You can get around easier now, but it’s still an annoying set of zones to play in, not fun to look at, many events are not only too difficult, but some are extremely griefer friendly (What ever happened to “no griefable mechanics in DEs?”), the place is dreary as hell AND, made obvious by the current stat of play in those zones today, is just not nearly rewarding enough to encourage people to play there.
IMO, they’ve become so obsessed over making dedicated farming in the game pointless that they’ve forgotten that such measures just make things extremely pointless for normal players. At some point, they have to realize that what ever economic basis they have for their design decisions become moot if the population just dwindles due to the inability of normal players to log in and accomplish something worth while during a play session.
Dailies are just a temporary motivator. They are already killing people with their repetitiveness and tendency to discourage normal world exploration and PvE. The laurel rewards are nice, but the tedium will eventually win out and said laurel rewards just make loot from world PvE look even more pointless.
Arenanet seem to be unwittingly conditioning players into unsustainable play patterns that will eventually lead to the implosion of the game and the state of the Orr zones is really a keen example of their design-gone-wrong issues.
My second dye ever was Abyss. I used it on my first toon, not appreciating how valuable it might be. I got my second Abyss Dye about two weeks later and decided to bank that one for future sale. (If the price ever hits 28 Gold, I’ll finally sell it).
I haven’t seen another one since, in over 1,100 hours of play. A few months ago I even bought about 200 unidentified dyes, before the price went up above 10S, no luck, so I’ve opened a lot more dyes than a player would see in 1,100 hours of play with out ever buying unidentified dyes off the TP.
I’ve never seen Celestial, or any of the other top five rares either. It could be bad RNG luck, but I tend to believe they made the rares even rarer to try to drive the Gem Store Dye Lottery sales.
(edited by Fiontar.4695)
It’s a rather poor band-aid fix for a poorly designed guild missions system.
Tier I guild Missions should be easy to unlock, T3 pre-reqs at the most. T2 and T3 Guild Missions, which are really only doable by larger guilds anyway, should have required much more effort to unlock, to give larger guilds something to work towards.
Instead of fixing it correctly, we got a way for all guilds to earn an extra 3,000 influence daily, which is just a really bad band-aid fox no matter how you look at it.
Better than nothing, but it doesn’t make a redesign of the entire system any less necessary.
I think there are a lot of mis-steps and just a failure to produce on the part of the developers that is really starting to take it’s toll on the game.
Dailies are, in theory, a good addition to the game, however the current mix of dailies encourages players to grind out their dailies in the starting zones, due to those zones, (and Diessa Plateau, thanks to the Living Story) being the only areas of the game with proper Dynamic Event density. People I play with bemoan that the game is getting very boring as a result, but no one wants to do the dailies in other zones, because they are afraid they won’t be able to complete them in the time they have to play.
FotM and Ascended gear were head-scratchers, seeming like something developers might add to an aging game, not very early in the game’s life. FotM also sucked people out of the game world, which is actually the most stunning, compelling part of the game. The original Difficulty Level system split the community and made it frustrating for most. They finally reformed the way difficulty works for grouping, but they also nerfed the rewards from FotM to the point that most are avoiding an otherwise fun, well designed portion of the game.
Many people put off dungeons as something they would do once their guilds/friends were leveled up and looking for a change of pace. At just that same time, Arenanet decided to make AC, the “tutorial dungeon” a lot more difficult and very obviously now tuned for level 80s in full exotic gear, rather than level 30s as originally intended.
The list goes on and on. Even when they accept they have made a mistake, they often fix things in a very passive-aggressive manner, as they did with Orr. They finally rebalanced mob density in the zones to make Orr more accessible, but they also made Temples a lot more difficult and some very vulnerable to griefing/idiots who can ruin the event for everyone. They also nerfed drops in the zone, so even though it’s less frustrating, it’s also pretty pointless.
I love the game and I’ll say again this game has the potential for $1Billion+ in revenue over it’s lifetime, but it’s not going to happen if Arenanet doesn’t get back on track. The Black Lion Chest skins lottery and removing the Sprite Chests, a much needed incentive to go back out into the world, after just two days, are just among the latest points of evidence that something is just not right with the ongoing development of the game.
Sigh.
The Sprite Chests were a God-send for the game. When they appeared I thought, “Thank you Arenanet! With Dailies and the Living Story guiding most of us to just play a few zones over and over again, the game really, really needed something like this to get players out in the broad world again”!
Seriously, I was ecstatic and saw it as a sign that the developers might be getting back on track again.
Then, they removed them after two days….
WTH?
::cries::
Please, bring them back to the world for the full month. The game does really, really, really need something like this to break up the monotony that the Dailies and the Living Story have brought to the game.
Also, look into maybe adding some quality brain food to the Arenanet snack dispensers, I think you guys need it…
I do have to offer some biting criticism on one point. Assuming it was true when Colin stated they are NOT working on an expansion at the moment, then there is something seriously wrong with the efficiency of current content creation efforts.
In five years of development they managed to create Personal Story, with modest branching, for five races. By my count, over 260 individual personal story elements. Even if they began working on the personal story right from the start, that’s about 6 personal story elements completed in a month. The game has been out for 7 months, so if they were working at full efficiency, they should have been able to create 42 personal story elements since launch. How many do we get in the entire Living Story to date? Two.
I liked both story elements revealed this month, but they really should have been able to deliver at least a four part story for each storyline for this month’s update and at least that many for next month as well.
This argument can be applied to Dynamic Events as well. How many thousands of DEs in the game? Promises that new DEs would be added constantly over the first year, with estimates that by the end of year one there would be 2x to 3x as many DEs in the game as at launch. How many new DEs since launch? Is it even a dozen?
I love this game to pieces but IF the line about not working on expansions yet is true, then there seems to be something extremely wrong with the way the company is managing it’s post launch development resources.
If they could have delivered even half of what one might reasonably expect, the game could be one of those rare MMOs that just snowballs to greater and greater popularity. With the current pace of ongoing development? Things are not looking good.
It was fair to nerf it in PvP because people have between 13000-19000hp, but it wasn’t so op in PvE when dungeon bosses have more than 1 000 000hp like in Arah…
Nerf the health pool of mobs, not the skills…
That’s a good point. The increase in burst would have a bigger impact in PvP, where players have smaller health pools than most dungeon mobs and a lot less than dungeon bosses. A PvP skill split might have made more sense in that case, but most recent nerfs are the result of an obsession over players doing dungeons “more efficiently” than intended, so it’s not surprising it was a universal change.
Closing actual exploits is one thing, but players using logic, skill and reasoning to make efficient use of the skills provided should never be punished over a 10% efficiency increase.
We all know that defeating a boss in 400 seconds due to quickness, when it should take 420 seconds, is just completely overpowered and needed to be nerfed, right?
::shakes head::
Probably the biggest impact of Quickness was that it actually got people to coordinate their alpha strikes to take advantage of the increased execution rate. I mean, all it did was allow you to occasionally execute six seconds of attacks in three seconds. In most fights, pointless, in boss fights, just makes them slightly less tedious and also provides players with a sense of accomplishment on their ability to coordinate a dramatic attack.
Add this nerf to the “come on, was that really, really necessary” list of head scratching moments since the game released. I mean, come on, I know they have a lot better things to do with their development time!
(10 seconds of quickness ever 210 seconds at the old 100% rate allowed 20 seconds worth of attacks in 10 seconds, which really just shaved 10 seconds off a normally 210 second encounter. That’s 5% more damage over time, assuming everyone makes perfectly efficient use of the time under quickness! Even if you could double the duration via traits/buffs, it would still only be a 10% increase in damage, requiring a very specific built to achieve. Being overkill on most scrub mobs and accounting for time traveling between encounters, the actually reduction in completion time for a dungeon run would be much less than the theoretical maximum benefit).
Look. The entire concept of nerfing skills or items because they might allow a skilled/clever player to solo a Dungeon is just absolutely absurd. I don’t care how clever, it’s still going to take that person a lot longer to complete a dungeon solo than to just complete it in group.
In other MMOs, soloing dungeons was bad, because you could essentially get a groups worth of loot for one person. In GW2, loot per person doesn’t change based on the number of people in the party. You get the same loot you would have gotten in a group, but it takes you longer, so you actually are earning less than you would with a good group.
Now, if someone is actually using a skill or consumable to run a dungeon in much less time than normal, that’s an issue, but it’s an issue you solve by modifying the dungeon, not by nerfing something that has legitimate use because someone was more clever than the devs who designed the dungeon!
I just don’t believe that any of those consumables did more than make runs somewhat more efficient.
I really hate when developers get bent out of shape over players “solving” their content is ways the developer didn’t anticipate. Far too often nerfs are more about wounded pride than a real unbalancing of the game. (The numerous invisible walls cutting off alternate paths to some Vistas in the game is a great example. It’s a lot more fun for players to try to identify the most efficient path among more than one available than to be barred from alternative solutions just because they weren’t deliberately meant to be alternative paths by a developer)!
This is disgusting and should not be the way Arenanet runs it’s gem store. I don’t care if they get a huge chuckle when ever some poor schlub spends over $100 in pursuit of something like this, I also don’t care IF it’s a solid money maker, it’s just plain wrong and absolutely disgusting.
IMO, the moral compass of Arenanet has lost all bearing when they decide to indulge in this kind of practice.
They would probably make more money with a more fair, direct route of purchase for the skins, but apparently it’s just much more fun to gouge the suckers willing to play this long odds lottery.
RNG Cash Shops are for F2P games that want to squeeze as much money out of suckers as possible before they realize the game is kitten and move on to something else. If Arenanet actually wants to grow and maintain a strong player base over a period of years, they really, really need to knock this kitten off.
It’s really like the person running the cash shop is more concerned about “how awesome it feels when I can sucker some gamer into paying x-hundreds of dollars on the cash shop”, rather than trying to establish a healthy, long term revenue stream.
IMO, the skins should be for sale directly for around 500 Gems AND the tokens should drop from chests. That way, people who just want a skin or two can do so with out the risk of shelling out a lot more than intended in the pursuit of an RNG, but people who already buy BLC keys, or have been on the fence about buying them, have a little bonus incentive to do so while the tokens are available.
I find it extremely sad that Arenanet has decided that “let’s rip suckers off for as much as we can” is their Gem Store mission statement, rather than “Let’s offer quality offerings at fair prices so a large portion of the player base can invest in the game over the long term and get some guaranteed value for their money”.
I’ve paid more than a typical monthly fee in gem purchases every month except for November, when I was recovering from a serious illness and the current month.
However, I’ve been a bit turned off recently over various development decisions and the sparsity of playable content in the last two monthly updates, which is why I boycotted personal gem purchases for March. April will really depend on the content of the pending patch and ongoing development decisions.
I’m a huge fan of the game and have logged over 1,100 hours across two accounts, but I have to admit that if this was a subscription game, I probably would have canceled my subscription this month.
The lack of subscription fees makes it a lot easier to maintain a player base among the natural ebb and flow that occurs with any MMORPG. The revenue numbers seem to show the business model works and players are spared the binary choice of paying to continue playing or cutting ties with the game when it no longer feels worth the subscription fee.
Hopefully this also makes Arenanet more responsive to players, since fresh content and design decisions can have an immediate and measurable impact, positive and negative, on the ongoing revenue stream.
Sounds good to me. I never did give into the temptation to guest for multiple rewards, when that was possible, or to do the “run it with multiple characters daily” deal. I didn’t feel like becoming a slave to event timers.
However, I did get miffed when such an event would kick off for the second time when I was still playing in the zone, only to find no rewards what so ever. This change will allow us to go back to a loot table that I assume is pretty close to what it was in the past, while basically giving us a special daily reward once per day, per account, which will have a guaranteed rare.
That’s fair to normal players, makes event timer slaves a bit less slavish, reduces guesting for mega-events and restores some balance to the economy. IMHO, win, win, win, win.
Has there been any response in this thread yet?
Anywho…..there is another issue that is playing out as more and more guilds gain access to bounties. With hopes of completing these, guilds will most like schedule when they have the highest concurrency. Well, since the weekends fill that role the issue of guild competing over bounty npc’s arises.
I have noticed on multiple occasions that when I run across a bounty npc (on the weekend) there will be several players from different guilds surrounding it. Next thing ya know one of those player’s guilds show up and the bounty is killed and the other players are left scrambling.
Needless to say the ones left are none too happy.
The only “response” has been for Anet to merge their thread into a smaller one…..
I found it interesting that they chose to merge them in this way, and not the other way round. (As they had been doing previously)It isn’t an official response, but the message seems pretty clear to me…..
Wow, that is pretty bad. The original Merged Thread was somewhere around 140K views last time I took note of it, now it’s just a few K. Does that make it easier to ignore as a dev if the views stat makes it look like very few people follow the topic?
Could have been a mistake, but it seems there indeed may be a message there…
The entire thing has been a bust IMO. The cost and process of unlocks as well as the missions themselves. The silence from the devs on this is most concerning. A lot of us were peeved at the state of this feature when it released, but I know I, at least, figured that ANet would quickly respond to the concerns and obvious issues and iron out those issues in a timely manner.
Well, they haven’t even acknowledged the issues, much less provided a roadmap for adjusting/fixing it.
I just don’t get it. It’s feeling like the rudder fell completely of the USS Arenanet once the game launched.
You guys have definitely added features, but very light on content. I exclude Guild Missions from content delivered to players, because the gating of access to them is so absurd that maybe 95% of players have no access unless they guild leech. Besides, bounties, though I’m sure taking some amount of resources to develop, don’t really offer much in the way of actual playable content.
(My post is not necessarily directed at you, I just high-jacked your post.)
I would argue that content, even if its not for you in particular, is still content. Fractals, for instance, wasn’t for me, but was still quite some load of content, and many (other) people enjoy it.
Also, I wouldn’t underestimate the workload required to deliver new features. Guesting or the removal of culling haven’t been released earlier since ANet didn’t want us to have it, they just needed a significant amount of time for development/testing. I find it understandable that this has required resources that could not act on different tasks. So, while the “story content” of the past two releases was rather shallow compared to the months before, I didn’t see ANet giving us “less than before” in the past two releases.
And, finally, I would like to highlight the fact that we got all of this for free, as a kind of continued service for our one-time purchase. This service is even more impressive than what we got for GW1. Don’t tell me you expected that, say, 12 months ago, since I would not believe you.
~MRA
I did acknowledge that the past two months represent features/content that required development resources. I do, though, think many of us have been scratching our heads over what they have decided to spend development resources on and what they haven’t.
It seems like almost every interview the last few months have offered some excuse about relatively straight forward things they would/could/should be doing, but can’t because of a lack of coders. It’s not always that direct, but it seems they really do have a serious lack of coders and if you have a serious lack of coders and that lack is threatening the potential of the game’s ongoing financial success, you go out and get more coders.
Same seems to go for character artists/ modelers. The gem store should be overflowing with cosmetic items and armor/weapon skins by now. It was one of the things almost everyone, fans and ANet, agreed would and should be part of a cash shop for the game. I can only conclude they just don’t have enough artists at the moment to produce the quality/quantity of items they should be producing. This probably has cost them millions in lost revenue, more than enough to justify hiring a couple talented artists to do nothing but crank out skins for the gem store on a weekly basis.
Writers. Arenanet employees are all very careful what they say about work on their twitter feeds, but it’s become clear to me that they are over worked. I think that’s bolstered by how little story or dialogue has actually been included in the last two Living Story updates. They could have made up for lack of coded content by having the refugees actually tell tales worth listening to, but they didn’t. Seems they are in serious need of additional writers as well.
Believe me, I appreciate that ANet employees are working hard and that resources have been needed to produce what we did get in January/February. However, it also seems clear that they lack the resources needed to produce ongoing features/content at the needed rate. It also seems that prioritization of the available resources hasn’t always been appropriate since launch.
As to “we got this all for free”. Well, some of you are getting it for free while some of us are actually paying for it via gem purchases, often to sums greater than a typical monthly subscription fee. You might say “that’s optional and if you don’t like the ongoing development, stop buying gems”. Well, that’s really what my concerns all come back to.
The business model for the game relies on people making optional cash infusions to the company via the gem store. I have to seriously question their priorities and productivity when it comes to providing ongoing content needed to maintain and drive ongoing gem store revenue.
Turning off the “paying customers” to the game while chasing after the needs of the fickle, nomadic “hardcore l33t” players seems very self destructive to me.
Yes, that would have made sense, but they needed to fluff up the teasers to cover for the fact that there really wasn’t much actual content in the January/February patches. They needed to preserve the illusion that they were updating and adding content monthly.
Actually, we’ve been adding a lot of content each month of 2013 but most of it hasn’t been related to the Living Story. That’s because the Living World teams were ramping up design and development while other teams were completing their projects. Here’s what we’ve released in the past two months.
January update contents: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/Game-Update-Notes-January-28-2013/first#post1321870
- Flame & Frost teaser events/NPCs
- Dailies/Monthlies
- Achievement tracking UI
- Fractal reconnect
- Guesting
- Orr polish
- PvP map
- Bug fixes
- Skill balance
- Etc.
February update contents: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/Game-Update-Notes-February-26-2013/first#post1639231
- Flame & Frost teaser events/NPCs (phase 2)
- Spirit Watch PvP map
- Item preview
- Guild Bounty, Guild Rush, Guild Trek, etc.
- Bug fixes
- Skill balance
- Etc.
In short, January and February were teaser months for the Living Story. March and April will have much more story content. As always, we appreciate your patience and look forward to hearing your thoughts once you’ve had a chance to play the new stuff.
You guys have definitely added features, but very light on content. I exclude Guild Missions from content delivered to players, because the gating of access to them is so absurd that maybe 95% of players have no access unless they guild leech. Besides, bounties, though I’m sure taking some amount of resources to develop, don’t really offer much in the way of actual playable content.
Feature rich, content light and some of that content unreasonably gated, that’s what leaves many of us frustrated.
I am all for new content, but I echo that just putting it out there and not a big announcement would have been better.
This would be a true teaser. heck put a few red herrings around also. None of that takes much effort, and will keep the players guessing, talking etc.
Right now they just ripped thru stuff that takes 10 min and stand around waiting for more. If not ready to release more (which I understand, trust me), then rolled it out different, without the fan fare and build up.
Yes, that would have made sense, but they needed to fluff up the teasers to cover for the fact that there really wasn’t much actual content in the January/February patches. They needed to preserve the illusion that they were updating and adding content monthly. They also had the problem where Colin had teased that between January and March we’d see “an expansion’s worth of content”.
I’d also note that we were told, once again I believe by Colin in an interview months ago, that they would be constantly adding new events to the world and that by the end of year one, there would likely be 2X to 3X as many events in the game, with some rotating in and out and some just expanding the overall available content in each zone. We are six months in and I’d be surprised if we’ve had more than a 10% increase in DEs in the game world.
Something just is not working with the way the company has positioned itself for ongoing development. The recent announcement that they aren’t working on an expansion removed the reasonable excuse that many of us assumed accounted the the lack of productive results.
It’s sort of looking like they need to reorganize their teams and hire some more people for key areas were they seem to be short right now, like writing, artists/modelers and especially coders.
This could be a $1billion+ game easily, but it won’t happen if they aren’t willing to put the resources into it that are needed to ensure it snowballs into the massive hit it can and should become.
Now, the big question is “when will ANet actually deliver some meat and will it actually make up for the past two months of content famine”?
If the next update is just a repeat of the last two updates, things may start to get really ugly.
If you aren’t satisfied with the rate of new content, cancel your subscription. That’ll teach them!
I’ve been spending much more than the equivalent of a sub fee monthly since launch to support the game. (The most I’ve spent on gems in a month has been $100, the average is a bit less than that). This month I’ve embargoed gem purchases for the first time over frustration with ongoing development. I’ll re-evaluate gem purchases next month based on the next big patch.
Revenue from users may be more difficult to track than with a subscription model, but some of us have provided ongoing financial support for the game well beyond the traditional $15/month sub fee and we can and should reward solid updates with purchases and withhold funds when ANet fails to deliver.
(edited by Fiontar.4695)
The key to understanding the understanding issue is in their recent blog on the Living Story. What they have given us so far are ‘teasers’, not actual content. There is also a reference to developers rolling off other projects now available to expand upon the story. The monthly events had to happen as they are a key value proposition for Anet. So, absent the ability to provide actual content, they occurred as ‘teasers’. I would expect the content to be fleshed out more properly over time and this should make the story more understandable. TLDR: You haven’t been able to get it because there has been nothing to get.
Correct.
Well, thank you for the terse, blunt, but ultimately illuminating response!
I’m so glad to know that the last two “chapters” of this Living Story have been nothing but a puff of smoke and a pocket mirror meant to provide the illusion of new content when there really wasn’t any, due to ANet’s inability to actually provide said content.
I also had wondered if I was somehow just “missing something” with the living story. Glad to know I’m not crazy and that this indeed has just been “placeholder” content put in the game just so you could say you provided new content for the month.
Now, the big question is “when will ANet actually deliver some meat and will it actually make up for the past two months of content famine”?
If the next update is just a repeat of the last two updates, things may start to get really ugly.
Orr needs to be more rewarding for ongoing play, then maybe more servers will be able to field the people needed to control the zones.
Before the recent adjustments, Orr was frustrating and marginally rewarding. Now it’s playable, but unrewarding. Almost feels like they were so ticked at having to change the zone that they decided to just make it worthless to go there out of spite.
It needs better drop rewards and maybe even needs it’s own separate category of dailies, or some other alternative reward system to encourage more play there, with out going to far and making it so people only ever want to play there. (That’s why a separate Orr Daily might be the best approach. Encourage people with high level characters to spend at least an hour there a day, make that hour very rewarding and the zones would fill back up again).
Someone in Lion’s Arch tonight was shouting to find a buyer for his guild, asking for a moderately big sum of gold. This guild had enough assets for guild missions. Even if we assume this isn’t a scam, it still opens up a number of potential problems.
How bad are the problems that can be created by guild sales? Should there be any intervention by the designers to prevent it becoming more commonplace?
I do not think this is possible at all.
In Guild Wars 2, it appears that the original ownership transfer of guilds is impossible.
The guild is disbanded if the original guild founder leaves the guild.I bought one for 5 gold. I kicked everyone except me after the original leaders stood down and the guild is still there. So, it is entirely possible.
Who the heck would sell a Guild for 5 Gold?
Anyway, selling for gold? I would strongly think this is legal. Selling for Cash? Illegal, but probably harder to catch than gold selling.
I agree.
In the future, I really hope they allow us to chose from a list for monthlies, just as they do now for dailies. This would allow them to add things like Fractals/Dungeons/Dragons etc… with out excluding people who don’t like certain areas of the game.
This month’s was good though, since, for the most part, a typical player can expect to finish most of them just playing the game “normally”. I like dailies, but they tend to make people focus on the check list and lose a natural immersion in the game. I’m glad the monthlies are more “organic”.
Hello.
I just saw the great news for WvW.
But since January Patch that I started to have Culling in PVE for the first times, mainly in Meta Events where even Mobs are Invisible sometimes!
Then, does the end of Culling affects also PVE? Or do we need to get used to “Invisible Events” in PVE?
I would like only to say, that I know Culling is also also about our Computer… but, the game must think in every kind of PCs, not only with high-end Ones.
The initial release of this system will be for WvW only. There are additional complications we need to solve with PvE due to the number and variety of creatures on screen that WvW doesn’t need to account for. Later this year, we’ll be expanding as much of the changes to the PvE open world as we can as well.
What’s weird, though, Colin, is that there never used to be culling issues in PvE. They’ve only really become an issue since you started talking about the push to fix culling in WvW! So, what is up with that?
As said in other threads; LOTRO had about the perfect system where you could have a set of clothes for stats and another for image. This system misses the mark for me and my entire gaming clique.
I share the OPs opinion. Bringing modern clothing and affectations into this steampunk style universe does look cheap and is thematically breaking for me.
hehe, MOST, if not ALL, post launch decisions have been head scraching for me.
i wonder who makes the “final calls” at anet.
I agree with the OP and I agree with this post. Post launch development has been almost entirely “head scratching”. The strategy for the Gem Store is one of the most befuddling, since it’s mismanagement and lack of content represents millions in lost revenue.
As to the recent offerings, the hoodies look ok, but yeah, do they really belong in the game? IMO, the pants are hideous, the boots aren’t much better and the gloves should probably be free.
I was very glad to see new offerings, the store has maybe 5% as many cosmetic items/skins as I would have expected by now, but I’m far from thrilled with the actual offering.
Arenanet really needs to hire some artist/modelers with an impressive portfolio in the fantasy genre and get them to work on quality gem store gear. Not only on brand new items, but doing the necessary conversions needed to offer more of the currently unavailable NPC skins for players.
It appears that the servers did not see a time adjustment to DST. Is this intentional? I don’t know if Europe does savings time at all, but the vast majority of people on the US servers likely live in areas that do observe DST. It would be nice if the times would be adjusted accordingly.
The short answer is that new content is not going to drive people away from the game. There is absolutely no evidence to support that it would.
The long answer is that guilds are indeed both social structures and reward mechanisms. We realize rewards can strain social connections and we do our best to prevent it. We want you to be able to play with your friends without feeling pressured by the game to spend your time doing otherwise. We’re still fine-tuning some details, but the general idea is that rewards from new guild content system are rate-limited in such a way that a smaller, more-focused groups can maintain a similar pace to the larger ones. So no, you won’t have to abandon your friends and join mega-guilds to benefit from the system, but that’s not to say the mega-guilds won’t have plenty of stuff to do.
I don’t want to go into too many more details until our team formally releases all of the information in our upcoming blog post. But I hope that helps for now.
Actually, putting such steep gates in front of content many people were looking forward to and the big insulting gesture the decision makes to everyone in a smaller guild is driving players from the game. Many small guilds were rejuvenated by the teases on Guild Missions, only to see morale crushed by such poor game design decisions in the way the content has been gated against all but the largest guilds.
You could have and should have gated the higher tiers of each GM category, ensuring that the lowest tiers were reasonably available to small guilds. There is no reason why a small guild should have reasonable access to Guild Bounties I, just as there is no reason that large guilds should have no cost to unlock Bounties II, III, etc…
It’s completely backwards design and it’s made worse by the PR stating that the system is meant for small guilds, as well as large ones. If you had at least been honest that the content was really only meant for large guilds, it still would have been horrible design, but at least you wouldn’t have set expectations that have only crushed many smaller guilds.
What I would suggest would be that every time you put four level 80 rares into the MF, you get the RNG result AND a precursor token. Every time you put 4 level 80 exotics into the MF, you get 10 tokens. 500 tokens + two additional ingredients get’s you a precursor. Relatively inexpensive ingredients for the two additional slots = random precursor. Relatively rare/expensive ingredients for the two added slots for recipes that grant a particular precursor.
No more throwing tons of stuff into the MF forge with the perspective of getting nothing. Precursor prices come down to more reasonable levels, rares go up in price a little. Some people still get lucky and get a precursor by luck, but no one loses everything in the pursuit.
Well, what did you expect? You gambled and lost. Should have expected you had a minute chance of getting a precursor. And now you kitten yourself because you foolishly spent all your gold gambling when you should always leave enough gold on hand to prevent this ‘depressive’ state.
The way I look at it, Arenanet has gambled on this system of RNG as part of the Legendary process and every customer it drives from the game is a loss for them and all the remaining fans of the game.
It’s horrid game design to put “soul crushing” gambles into the game that are guaranteed to drive players from the game. Who would ever think that was a good idea?
Jeff Grubb or Ree Soesbee
Add the lead game designer(?) Eric Flannum to that list.
Yeah, there are a number of key developers we haven’t seen hide nor hair of in some time and I figured they were working on an expansion. If not, where the heck are they?
I was shocked by this. The live content, mixed bag that it has been, was still sort of impressive, assuming that only a quarter of the company was working on Live Content. I assumed half the company was hard at work on an expansion. If all of Arenanet has been working on Live Content, then that makes what we’ve seen since launch look pretty pathetic.
Every excuse I’ve made for the lack of progress on Professions, the lack of new DEs, the lack of armor and weapon skins in the store and in the game, the lack of bug fixes, etc… hinged on the assumption that most of the company was working on an expansion.
Well, now I know we need to be demanding much, much more from Arenanet than we’ve been getting.
It’s possible for a really, really good player of some professions to take out a dungeon boss solo. No exploits, just near perfect play with a near perfect build. There is no problem with this. A great player beat your content by playing great. No one cares and it certainly doesn’t warrant nerfs that negatively impact the entire profession, while you move the goal post due to an inability to just appreciate great play.
Now, that two really good Rangers might be able to pet tank a dungeon boss somehow negates fixes that the profession really needs?
I see a trend here.
Stop holding back the rest of the game and eroding it’s very foundation due to an obsession over what a top 1% player might be able to accomplish in a dungeon that you’ve decided that no one, ever, should be able to accomplish alone or in a duo.
We play the game to have fun. Stop designing to the top 1% and start giving some consideration for the rest of us. Honestly, there has to be a better use for your time than hunting down extremes and finding ways to crush them, no matter the cost to everyone else.
The needs of the Dungeon outweigh the needs of the many. Or something like that. The kits needed a cooldown, but the nerf was overkill and it all goes back to what’s best for Dungeons trumping other considerations. Some people just like to suck all the fun out of a game, because, you know, games are not supposed to be fun, right?
[snip]
Rangers have their highs and lows like every other class. They have really good DPS, but they have to work at it a bit more than other classes like warrior or mesmer. It’s possible just not as easy.
As for ranger balance, we have frequent meetings about balance where we discuss that sort of stuff – I go to those meetings on behalf of dungeon content and to lend my experience with ranger knowledge.I personally accept the tradeoff of damage for survivability (Can’t do damage if you’re dead). I tend to run a condition build using shortbow and sword\dagger, and focus on being supportive and holding aggro while keeping a steady output of DPS through conditions. Rangers have an incredible amount of evasion and damage mitigation if you are very focused and know when to use your skills and heals (prot on dodge roll, vigor on heals) means you can keep prot for when you mess up, and always have evasions ready. There are some very successful dungeon builds, but most of them aren’t DPS focused.
We’re working on ideas for making pets better in dungeons. There’s a list of reasons we can’t just tweak a number and call it good (it wouldn’t actually solve the problem), but it is something we are aware of and working on.
One of the things you have to think about, is how the game is played. If we buff rangers just for dungeons, than they are too strong for the open world. Considering I can solo most content in the open world by letting my pet tank, I feel ranger is very powerful outside of dungeons. We can’t have rangers that change based on PvP, open world, and dungeons because that gets too confusing for players and puts us on a slippery slope. Whatever we do to the ranger, it has to happen in both the open world and dungeons, so it requires more than just number tweaks. You see a lot of bots as rangers for that very reason – they are really strong open world classes, and buffing them for the sake of dungeons doesn’t work out to being a good fix.Wow this is getting long. I should go to the class balance forums some time, lol. Sorry for the text wall!
I really have to take exception with your logic there.
First, since when does any profession, properly played, have any problem with world PvE content? A buff that makes a profession more viable in Dungeons would be an important improvement and concerns over whether or not it would then make the Ranger “too powerful” in open world PvE is absolutely pointless.
Second, you’ve shown a perfect willingness to suggest nerfs that will make Dungeons harder, with out any regard to how it impacts a profession’s capabilities in World PvE, WvW or sPvP. It’s ok to make professions less fun and capable through out the entire game, just so they can’t approach Dungeon content in some manner you didn’t account for, but adjustments to weaknesses in the dungeon environment shouldn’t be made out of concern that you might make them “too powerful” in open world PvE?
You must realize how nonsensical that is.
I’m left wondering how many needed profession improvements have been scrapped because of your tunnel vision on dungeon difficulty?
Is not just Gandara or Tarnished Coast or some other server. Most servers have overflow on all 3 dragon events and Shadow Behemoth. people are too lazy/impacient to wait for the event to spawn on their home server so they check the dragon timer websites and guest on a server where th event is just about to spawn.
Since the event chest can be looted only once a day per character that means the 3 hours waiting time to stop the farmers is unnecessary. They should lower the waiting time for those events to something like 1 hour. 3 hours is too much. Frozen Maw and Fire elemental don’t have overflow servers because they reset every 30-45 minutes.
Making the dragon events spawn more often would help spread the population a little bit so the event would have less lag and less people at the same time, therefore no overflow.
This!!!!!
Yes, with the limit of once a day per character, there is no need for the three hour timers anymore. It’s just “forcing” players to use guesting if they want to get each chest once a day per character.
Also, rather than nixing guesting to a server only if the server is full, they should bar guesting to a zone that has reached the threshold after which characters get sent to overflow. Or, better yet, nix guesting to a zone that contains one of these events if the local population is even at 60% of the cap for the zone with in 20minutes of event launch time.
I agree with CobaltSixty. It was a joke before, now it adequately scales with the actual amout on players in the area.
But not with the number of players that are doing the event.
Yes, and this part of the issue. I wanted to see what everyone was talking about so I did it several times the day after patch. First event was no problem; I duoed it with another guardian. It was a good deal more challenging than before due to abilities of and buffs to the Krait, but manageable. We didn’t see a champ spawn.
Over the next two times the body count began to rise. It was near Teq time and there were more people hanging around (not doing the event). The moderate sized group seriously struggled. By the last run the rez me tombstones were flying in full force. I even went down once due to multi-champ inattention.
Is it impossible? No. It’s simply inappropriate as implemented for its intended purpose. I’m fine with a DE chain that ends in a champ fight. However, having them in multiples here and at pent/shelt is just bad design. To begin with, champs are worthless bags of HP. There is a reason we avoid them and it isn’t because we’re not up to the challenge. So, having them thrown in our face is not going to make for a happy playerbase.
The previous patch took a step in the right direction in making Orr less annoying. 2/26 takes the game two steps back.
Arenanet have always told us in the past that DEs scale based on the number of active participants and that determination is made at almost a second to second basis.
The recent behavior seems to indicate this is no longer the case.
I have to wonder if this isn’t one of the causes of the lag issues at large group events. The events themselves are reaching difficulty thresholds they could never have reached before, including more mob spawns, more special abilities, more complex AI etc., than they could ever have reached when the servers were properly polling participation levels.
It was crazy there last night. The boss was one-shotting Guardians. =O The crazy lag from guesting doesn’t help.
What is with the guesting meme? I’m starting to think it’s a deliberate cover for the obvious server issues that have only been getting worse, not better and started to get worse well before guesting arrived.
The problems really came to a head after the four hour server maintenance a while back, not the introduction of guesting.
BTW, I’d add that those of us on high pop servers can also guest on low pop servers. I’m going to bet the lag isn’t much better on the low pop servers either.
Pro-sports merchandising has seen a trend in recent years for more and more pink jerseys and other offerings to appeal to women. Does this mean all women will want a pink jersey, or that no men will, or that just by offering pink jerseys to a portion of their demographic they are being sexist? Off course not. They identified a need and offered a product to fill it.
We can argue over exactly how valid the blue for men, pink for women assumption on a binary preference poll is today, but I think we can probably agree that there is still a heavy gender related bias to the choice. (Also, I’d add, there is nothing at all wrong with a woman preferring pink, or a man preferring blue. Feeling forced to break with a stereotype due to some perceived political statement it makes is as oppressive as feeling the need to choose pink as a girl, or blue as a boy, in order to conform to societal expectations).
So, given that the gender preference on pink vs. blue is real, no matter the exact degree, I would agree with the OP that it does seem that putting the Pink Quaggan in the BLC does place an inordinately higher barrier to obtaining the color that more women are likely to be interested in than men.
Back to sports merchandising, imagine the outrage if the only way to obtain pink team jerseys was through an expensive lottery! I don’t see this as any different. BLCs are clearly a lottery and a person looking for a Pink Quaggan backpack is likely to have to spend a lot more money to obtain it and those people desiring the Pink Quaggan backpack are more likely to be women.
IMO, both colors should be for sale directly and both should be on the loot table for BLCs.
Just wanted you guys to know that these are also available as guild mission rewards as well. You can get them as random rewards from completing missions or from the commendation vendor.
That’s salt in the wound, rather than a solution. You’ve made Guild Missions inaccessible for the foreseeable future for anyone in a small to medium guild who doesn’t find a large guild to let them leach, or doesn’t just quit their small guild to join a large guild for GMs.
It’s really feeling like you only care about Elite players now and the rest of us might just as well take a flying leap.
Why are you insisting on an end game gear grind, when a core design philosophy the game was built around was “no end game stats gear grind”?!?!? Don’t you get that the foundational design philosophy for GW2 is the reason the game is a very rare hit in the MMORPG genre? It’s not holding the game back, it’s the reason the game has the level of success it enjoys!
Anyone who has any clue about the genre knows that developers focusing their development efforts on the nomadic, never satisfied “Elite” accomplish nothing but the destruction of their game.
The “aesthetics as carrot”, rather than stats, could have and still could work if you’d spend more effort creating desirable armor skins for the game, rather than finding ways to make end game grindy and exclusionary! Is it really so hard to find talented armor artists/modelers that you have been forced to return to the failed formula of “end game gear grind as a necessity”?
Arenanet, I feel like I don’t know you anymore.
I’d like to raise another point here.
I’m not that interested in the Ascended reward for this content, or the potential of receiving a legendary pre-cursor.
I’d just like to have more content to play with my guild. Not with someone else’s guild.
It’s not about the reward. It’s simply about having more game to play with my friends, and I’m being prevented from experiencing this content with people I know and love thanks to arbitrary gating mechanisms.
The bounties sound the least interesting if I’m honest. The Puzzle though? ArenaNet only need to check the logs associated with my account to see how frequently I play jumping puzzles. I love ’em.
And the guild rush looks a hoot.All of this exciting new content, locked away from my guild with no likelihood of ever being able to access it. If we do want to play it, we probably have to rely on the charity of larger guilds.
Utterly ridiculous.
Exactly! Endorsed times one million!
I continue to be befuddled as to how anyone at Arenanet thought this was a good way to do Guild Missions.
The unlocks, for small to medium guilds, are indeed utterly ridiculous, but then once they are unlocked, there is no real effort needed to progress through the ranks, so the large guilds will just blow through them. Wasn’t the justification for the gating that they didn’t want large guilds just blowing through the unlocks? Well, guess what, they will blow through them, while those of us in small guilds will be lucky to have Bounty Missions unlocked by the end of the year, if our small guilds even survive the year.
Since the event requires the guild to fan out and find the bounties, it doesn’t make much sense that you have to be there for the kill to get rewarded. In the same zone should be enough. That some shlub who ports to the zone then just stands there might get a free reward is meaningless compared to the guild members who are there taking an active role, but miss the reward because they couldn’t get to the target in time once it was identified.
Sadly, not much about Guild Missions seems to have been very well designed. We can only hope they make rapid corrections to the many flaws.
I think someone ticked a wrong box when moving this. Not sure how persistent lag/culling issues in the game during large events, especially server lag that makes use of some skills impossible, (can’t even be triggered with key or mouse press), belongs in “Players helping Players”?
Bugs? Maybe. PHP? Has to have been in error.
More rares, at reduced prices, probably means either a wash in daily earnings, or a slight pump up. It does mean, though, that rares will be a lot more affordable when people go to buy them, which helps everyone, but really helps the more casual players who are never awash in gold.
Crafted Exotics might come down a little as well, with the reduction in ecto cost.
It sucks for speculators that had a lot of gold in the rares and ecto markets, expecting that the prices would just continue to rise and rise, but I think it’s pretty good for most of us.
Yes. Lag, especially skill lag, (or, more often, skills being completely untriggerable), is worse than it was a few months ago. So far, what ever steps they have taken to combat lag/culling issues, have just made things notably worse, not better.
I hope they have metrics that show this and fine enough date on the bottlenecks to some day fix the issues.
It is too easy to become fixated on dailies, even when the mix of dailies could come close to full completion if you just played the way you normally play. It does detract from immersion and eventually it will wear very, very thin, to the detriment of the game.
The solution may be to make dailies a little easier to complete, while also tuning the mix to make it easier to complete dailies just by playing, rather than worrying about a check list. The dailies bring people to the game near daily, but it might be better to get them off the daily and back to normal game play as quickly as possible.
If it was up to me, I’d expand the list to 5 of 12, instead of 5 of 10 and have a plain kill count and “level up” be part of every daily, while limiting the number of achievements in a daily that require doing things you wouldn’t be likely to accomplish through ordinary play to 3 of the 12 choices daily.
Adding two generic, reliable options daily to the current mix of ten would work well with the current mix of dailies, allowing more people of varying play-styles to accomplish the daily but just playing the game “the way they want to play”, rather than obsessing over a checklist.
One would presume that with most of the servers being high population, people using guesting to “escape” low pop settings would be spread around pretty widely among the other servers in the game. I’d also presume that even on high pop servers, guesting goes the other way. (I’ve used guesting a lot lately to do parts of the daily where too many people around makes things frustrating), so it’s not like people only come to your server via guesting, but no one on your server ever guests anywhere else.
Even with guesting, this were feeling a bit dead the week before the latest patch. This is the second month in a row that the Living Story has driven large numbers of people to return to the game and congregate in two game zones. The patch related influx and the way the content concentrates players are likely much, much more to blame for high pop issues than guesting!
I tend to agree with most of the OP. I sense that the problem is actually that Arenanet aren’t being honest with themselves as to how far recent changes actually stray from the promise the game seemed to offer. This is the best MMO on the market and could be a long term, sustainable hit, but it sometimes seems like the developers don’t know what to do with that success and that potential.
The game, it’s systems and it’s core design philosophy all lend themselves to a game that can simultaneously appeal to large swaths of the gaming populace, from casual to elite, from occasional to daily play. One thing that excited me about the game was that there were so many ways with in this framework that they could scale content to allow development time spent trying to appeal to the hardcore to also provide content for the casual. However, now it seems they want to make the all to common mistake of chasing after the fickle needs of the nomadic, game hopping elite at the cost of the other 95% of their players.
It just doesn’t make much sense.
I do take issue with the OP on dailies. There is enough choice to support many playstyles and characters of all levels. Today, for instance, you can do the Shiverspeaks Events and Ascalonian Kills in newb zones if you wish, but with each region also containing zones pretty high up the level range.
My only reservation about the dailies is that I’m finding it’s very easy to become so focused on efficiently completing dailies that you stop playing the game in a natural manner. Running around with a checklist of stuff to do detracts from immersion and exploration and eventually people are going to get really sick of the daily routine, even with efforts to change the mix every day.
I don’t know what the solution to that is, but it is something I’m worried about and the dailies have started to detract from my personal game play in noticeable ways which has me even more worried.
Now, this is just my personal impression, but with most of the design decisions that have made me cringe since launch, I just can’t shake the feeling that some developers are more worried about the game they are working an being perceived as “hardcore” by their peers in the profession, rather than a casual friendly game. Fostering this impression is the number of times they’ve decided to design to the elite, even when the game offered ready solutions for difficulty scaling that would allow the new content to appeal to a wide range of players.
There is just no reason for so much time being spent on content that is artificially and needlessly rendered exclusionary.
All those developers in the industry teasing you for having a casual friendly game are really just wishing they had as big a hit on their hands as you have with GW2. Put the egos away and make the game that advances a new paradigm for MMOs, rather than retreating back to the safe confines of the old paradigm!
It’s just bad design. Period.
From what I can tell, unlocking Bounties requires what to small guilds is probably an impossible amount of influence and even for medium guilds will take many months. However, once you unlock Bounties, your guild has access to all five difficulty levels of Bounties and they all cost the same pittance to activate.
If I’m understanding that correctly, that’s really bad game design.
Might it not have made more sense to allow unlocking of T1 of Bounties, (or any other GM line), be achievable for small/medium guilds, while then scaling up the cost for higher difficulty/reward tiers so that only large guilds would ever reach T4 or T5 for Bounties?
I mean, come on now, it’s obvious that if you want a guild reward system that gives huge guilds something to devote a lot of time and effort to, while not making it impossible for small guilds to enjoy the new content, you need to Tier the unlocks/difficulty/rewards?
Small guilds should be able to unlock T1 of a guild missions line with the same effort it would take the largest, most efficient guilds to unlock T5. Ideally, the difficulty curve would scale such that guild sizes between small and massive would each have a Tier to shoot for that would then be challenging for a guild of their size once it was unlocked.
I think Arenanet needs to re-examine the original ideals that were set for the game’s design several years ago and stop making so many crass compromises.
Haven’t we seen enough MMOs fail to know that once devs start designing to the most elite top 5% of their players, implosion becomes imminent.
There are solutions if arenanet were to chose to do something about this.
1. Redesign distribution of dungeon loot/tokens so that half of the tokens for a run are distributed along the way and only the last 50% of tokens for the run being rewarded at final completion of the dungeon. Distribute that first 50% in a way that makes sense for that particular dungeon/branch, so that easier steps rewards less and harder steps reward more, to prevent people running partial runs mapped for the easiest content to farm tokens.
(This would also combat the issue of parties skipping content to get to the end).
2.) For each person kicked from a group, reduce final rewards by 25%. This preserves the ability to kick truly disruptive players, with a cost that needs to be weighed by the party.
(No penalty for players quitting/disconnecting, only for kicking).
3.) Reduce rewards for substitute players by 20-50%, depending on how much of the dungeon has been completed prior to them joining. If the dungeon is beyond 66% completion, the substitute player does not get credit towards dailies/monthlies/FotM difficulty rating advancement.
Penalties for kicking, partial rewards for kicked players for content they did complete and reduced rewards for subs. That’s how you do it.