Guild Wars 2

Jockum.1385:

FoW and UW were originally some maybe 5 hour elite maps which kicked you out of the instance when your team wiped. I think you cannot recreate this for GW2.
But it was an important factor of these areas.
It forced you to be careful when luring enemies. To avoid aggroing two groups. You had to position yourself in an open field, to protect your backline, manage your deathpenalty etc.

Both maps were not designed for a small amount of enemies/bossfights, they were designed for teamfights. For fighting a team of trashmobs and avoid the other two enemy teams which were patrolling into your battlefield. I don’t think that such a design would be a good idea in GW2. It would only be a map full of trashmobs.

Maybe Anet could create a similiar looking area. But thats it. It will be something completly different.
See Sorrow’s Furnace or SE. GW2 has completly different gameplay mechanics.

I don’t think its worth it. It’s only about a similar setting.

Most clever groups had the Monk ready to run if it looked like it was gonna go bad. I wouldn’t say its impossible to recreate this. I think it would be very easy to recreate it with the Guild Wars 2 flair.

Making FoW or UW into a raid would very seriously be do-able as that is what a raid is a team fight.

Aggro’ing Mobs should always be carefully done. And would work in GW’s 2 as well.

Most of the enemies in UW or FoW were trash mobs and could be easily killed.

I think it would be totally worth it.

Payne.1250:

10 minutes for matthias, the third boss
he’s a pure nightmare i promise, sabetha is a joke if compared to him

That’s cool.

Ayrilana.1396:

Firebird Gomer.9563:

Cause this new raid proves that timers are useless (Roid beat the first boss already) and it should be Mechanics based and not timers based.

Not really. In case you don’t know, all bosses have mechanics.

Yes I do know. And most of them can be better than they are now and more challenging.

Makes it all the more AWESOME for you guys =-)

How much time was left on the timer?
Have you beaten the second or third boss yet?

Actually I cant raid until tonight. And so I was curious people are allow to be that you know.

And I am more than happy to push “my” agenda against timers (I’m not really the only one just so you know) over and over and over again. Cause this new raid proves that timers are useless (Roid beat the first boss already) and it should be Mechanics based and not timers based.

Hey. I have complained a fair bit about Raids. I have complained a fair bit about Anet’s idea’s on timers vs mechanics. I have complained a fair bit about only certain stats when it excludes others.

But for once I would like to praise Anet for a choice they made in regards to time spent in raids.

Thank you Anet for making it that I don’t have to spend 4 – 6 hours having to do the whole raid in one go. I can beat a boss and leave and come back a day or so later and continue on with the second boss. Thank you Anet that I don’t have to take 18 hours to beat a single boss (go look up what some people in MMO’s have had to play to complete a raid). Thank you Anet that you recognize that people have a real life to live outside your game.

Just thank you!

Please continue to think about how not everyone has 20 hours a day to play.

I would love UW and FoW Raids that would be great, SO LONG, as like the current raids they make it so when you beat boss one it remains beaten if you log out and that you can move onto boss two when you next log on. And is only reset weekly.

While I do think certain things in raids are lacking or could be better implemented that one feature is a fantastic choice for raids for those that don’t have 3 – 4 hours to sit and do the whole raid in one go.

Congrats on kill.

Question.

What was the time left on the clock?

Wow.

Was this Ranked?

Anet have admitted there is a problem but can’t/won’t fix it for season 2 sadly.

This has destroyed this seasons league for a lot of people.

Not a critique an observation that lots of people have made and requested.

Thank you. There’s the information I was after.

Wow. Just Wow. Dude.

I am just asking if there is timers for Raid 1 wing 2. Not your opinion on them.

Ummmmm Wing 2….

Sorry I’m still downloading the content.

Is there a timer for the Bosses? Or has Anet managed to make it about Mechanics and skill this time?

Heriticus Spiritus.2489:

I suppose i’m much older than the average forum user. I was born before the Korean War, and before TV even dreamed of being in every home. I was born in the radio era.

I am 70 years old and still going strong. So take hope all you youngsters!

That is so Awesome!!!!

I hope that I will be the same as you… Tho so long as there are Zelda Games I know I will be there and playing! Only -30 years to go.

Donari.5237:

Firebird Gomer.9563:

I am Precocious obviously =-)

Or a Smeghead…. Your choice =-)

Now I’m giggling! What a fine show that was. I remember a film of a Q&A session the cast did at a con. Very first question from a rather young child was a sweetly innocent “what does (for some reason the feline filter came in on smeg) mean?” The Lister actor lost it completely, laughing his head off ’til he was crawling on the floor slapping it with a hand.

I’m so glad I was around for when Red Dwarf was airing (and Farscape, and Firefly, and Babylon 5). You younger sorts who are enjoying GW2 are going to be able to reflect fondly on it in 20 years and use it to one-up other people saying “I remember when MMOs still had 2D graphics.”

You named some obviously great Sci-Fi’s! But you missed the Greatest and Longest Running of them all and the only one that counts.

Doctor Who! Tho the others are all very good too =-)

Yargesh.4965:

Firebird Gomer.9563:

I am Precocious obviously =-)

Or a Smeghead…. Your choice =-)

Better than being a hologram I guess.

Yes No one wants to be A Rimmer!

Orpheal.8263:

Thanks for this summary.
Now to my thoughts about it as reaction as brief as possible:

Schedule

• I like that the next Update is all about reducing Grind in GW2, because this game has become lately so grindy in many places, even when most of it is just optional for some visual fluff, but even for somethign like that some grind of this Game has reach absolute real absurd highs – Wintersday 10k Drinks for example just to say.
• I hope this Grind Reducer addresses following things:
  - Reducing Material Costs of too cost high things in this Game, like recipes that require 100 or even 250 units of something rare like lodestones
  - Raising Drop Rates or adding more ways of getting certain way too rare items, like the Orrian Pendant… over 400G for such an item just to get a more or less useless chest for your personal instance is outright ridiculous!!
  - Reducing significantly the cost factor of everything that has to do with Scribing and adapt it far more to work like all the other Crafting Jobs, just with the difference, that you can learn this Job only, if you own HoT. 5k Gold Costs to max this Job is not acceptable at all
• Increasing Dungeon Token Rewards, so that playing Dungeons isn’t anymore much slower to work on Dungeoneer, than playing simple PvP.
• Implementation of Boss Tokens so that you can work steadily on something you want from certain World Bosses like Tequatls unique skinned Weapons, rather than grinding your butt of eternally and hoping each time, that RNGeesus likes you today.
• Adding more Account Bonus Systems for example for Crafting Exp, for Gathering Effectiveness and so on
• Reworking the Login Bonus System to provide for more things more effectively that can reduce grind, by removing useless junk out of the table and add to the created gaps something more useful.
  Example:
  Remove Bags of Luck, Remove Bags of Experience, Remove Bag of Transmutation Charges, Remove Bags of Black Lion Goods.
  Add in the gaps therefore: 1-2 more Bags of Crafting Materials for exampel for ascended materials, add instead of Lion Goods 1-2 Bags with randomly either Black Lion Key or a Black Lion Ticket and make Keys/Tickets also sellable on TP, makes no sense, that both arent sellable. Theres surely alot of people out there, that don’ need these items, but could make some good money with them if they’d be able to sell these to other players via TP. Add in 1-2 Bags with randomly Rare Materials like Lodestones, Giants Eyes, a Bunch of Ectos ect., add in a bag of 1-2 Dyes that have also a certain chance to drop for you Gemstore Dyes

HoT Maps
It’s not their intention to suppress free form exploration?
Then you would have to completely redesign all the HoT maps, because thats exactly what they all do and their Meta Events, because they all were designed with Group Play mainly back in mind.
The only thing that can be changed, without having to touch the Maps at all and at the same time reducing the grind is it to make the Map Exploration more accessible:
- Rebalance the Hero Points, make the spawning enemies SCALE accordingly to the number of players that are at the spot when the event gets activated.
- Make in general Exploration for Alt Characters easier, nobody, I repeat, absolutely NOBODY wants to do exactly the same thing like 100% Map Exploration with more than 10+ characters or even lower again and again.

Adventures need to be rebalanced better, especially Fallen Masks, Shooting Gallery, Tendril Torchers and Scrap Rifle Field Test and they need to become accesssible whenever you want to play them. make them all instances just like Haywire and Scrap Rifle Field Test, that way you can play them all whenever you want, regardless of what happens on the maps. When it works for these Adventures, then it can work the same way for ALL ADVENTURES.

Items

Good to hear, that missing content will hopefully soon come back finally and personally it was from begin on clear to me, that Anet will hold certain rewards, like that weapon skin set from HoT Beta Days most likely back as some kind of special reward for living Word Season 3 and that the new items from HoT will become with Living Story also more accessible.
But hopefully this means also in regard of reducing grind, that the HoT Currencies, especially Crystalline Ore will become more accessible through LS S3, because that grind for that ore currently is absolutely terrible where you have only 2 choices and both are absolute grind gallore high 3, either replay countless of tiems the Hot Story or grind your buff off eternally in Dragon Stand to farm those pods for a measly 1-10 ore units where it most oftnely will ever be 1 when you are unlucky, when these pods should range rather between 15-100 of them given the costs of them in the reward sections that require them stay untouched to reduce the grind for them.

Story/Living World S3

Sad to see that we still have to wait several months, until it starts, HoT was so low on Story Content, that alot of people are already starving for new story since months.
The Personal Story of the Main Game was in regard of Replay Value and Long Term Entertainment alot better than HoT with its much longer story that provided also multiple different PATHS..something that I terribly missed in HoT.
I hoped Hot would surpass the story telling and replay value of the Personal Story and would work actually as continuation of it, but instead it was just underwhemling short compared to it and basically provided no replay value at all, given the fact you played HoT directly with a Sylvari-Character, otherwise you have only the tiny replay value of replaying it with a Sylvari if your first character you play HoT through with is not a Sylvari, just to see the very minor differences in the expansion between how Sylvari and Non-Sylvari experience the situations…

I really hope the next Expansion will reach again the same quality and replay value, that the personal story basically Living Story Season 0 had, where YOUR CHOICES MATTER and result in different stories.
Also I hope it doesn’t take so long anymore, until Living Story season 1 gets reintegrated into the game with the same mechanics and gameplay that Season 2 brought to the game.

Dungeons/Fractals

I keep on hearing this, sorry to say this – “excuse”, that they curently have since a longer time now no dungeon team ect. but wouldn’t it be simply said the BEST thing to do to let the Fractals Team take over this content and let them work on Dungeons also too?
Fractals are basically nothing else, than dungeons, just shorter…
Throw Fractals and Raids Team together finally and let them work on all three things together – Dungeons, Fractals and Raids, because thats god in hell our ENDGAME CONTENT and call it then Endgame Content Team. Finish – problem solved, no more excuses anymore!!!
This selfmade dilemma wouldn’t exist, if you manage just better your teams to work together in regard of game content, that is in itself already very similar to basically exactly the same and belongs together.
If I’m not right with this, so please correct me and show me up reasons, for why it is better to have seperate teams on dungeons, raids and fractals, when the content for all 3 modes is practially the same design wise, with the exception of AR/Levels/Rewards.

To make Fractals in itself easier accessible for new players and to reduce grind in this game, I would massively reduce the ridiculous grind in this game that comes from getting Agony Resistance high enough to be able to play together with your friends in the higher level fractals and to survive there.
Thats something, that holds back new players massively from joining the fractals, because you need to grind for AR first and get your equipment ready, before you do something or can join your friends at the higher levels without being a BURDEN for them that needs to get dragged through more dead than alive.
Yes, you added with the last patches some nice things and getting Infusions has become also cheaper.. but just take a look still at the prices of the higher AR infusions that you need, it becomes quickly ridiculous due to the bad system with that you rise the AR higher, which becomes way too fast too cost expensive.
Rework your Infusion System to make fractals more accessible for new players.
It has so much unused potential and is so underdeveloped, like it has been designed with the sole intention only to be a giant gold sink and nothing else in mind.
Instead of having to do this horrible plus 1 + 1+ = +2, +2 + +2 = +3 and so on grind …
Make AR a BASELINED attribute of your Ascended Equipment and change AR into some kind of LEVEL that you can raise by using up infusions on that equipment, where every used up infusion raises the AR Intensity Bar of your Equipment, until its AR Level rises.
No more stupid AR grind for like +10 or higher infusions , its instantly accessible for new players, as they can use up all the infusion rewards the get instantly in their ascended equipment to increase right from the start its defense against Agony.
Brief said, just turn AR into the same mechanic, that MAGIC FIND IS and make infusions just like Luck Essences but this time not bound on your account, but bound to your characters ascended/legendary equipment!

Raids

Raids need to become more accessible.
I think it would be best to implement also some kind of “Easy Mode” that is good for making just the Achievements and to LEARN THE BASICS, where you can just join for fun and the story parts that come with the raids.
And when you think you have learned good enough the basics of the raid wings in this kind of “Practice Mode”, then you can go for the real deal for the far more rewarding harder normal versions of the raids.
Also raids per see need to be more adjusted, hopefully through class specific masteries, so that ALL CLASSES become wanted for them.
For example you will want to have a Thief with you, because their class based Raid Mastery line will make Raids for the Group more rewarding, not essentialy much easier, but essentially more rewarding for everyone.
That is what thieves are for in “Raids”..they are the treasure hunters and trap disablers in raids so that you can get to treasure, that youd normally not see/find without a Thief in your group.
Every class needs for raids such a kind of unique speciality for why you would want to have if possible of all classes at least 1 with you.
So rebalance Raids, so that double classing just for DPS performances isn’t absolutely neccessary anymore. Rebalance and rework class skills, so that all classes can partake in raids and so something helpful there.
I think this has completely been overlooked when raids were designed and it hasn#t been thought about this for a single second, which is the very reason, why you see currently in Raids permanently only people asking for the same class meta the very first moment people saw at dulfy, what kind of group constellation can do them successfully due to only specific classes beign useful for Raids due to the massive DPS race that raids are… Take that silyl Timer out of Raids, and this dumb DPS race would immediately stop. Yes, it woudl make raids a bit easier, but at leats for the advantage, that all classes are then more wlecome to raids, because you dont need to think mainly on DPS then anymorewhen makign the group just to be successful!
You can put in that timer back in if you want for some kind of more rewarding “Speed Run Mode/Speed Clear Leaderboard” or so ,but the normal raids shouldn’t have this silly DPS race.
Thats just something for people that like to race against the time!

WvW

Im personalyl really interested alot in this part of the update!
Personally I hope the big change and solution of the population issues means, that we will finally see an end to “World Servers” as rumors say and get a completely new “Faction System”, where Factions share players from basically all servers at the same time.
This actually would solve the Population/Night Capping Issues instantly.
GW2 had from begin on never at all something like “Server Pride”..people bunny hop from the first moment of WvW on permanently always to the winning sides, so stop please with this unfittign argument and “Faction Pride” can easily replace that if you seriously need some kind of “pride” to play for a side…

SPvP
Nothing to say here, I’m not that PvP Player… but everything that makes PvP more interesting for new players and those that aren’t super PvP nerds, is absolutely welcome xD

Class Balance/Testing

I’m absolutely for Skill Splitting. Skill Splitting is the very reason for why you reduced so significantly the amount of skills in GW2 compared to GW1, if we need to remember you Anet, so that balancing the game will become alot easier for you and that something like Skill Splitting will become also easier to handle and to maintain than it would have been in GW1 with its tons of skills.
—

The last two points do I keep out, nothing to say to them , other than I hope that we will see Fishing in the future …especially due to that responsible dev that left 5 years ago Anet being “the husband of the current craftign designer”.. cough

PS: just to say… anyone who dies on Thief from Pocket Raptors, seriously plays this class wrong, as it takes just only 1 single skill to survive long enough against tons of them to nuke them all before they can kill you and even if you get near to death,. you still have Stealth… just using Signet of Malice makes you survive by nuking all the Raptors with Cluster Bomb Spam … or Pistol Whip Spam even better as you evade also incoming hits, while killing off tons of them and healign your self …

Wow. Just Wow.

That was super well thought out!

Rezzet.3614:

welp our lord and savior Colin is leaving, all hope is lost .

Its sad that you think that. He is just a man.

I am Precocious obviously =-)

Or a Smeghead…. Your choice =-)

Also I am 1289 days old.

Thanks for asking

Bellatrixa.3546:

I’m as old as Back to the Future and disappointed we still don’t have hoverboards

There are such things as hoverboards.

The Problem is they burn houses down!

I disagree with dates. When its done is the best policy.

I think 4 times a year they should have a "this is what we hope to have done and available in our next quarterly update (tho things can happen and they might happen at a later date).

This Reddit Dev AMA they just had should be done every 4 months. And people will be happier because they are being given some information and clarity that they are hopefully being listened too.

I do think this should be done on their own forums instead of Reddit. They could have a sticky post saying please post questions in this post 1 month before hand. Then they can go through the questions had them out to the relevant department and then collate them and post them on the front page of their website. Then they can delete the sticky post until 1 month before the next one and then redo the questions post. In this way they can not talk about what they don’t want to and talk about what they need to.

Aidan Savage.2078:

There’s been many changes to underlying systems in that time as well. Even if they had a trait-saving system released with the old trait system, would it have survived the changeover to specializations? Or did they have a system being worked on that was rendered obsolete/defunct as a result of the changeover to specializations, thus resulting in starting over from a day zero point?
Just because it’s been X months/years since Y came out, doesnt mean that Z should have been possible by now Things Change.

That’s a very good point. And something I haven’t put a lot of thought into.

They really only removed the stat bonus’s from the old Trait System and made it so you can only choose one trait from each section and not have it so the number 2 trait could be in the Grand Master trait. I don’t think it would have been that hard to modify it compared to the changes they made to the trait lines themselves. They did also change some of the Traits themselves.

But your right there could have been something in the background that stopped them.

However it doesn’t stop them from saying

“Hey we know you want this, we started on it, but when we made the new trait system we found some things that stopped it from working. We have started again but at this stage we don’t know how long it will take.

We will give a progress report in 3 months time if there is something to report."

3 months later.

“Hey so the trait system is progressing. We have sorted out some things to help simplify it. Update in 2 months if we have any problems”

2 Months Later.

“Sorry Guys, The Interface for Trait saves broke the whole game and so we have to scrap the idea for 6 months as we need to get all Devs working on LS 3 for the next 6 months.”

6 Months Later.

“Guy’s Guy’s…. We did it! We hope that it’s going to be out sometime in the next 3 month’s barring something changing.”

See the only time frame would be the update times. And they don’t need to commit to it either.

I really think this Dev AMA idea every 4 months wouldn’t hurt anything and would help the community feel like there is a communication flow. And like Nintendo, Anet can withhold information they don’t want to share till its ready.

Aidan Savage.2078:

As an aside, regarding trait saving, what makes you think they ARENT working on it right now?

Gaile’s also said that just because they arent posting anything about ideas being put forward, doesnt mean they arent looking into it. One of her posts gives 3 categories most of the ideas fall under- Not Possible, Technically Impossible/Unfeasible, Not in This Timeframe. Trait saving is likely under the last category.

Actually they did say that it was on the table buried under all the HoT stuff and they would try to get to it after HoT released. A simple yes we are actually working on it still wouldn’t hurt them and would make the where is it posts drop. It also doesn’t have to have a date and time linked to that. (They did drop off after they mentioned it was on the table. It has once again been started to be asked again because no further mention of it has occured.)

As to the Not In This Time Frame statement you said. 3 and a half years of being asked for. At least one new post about it every month or 2. I think the time frame is a little long and perhaps others do as well..

I totally believe in When Its Ready. Not due at this time. Its why I am a Nintendo Fan through and through. Their games aren’t released until they are done and that is why their games are generally regarded with great respect.

WvW

Stephen is the studio technical director of ArenaNet. He’ll be the new director for WvW and clear the log jam.
At a high level we plan to address core WvW issues such as population imbalance, scoring issues, and rewards. Of those, the first updates you’ll see will be related to population balance and rewards. As always, as we get closer to releasing an update we’ll be publishing a blog post including more details.
We are set to live beta-test changes starting after we publish the April update .In a Live Beta, the beta feature is available on the live game servers, but we are able to quickly disable the feature in the event that it’s negatively impacting gameplay, or any other serious issues arise. Depending on the feature the length of a live beta can be highly variable, it may be a few hours, a weekend, or much longer. It’s an opportunity for us to gather feedback on the feature, from the entire playerbase, and update the feature before shipping it ‘for real’. The live beta will be available to everyone.
Right now our priorities are population imbalance and rewards. But they don’t have to be. I’ll contact WvW opinion leaders and put them in front of the team to make sure we’re working on the right things.
We overscoped a big “WvW 2.0? awesome update that was taking forever … so now we will ship lots of small incremental improvements that get us to where we want to be, and so y’all know we are actually working on it! Some of the things done over the last year and a half are reusable, and we’ll get those to a ship-able state.
The WvW team’s current top priority is fixing population imbalance. It’s a really hard technical problem. It has taken us a long time to ship a solution, so it’s been a long time since we’ve shipped significant updates, and of course that hurts. Currently, we’re clearing the log-jam by making sure we can roll-out incremental updates to the Live servers. It will be nice to be back in a mode of shipping frequently.
Once we’ve released our blog, announcing the first part of the big WvW update, we’ll be able to be a lot more open when answering questions about our solutions to these big issues and how exactly the updated systems will work.
We are currently working on layout improvements to the Desert Borderlands map. Specifically, we are looking at changes that simplify navigation, reduce line of sight blockers, reduce/eliminate critical choke points (Fire Keep Lord Room), reduce lethal fall locations, etc.
We still intend to eventually bring back the Alpine Borderlands map, but it’s not as simple as just toggling it back on. We don’t have the tech for rotating between the two borderlands built yet, and the map itself required a significant amount of content updates to support all of the features that were added to WvW as part of the HoT update.
When we made the new borderlands we planned to be able to switch between it and the previous map, perhaps by round, or perhaps by ‘season’. But the tech to support that on-the-fly swap never worked; we kept thinking it shouldn’t be that hard, because we can redirect people to/from PVE and PVP maps with simple configuration changes. (One big problem is the overworld map can’t dynamically update). We didn’t mean to get into a place where there was only the new map but unfortunately we did.
We moved resets to Saturday because sometimes we do a build on Fridays and just about the time we wanted to activate the build was during the reset time. So we thought it would be better if there was no conflict in the timing of those things. Since people love Friday, but we might do a build on Friday, we need to talk about exactly what time of day would be good for the community, and then adjust based on that.

sPvP

Halls and Tombs were a huge part of GW1. While we loved those modes in GW1 we wanted to try something different for GW2.Guild Wars 2 PvP takes a new and different approach to PvP and overall is much more successful for it.
The old iteration of the leaderboard will not be returning, but we do have the Legendary Division Leaderboard which highlights our top Ranked Arena players as well as the Guild Challenger League which highlights our top guild teams.
We are definitely aware that there are some frustrating match-ups being made during this Season’s initial kick off period and we are actively working to improve this for Season 3, particularly during the start of the season.
No plans for a betting system for PvP esports games.
We believe that having distinct meta periods is healthy for the state of PvP, but keeping the meta constantly in flux is frustrating for most players, because things that were effective one day were ineffective the next week.
We use MMR for minor matchmaking considerations (like finding similarly skilled teammates), but it doesn’t really work as a determiner of which division you technically belong in for our specific league system. There is a lot of things involved in the League progress system, but sufficed to say, we’ve explored the idea of using MMR as the sole means of determining player positions and we identified enough pitfalls that we decided to opt for a different system instead.Right now, for the purposes of matchmaking, MMR is currently used when searching for players to be on your team (unless you’re in a pre-made group, of course). We do not plan on making any changes to matchmaking until after Season 2 has ended.
We are looking at ways to get higher tier players to where they need to be faster. In S2 we added win streaks which our data has shown has helped a lot to achieve this. Again, no solid plans yet but this is something that the team is keeping a close eye on.
It is definitely our intent to build new maps for PvP for both Conquest and Stronghold. Before we dig into that, we are taking a pass on making some improvements to our existing maps. We’ve had some feedback from some of our top players on how some existing maps could be adjusted to be more competitive. Expect to see some adjustments along those lines first.
No plans for 1v1 or 2v2 PvP gamemodes at the moment or plans for match sizes larger than 5v5 in PvP.
We’re aware that there are still existing pain points on the Battle of Champion’s Dusk map and we are actively working to address them.
Our currently supported gamemodes are Conquest and Stronghold. Courtyard still has a place in custom arenas, but it won’t be returning to Unranked or Ranked arena.
How players move between maps in PvP is different than in the rest of the game and because of that it there are technical limitations on our ability to have players queue from outside the Mists. If we can find a solution to the technical challenges around this we would love to be able to do this but it is a very difficult problem given how the code between these systems work.

Class Balance/Testing

We do have a team that works on skills. We focus on maintenance and balance of current skills, in addition to the implementation of new player skills down the road
Internal testing is a mix of Dev/Q.A./tester Hands-on interaction, and some automation.
When discussing changes for classes, we look to a variety of areas to determine what should happen. We use metrics from many areas of the game, feedback from a plethora of sources (yourselves included), along with our own spreadsheet comparisons and experiences. In addition, we have meetings with each feature team to discuss the issues in that we then investigate and come up with solutions for. We balance from many different perspectives, top tier pvp is included as well as Raids, Fractals, WvW roaming/group play, casual open world, huge map-wide encounters and a few more
We are not fully against skill splitting between the different game modes but it adds a lot of overhead to every balance and design decision. While it does give you another tool box it does lead to optimizing skills heavily for each game type which does make power creep.Its on the table and it’s something we may use in the future

Technical/Features

Extended Experience never really existed in the form promoted in that blog post and the team working on it was restructured to focus on other things. Don’t expect us to ship anything like what the blog post promised, it’s not a good use of our time. We decided a long time ago that it would be far better to have the community own the extended experience than for us to do it internally.
Character rendering API is still a “that would be awesome” sort of long-term goal
New Bug Tracker is intended to simply make our processes more transparent, it will display a highlight of all the bugs being worked on. It is to improve communication between QA and the customer base.
No plans for graphics engine update (i.e. no Direct X 12 or moving to Vulkan).
Mac version was done via a shield party shell to host the Windows version and isn’t a true Mac application. We are actively experimenting with getting native code that runs directly on the Mac with OpenGL etc
Guild Anthems weren’t fully polished so we pulled it from the HoT launch. We want to get back to but not actively working on it right now.
Megaserver/Taxi behavior is a very complex problem. The taxi system is not designed to be the primary way people make it into maps with their friends. That being said, we don’t think getting rid of the options gets us many benefits. There are two major problems with megaservers: the criteria for who your playing with is immense and it isn’t a load balancing problem in the normal sense. We can’t say specifically at this point what the final experience will be like, but I can say that it will be better. We’ve been at work for several months already. There will be very little random about the new system.
Keyrings is a cool suggestion but we are not working on that as we got our plates full with other developments.
We’ve experimented with public test servers and there are two problems for us: 1) much of our stuff is story driven, and not suitable for a public test server; and 2) the results from play patterns don’t match what we see later on live. Instead, we developed a system we used for HoT where we can beta test characters and maps on the Live servers with a cute little personal sandbox that surrounds beta characters.We will be exploring using that tech more so we can do public-test-server-like things but in the live game, so we get real useful results back
No plans for aerial combat. We like it but working on other things.

Fluff

Colin is leaving due to a new opportunity that allow him to see his family more and support his wife on a project. Also less commune for him.
Game directors coordinate it all, set the long-term direction, set the anchors that teams use to make decisions, and generally ensure that the finished product is more than the sum of its parts.
Official fashion contests are a nice idea that the team can discuss and see if it fits.
Weapon design contests like we did for GW1 are tricky due to legal issues that restricts who can enter and can take a lot of work to implement. The team will be happy to discuss this possibility in the future.
Original designer of the crafting system was in love with fishing and it had more documentation than the rest of the crafting system. Unfortunately we never had the plans to do it and the guy left the company 5 years ago. This designer is actually the husband of the current crafting designer. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be fishing in the near future but she will keep bringing it up.
Roy is now a team lead on creatures and working on Expansion 2.
QA at launch had a very large group of 60ish people in house but it is more leaner now.
The hardest part of writing any music for the game is making sure it matches the intent of the rest of the team, from the artists to the writers to the designers. The other difficult part is making sure it feels “Guild Wars-y”, for lack of a better term. There is room to grow and expand what that means, but I’m always very aware of the legacy of Jeremy Soule and what he means to the world of Guild Wars.

Here it is from Dulfy. Thank you Dulfy!

Really Anet this should be done by you guys. But I know you can be busy. I also read in another post someone saying that this should be done every 3 – 4 months I totally agree and this would go a long way to calming down the community in times of stress.

One thing that wasn’t discussed was once again a Trait Saving System.

Gaile. I’m not going ask you for an answer but perhaps you could go ask someone for us, if someone could provide us with new information about this highly requested feature. This request has been going on since launch. There was a poll by Anet what we wanted the most and Trait Saving was the most requested feature. Ive said this in other posts, it doesn’t need to have armor and weapons and trinkets to start with. Just the traits. Make it a creation that evolves over time.

Anyway on to the rest of the information via Dulfy.

Schedule

Next big quarterly update in April to reduce grind and improve rewards. After that we will do live beta tests of improvements to WvW
Raid Wing 3 will be launched in May or June and then LW3 and the next Quarterly update after.
120 devs working on live game, 70 devs on expansion 2, 30 devs on core teams that support both. With in the live release/expansion groups we have the PvP team, the WvW team, the Fractals team, the Raids team, the Living World team, the Legendaries team, and a couple others
We will ship things when they are done and polished rather than on a hard schedule.
There are a couple things we’re focusing on going forward. First of all, sustainability. We don’t want to shift back and forth, so we need to make sure Expac2 doesn’t need us to pull down Live devs and vice-versa. Second, quality. When we’re shipping every two weeks, we just have to ship. But going forward it’s much more important for us to be proud of everything we ship, and for you to be proud of everything we ship, than to hit a specific cadence.
We can’t get back to the 2-week cadence, not only because we’re also working on an expansion pack at the same time, but also because shipping every two weeks forces us to sacrifice quality. However we do love to sprinkle little bits of stuff in there between releases.
The Story Journal was created as a way to provide story content to players in a way that they could control the pace at which they choose to play. We’re definitely looking to continue with that.
New Eite specializations are part of expansion packs.

Hot Maps

Current Hot Maps seems to push players to just do group event content rather than free-form exploration. That is not our intention. When we make maps we try to make them great both group events and exploration.
It is not our intention to kick players off a map with progression to one with no progression and we are working on ways to fix it.
Players should not have to take part in multiple hour long zergs. There’s a lot of content in HoT and we’re trying to make it rewarding to play in a variety of play styles.
With HoT we leaned more heavily on the organized content unfortunately at the cost of more casual experience. This is something that we plan on making adjustments to and are taking into account as we develop maps in the future.
Availability of Adventures is absolutely something we are addressing for the April release!
HoT daily achievements were overlooked during development. Expect to find these and some of their friends in an upcoming release.

Items

Studio has regularly conversations about differences between male and female armors. Things like skimpy male armors are being discussed.
We are working on bringing the Apostle and Tribal armor Old PvP skins back into the game.
There are some improvements on obtaining the new HoT gear in the April update but it won’t resolve the issue of having some builds difficult to gear than others until Living World Season 3.
Armor sets are one of the most time consuming things we make for GW2. Each set has an incredible amount of detail and customization, and then has to be fit to very disparate rigs. That’s a big part of why we did the number we did for HoT.That being said, there are plans for more reward armor sets in the future
It take about ten times the dev effort to make an armor set as to make an outfit.
We believe that armor sets make great rewards and the best place for them is earned, in-game rewards.We designed the rewards for raids around the acquisition of Legendary Armor and have no alternate plans for getting them.
We are working towards completing the entire set of 16 HoT legendary weapons (sorry underwater). Of the 13 left, they are all in various stages of concept, modeling and design, but the two that are furthest along in development are the Short Bow and the Mace. We will be releasing them as they are ready with each of the packaged releases.
Legendary armor are still being released as part of raid rewards, that has not changed.
We have delinked Fractal backpieces from the leaderboards and can release it sooner. It took sometime to undo the link to Fractal leaderboards and now we are testing it to make sure everything works correctly.

Story/Living World S3

Living World should come back around the time of the July quarterly update.
Living World Season 3 will require players to have purchased HoT
The story will definitely pick up in Season 3 where we left off in HoT. You will certainly hear more about Rata Novus, the egg, etc and we always look for ways to put in bonus and optional story for the folks who really want it
As we continue, we will absolutely have epic events like the ones in LS1 as some of our broad story goals
Team loves weaving long established lore into our new story, and we’re excited about a lot of ways that we will be doing that in upcoming releases. Magic in Tyria is broader than dragons.
We have a long term plan for the story and not just brainstorming things along the way. That being said, there are many ways for us to get to the big milestones along the way, and with every new release/season/xpac, we always do a lot of brainstorming on the best ways to get us there
Expect to see permanent changes in the world, that can happen in new maps or old maps
We also love telling stories in open world. We’re definitely looking at all the ways we can tell our story in upcoming Living World releases.

Dungeons/Fractals

We’re continuing to focus on Fractals as our primary focus for 5-man content. However, given the reaction, we are taking a second look at the current dungeon rewards.
We didn’t need to nerf dungeons like that. But we also don’t have a dungeons team to keep dungeons updates. So that’s the dilemma. We have no current plan to staff a dungeons team; no free developers to staff one with.
No new dungeons. Just Raids and Fractals for the foreseeable future.
Development on Fractal Leaderboards has been suspended. The more we worked on Fractal Leaderboards the more we realized it just wouldn’t work with Fractals as they are right now.
We did come up with something else entirely that we really do like as an alternative, but that would take a lot of development work and we just have too many problems with Fractals in their current state before we can devote those kind of resources to a project like that.
We’re working on some new Fractals right now and also looking into making improvements to Fractals as a game mode. We can’t commit to a specific date, but we would really like to get some of these changes in for the next quarterly update, New fractals are still in early prototype state and won’t be ready for Q2.
We’re looking into making certain existing encounters into fractal content, and have found one that seems promising. Claw Island would be fun. Maybe at some point? Mechanically though, if we convert existing content into Fractals going forward they will definitely need a mechanical tune-up. What works well for a Living World instance doesn’t necessarily make a good Fractal.
New Fractals would replace existing levels.We don’t really want to add more levels past 100, because that opens up a whole new can of worms. For much, much later on, at some point I think we will need to simply change how Fractal Scales work. Maybe instead of having scales at all, you would just play Core Molten Duo or Casual Jade Maw or something like that, instead of Scale 40 and Scale 20.
To make high level fractals more challenging, we’re borrowing a page from Raids here with things like phase transitions and different attacks, which will then become more challenging at higher scales (e.g. larger AoEs, shorter breakbar windows, more punishing attacks when you fail to dodge, etc.) We are looking at both doing this for new Fractals and reworking old Fractals to incorporate these things as well. It will take us some time to get to all the old Fractals though.
Instabilities are one of the things we’re working on. We’re absolutely working on new Instabilities. We agree than many of the ones live right now are more frustrating than anything else. We really want Instabilities to be something that mixes up gameplay at higher scales and become something players need to interact or react to, and not just something which passively makes the Fractal harder.
As we develop new, better Instabilities we do plan on phasing out the old ones. We’ll likely end up with a mix of new and old Instabilities for a period though, at least until we develop enough new ones.
We are currently reworking Fractal instabilities, though we’re still in the very early stages of development on those.
We want to incentivize players to play all of our Fractals, not just the shortest/easiest ones. We have several ideas on how to tackle this, starting with changing how the Daily Achievements work
Random fractals like before were not accessible to everyone as you needed 1-2 hrs to sink into fractals. We want to make Fractals more accessible to new players and make sure it’s something that is easy to just pick up and play.
There are plans to increased Ascended drop rate.
We do want to rework how Agony and Agony Resistance works, but those are plans for far in the future, as we have other more pressing issues we need to work on first.
We really want to add more incentives to play a wider variety of different Fractals, though we do know there are some people who do enjoy it so we don’t want to nerf Swamp/Duo directly.
The primary goal for HoT fractal changes was to make them more accessible to new players. This was partially successful, but I think it came at too high a cost to players who loved Fractals as they were. In the future we want to make sure we can have Fractals that appeal to both crowds.
Ad Infinitum was held back because we were trying to work it into Fractal Leaderboards. The problem is Fractal Leaderboards, as a feature, ended up evolving into something else entirely that was taking way more development time than originally intended.

Raids

Raid teams are smaller than teams for Living World releases. For example, with Salvation Pass, we had only about 5-6 people working on it full time for 4 months.
Raids had always planned for 3 wings to encompass the first raid. So we had some stuff and ideas in progress before we ever shipped the first release. While it seems like it’s the priority over smaller group content, that is definitely not the case. We just got a head start is all.
Raid in MMOs are high-end content designed for the more hardcore player. However, from an analytics standpoint, the participation is higher than other games we’ve seen. This is likely due to the nature of our progression system in GW2.
We have multiple teams working on different types of content for Guild Wars 2 and raid content is just one of them. Expect to find a variety of content types of varying difficulty in future releases of Living World and Expansions.
Living World Season 3 should open some avenues for non-raiders to gear up with ascended equipment. This should also allow non-raiders to get the gear/stat combinations that are currently only available in the raids, like jewelry with the new HoT combinations.
One of the things you’ll see in Salvation Pass are some new achievements that force you to play the encounter differently. It’s one of the ways we are slowly exploring making encounters with opt in extra difficulty.
There will be variances between the raid releases regarding the number of encounters / bosses depending on complexity of development and design. Most raids will try to be of a consistent size.
There are no plans for a final boss that is only accessible after you cleared all 3 wings.
You will need one Gift of Craftsmanship to upgrade each piece of the final set of precursor armor to legendary. I’m still working on balancing the number of legendary insights you will need, though if you raid regularly and successfully, you should have enough to complete your armor without having to go back and grind more insights.We’re looking at making the provisioners easier to access to make it less of a hassle.
No plans for 5 man version of the raid or easier mode of the raid. We are working on solutions for finding raid groups such as adding raids to the LFG tool.
We’ve slowly started talks about what the raid after Forsaken Thicket is and where it will take place, but that’s the extent.

I hope that Anet can actually made some encounters truly mechanics based and not timer based. I played other games that if you made a mistake (possible to recover but really hard to do so) your party would wipe and not ever was the pressure on from a timer.

Timers make it boring and don’t do what Anet said would happen. The end of zerker meta. In fact those timers did the opposite it made zerker even more prevalent.

So lets all really hope that Anet learned a real lesson and can make something not timer based. (Probably not).

Least your having mostly close competitive matches about 80% of the time

lead.7543:

Matchmaking
Matchmaking is the process of organizing players in such a way as to encourage competitive and fun gameplay.

Not so sure this season is based off the bolded part of your reply =-)

Ok kool Thanks for the confirmation I appreciate it.

I just flat out suck at Mes. =-)

So the reason I am asking is.

My Guard is prolly about 30% win 70% loss

My Mes is about 10% win and 90% loss

My Ranger is 90% win and 10% loss

I’ve played all three in this season so far.

If I’m on my Guard I win a few I lose a few and the teams seem ok.

If I’m on my Mes I lose just about every game and the teams seem bad.

If I’m on my Ranger the teams seem nice and organized and talk to each other and we win.

Now I know some will say your just bad at Mes. And your prolly right.

But its the team abilities that make me wonder between the 3 different types about MMR and is it Acc based or Character based. I would assume Account but just want to make sure.

I just read on an other forum post some one had over an hour queue, and a few people were averaging 30+ minutes

The Ace.9105:

Firebird Gomer.9563:

Now we all know that Anet has made it so that all the higher MMR gets put together and all the lower MMR gets put together so that the Higher MMR can get out of the Tier they are in faster.

Ive just thought of something that Anet might not have considered.

So when all the ‘better’ players are up in the higher tiers and only the dregs of MMR are in the lower sections, according to what I’ve read if say i and 4 others have 20 MMR and 5 others have 30 MMR. So the people with 30 MMR will EVERY time be grouped together and the ones with 20 MMR will always be grouped together.

This means that every time the better players will be put together and the crappy players will always be together. Ummmm thats fairly terrible. It would mean that barring someone DC’ing or waffling their face on the keyboard the lower players will very rarely win.

Anet Devs what are you going to do about this real imbalance in your system. You have made it so that there is no fairness in the system.

Another thought to think of is those players in Diamond or Legendary will also eventually encounter this as well.

I really don’t care what anyone else says about this. This is one way you could balance it. IF you won a game then next round you get put in with someone who lost. So you would have a possible 2 winners 2 losers and either a winner or loser for the 5th person.

You forgot that the group with 30 mmr might face a group with 40 mmr in the next division pip range. They will lose until they get better at the game and finally beat those guys with higher mmr.

That is true. And lots of people have posted about that and how they got to emerald and suddenly they got slammed and started their own losing streaks now. So those who were winning now are in the boat that the group they were playing against previously. The system for all it tried to do, has done the opposite.

And again Anet has not talked about it, and has buried their head in the sand and are going LALALALALALLALA with their fingers in their ears.

brannigan.9831:

What can be fairer then being matched with people around your skill level as teammates?

The mis-balance comes soon. The 5 in Amber or Emerald with say 100 MMR will be always partnered together. The 5 with 150 in Amber or Emerald will always be partnered together. So the group with better MMR and better abilities will win probably 9 times out of 10. The group with 100 MMR will just get flogged over and over and over again. And eventually they will be so against PvP they won’t step in it again and probably leave Guild Wars 2 as well.

I had a similar experience in Aion. I hate Dueling or PVP now. I’m almost fed up with this season already. I am not the best, I’m not even a middle ground PvP’er my reflexes are not what they where 20 years ago. But until this season I have always felt like I can 1 v 1 someone and put up a reasonable fight.

Like I said its not actually balanced. ITS always 1 set of good players verses 1 set of bad players. And its not being balanced properly at all. Ive read people saying that losing helps you get better. This is partially true. But when those people have lost 20+ games and only won 1, have they really had a chance to learn and improve? especially with a 50 to 500 point game.

Its only gonna get worse. Bad players will only be put onto teams that have bad players. Good players will be put onto good teams. And the cycle will get worse.

And Anet will continue to bury their head in the sand like an ostrich and put their fingers in their ears and go LALLALALLALA and will not comment on this or fix it.

Edit: My Bad Players line isn’t correct. A correction to that is as follows below.

Players who have experience but not a good MMR will be placed with bad players. And from there as they lose more and more then it will get worse and worse for them.

Wow. That is bad.

Anet won’t answer this issue unfortunately. As normal at this stage what they do is become an Ostrich. What this means is they bury their head in the sand till it ends and everyone stops complaining. Then they will come back out into the light of day and pretend like nothing happened. Just like the other times.

And now Ive just a match of 5 randoms vs a guild premade group. I thought with the new system this was not meant to happen.

And again. Anet have gone totally quiet.

This won’t get fixed for this season and people will totally not want to play next season.

Anet seriously. You said last year you realized that you weren’t communicating enough and that you would improve that this year. And yet here we are again with a storm of annoyed players and your deadly quiet AGAIN.

I still find it ridiculous that Reddit gets more information and explanations than your own forums. That’s a different topic for a different time tho.

Edit: So I’m slightly wrong Anet PVP Devs have slightly been talking. But not to give any updates or discussion on what people are actually saying.

ronpierce.2760:

The reason I ask this is, if the above are both true, first off, people need to get out of the mindset that “Ranked” is for everyone. Everyone is welcome to apply, but not everyone will be effective in a highly competitive arena. That’s FINE. There is no reason to hand-hold people in Ranked, that’s what Unranked even exists for. People who want 100% fair matches, remember unranked exists. It may suck to hear, but Ranked simply isn’t a reward track and isn’t intended to be. It is a competition, and as such, it wouldn’t be a competition if everyone won or if it was divided up into baby, medium and high tier (which is effectively what averaging MMR does), because it becomes unfair for the higher tier players who have to fight only higher tier players while lower tier players rise in ranks by fighting other bad players.

The point your missing is that for many people Ranked is the only way for people to get a Legendary backpiece. So if Ranked isnt for everyone why “AGAIN” did Anet put it behind the League matches.

I would like have a lovely balanced close and competitive match via unranked but like so many others I would also like my PVP back piece.

Any More Elite Spec ideas?

This is from Anet’s own post on their own site about the changes to Season 2

" We’ll search for other players that fall within your pip range (which can extend outside of your division depending on where you’re currently placed) and pair you up with teammates who have a similar skill level to your own. We’ll then find you opponents within that same pip range and pair them against you, regardless of their skill level."

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/pvp-league-season-two-changes/

As I have said. All the best players are on 1 team and all the bad players are on the other. Even if they are close. Its still going to be the same. VERY rarely will the bad group win.

Seriously Anet when people really understand that. They are going to be even more upset than they are now.

Cynz.9437:

I am losing matches right now, quite a lot of this. I did hit the brick wall and i am ok with it.

Just wait give it a few more days you’ll be less happy about the new system

At least last season it wasn’t total routs. I might lose a few then I would win a few.

And while I have won a few I’ve lost a heap more.

Now we all know that Anet has made it so that all the higher MMR gets put together and all the lower MMR gets put together so that the Higher MMR can get out of the Tier they are in faster.

Ive just thought of something that Anet might not have considered.

So when all the ‘better’ players are up in the higher tiers and only the dregs of MMR are in the lower sections, according to what I’ve read if say i and 4 others have 20 MMR and 5 others have 30 MMR. So the people with 30 MMR will EVERY time be grouped together and the ones with 20 MMR will always be grouped together.

This means that every time the better players will be put together and the crappy players will always be together. Ummmm thats fairly terrible. It would mean that barring someone DC’ing or waffling their face on the keyboard the lower players will very rarely win.

Anet Devs what are you going to do about this real imbalance in your system. You have made it so that there is no fairness in the system.

Another thought to think of is those players in Diamond or Legendary will also eventually encounter this as well.

I really don’t care what anyone else says about this. This is one way you could balance it. IF you won a game then next round you get put in with someone who lost. So you would have a possible 2 winners 2 losers and either a winner or loser for the 5th person.

ODB.6891:

Ranger E-spec without a pet!

I don’t even care what weapon they give…so long as the fix main hand sword.

Have the utilities be “aspects” of different beast types…similar to facets from the herald…only be buffs instead of boons. Restrict it to maybe only 1 or 2 active aspects at a time.

Thats where my Dervish for Ranger would SERIOUSLY come in and work!

Ok so first off. I made this post about new weapons to help make new Elite Specs

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/What-new-weapons-could-be-added/first#post5989767

Second. I made this post a fair few months ago for Ranger

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Dear-Anet-Dervish-Spec-for-Ranger/first#post5860287

Third. I have seen a few people in here say Dervish for Guard or Rev. Now I have put across the point in the last post that Dervish is a Medium Class in Guild Wars 1 not a Heavy Class so lore wise Dervish will not fit those two classes. Ranger, Thief or Engie would.

Dervish is a Melee Class.

Now Ranger needs a far better Melee option. Thief already has a Melee option. Can’t Really comment of Engie. Don’t know enough about it

So my thought on this is.

Dervish for Ranger.

Weapon Class – Scythe.

Ability – Pets are no longer available as a Minion instead you can use types as Elites.

So bears become 1 type. Felines another. Birds another. And so on.

What this allows is the same idea as the God’s Avatars from GW’s 1 but instead you merge with your selected pet type!

I can expand on this further but I have to take my kids to school =-)

[quote=5986852;DoogySnowStalker.2069:]

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

Nunchucks. And when you hit someone with them your toon shouts “Kowabunga!”

Lol thats funny. I like it.

I would say the most likely professions would be Warrior or Thief