn, what’s the point of using a two hour cycle? Why not just have it hourly, so people don’t have to sit around for up to two hours doing nothing, waiting for a show who’s schedule can not be determined any more precisely?

It seems like passive-aggressive game design. (Orr changes are a good example, with the zones a bit easier, but many temples much, much harder). Something like, "oh yeah, so community feedback is forcing me to make these a little more difficult, well, I’ll show them more difficult…[[insert evil laugh here]].

If so, it’s pretty childish.

BTW, I personally am not having issues soloing these in a level 70ish zone, but it’s a heck of a fight and I can imagine that different builds and/or less player skill could make these impossible to solo now.

My rates are about half what they were the first day as well. This wouldn’t be the first time a dev has told us drop rates on something haven’t changed, only to find out later that some “bug” did in fact change the drop rates.