Guild Wars 2

Yeah, I know about glacial lodestones, but this is Glacial Fragment (2nd tier material). And I haven’t found any guild upgrades requiring glacial fragments :s

Come on, someone spill the beans.. Why are they worth 2g all of the sudden?

What’s the deal with it? Exploit or some super awesome recipee?

You do if you have multi layered maps.

Don’t worry OP, I’m sure we’ll get a bunch of outfits which people will buy, try and forget about one week later…

Azure Prower.8701:

Was this message in game how ever?

Should it be? I mean, I understand accessibility is a great thing, but if guild officers/leaders couldn’t be kitten d to check the changes to the guilds, isn’t that ultimately their own fault?
What’s the alternative? Somehow posting pages and pages of changelogs ingame?

Cerbeius.7129:

215

/me starts snickering.

Does that mean Jennah is Joffrey, and Annise is the Hound?

Shiren.9532:

And a host of other questions. Many of the issues with them as minions canon can still be dealt with once we learn more (I think it was a premature fan conclusion that all Elder Dragon minions work in the same way and are too similar to each other, but I would respect a post arguing the properties of dragon corruption and minions sharing similar rules is valuable and weakened by sylvari breaking the norm).

Thing is, we can compare Mordrem with other Dragon minions and see they all share the same similarities….. except for that one particular type of minions who are completely different then anything else their master or any other dragon has presented so far.

Is it possible to cram some sort of an explanation into lore? Sure. But it still won’t be consistent with the rules GM’s set for their own world and you’ll get the same feeling you get from LOST or Mass Effect 3, or any other case of “let’s break the universe for this one particular instance of dramatic reveal” followed by a deus ex machina explanation.
It just tastes sour.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Shiren.9532:

First all, Angel’s comment should be enough.

If it’s not, Colin Johanson talked about the sylvari origin on a recent Points of Interest and he mentions that Ree Soesbee was planning it since the beginning. He talked about how Ree was revising and revising the tutorial and sylvari personal story text, trying to make sure that they didn’t give away too much of the secret. It has very much been a core part of sylvari design since before GW2 launched, it’s not a PR response, it’s not a change made by a writer you don’t consider credible, it was planned by one of the people who was integral to imagining both GW1 and GW2.

Well, about the people this is aimed at . . . nobody in that group cares. If they don’t believe it on one red post, they’re not going to believe it on two. Or four. Or ninety. They already have their minds made up.

Jeff Grubb shows up and says he sketched it out from the start? Not gonna be believed. (Even though I recall seeing him pull this stuff off once before.)

Pre-Alpha builds of the script could be leaked showing some clues before they were cut? They’d still call dolyak crap.

A time machine takes them back in time to the discussions about creating the sylvari so they can hear it? They’d claim hoax.

I’ve dealt with this kind of thing before in a CS capacity – there is no satisfaction possible.

Let me counter your tirade with my own broad assumptions. Either they planned it from the start and somewhere down the road they lost couple of pieces, or they experimented and improvised like they did for every other bit of content for ~2 years since release.

Whether there is a conspiracy theory to cover it all up (I suspect illuminati) or simple oversight doesn’t really matter in the end. Somebody made a doodoo on the floor, but nobody brought the broom, so let’s just move away from the smell and try to keep the path ahead of us clear.

Lucky.9421:

Well before the announcement of Sylvari as a race and 5 years before GW2 was released. I felt this should be acknowledged in its own thread.

From PC Gamer’s Movement of the World article in 2007:

This story began with a human soldier named Ronan whom, [sic] while separated from his patrol, discovered a cavern filled with strange seed-pods. This cavern was protected by terrible plant creatures, so he fled, clinging to a single seed to show his daughter when he returned home from war. But, upon his arrival, Ronan discovered the Mursaat had destroyed his village and murdered his family, leaving only ruined houses and mass graves. In agony, he planted the seed on their graves and swore never to return to battle.

Terrible plant creatures? In a cavern underground? The seed that would grow into the Pale Tree belonged Mordremoth all along!

You can restart the fight after it’s finished using Mote. You don’t have to restart the entire instance.

It’s late and I’m sleepy so I’ll keep it short:
Watched last PoI and I must say that I got (some of) the hints about the atmosphere in this story instance. I loved the sense music brought, especially if I wasn’t looking at the minimap at the time. You guys should’ve went with darker setting as you initially wanted. The lights were a nice touch but they’d be more appreciated if the ambient was initially darker (also improves overall atmosphere).
Loved this experiment, I’d love to play something similar if you guys ever find time/space to implement it.

Forum ate my post so here’s a short version… basically rely only on yourself and you should succeed every time:
-use zerker gear, bubbles die very quickly
-politely instruct new/clueless players that are randomly attacking bubbles to join the zerg, tho this isn’t a major issue most of the time
-you can pop bubbles even when boss is 2 or 3 charges away
-when boss pops bubble he changes charge direction

Wizzlock.3492:

And now I can’t unsee it…

+1… darn it OP
q_q

If “they died suddenly” was a legit excuse for spawning ghosts, entire Tyria would be swarming with them…

Other then that, I only have a few nitpicky complaints, but overall anyone who enjoys Guild Wars lore will appreciate this awesome (albeit a bit short) episode.

Everyone who played this activity once would agree that it’s quite unbalanced.. Mad King Says is the most glaring offender and it’s basically “I win” button… times 5… Respawning ghosts is another major issue that’s apparent from the get-go.

The thing is that Lunatic Inquisition is an activity and activities are never on balance team radar (or apparently on the common sense radar). There have been multiple complaints and calls for easy fixes that’d improve the feeling of various activities going on from when the game was released (for example the multi-ball spam in kegbrawl), but nobody at ANet really cares or listens to those.
On the other hand, the awkward solution to getting into activities, lack of balance, lack of ability to play with friends and other inconveniences turns people away from said activities, so I can understand why ANet won’t commit even the least bit of effort into fixing them.. The demographics for said activities is non-existent with the exception of achievement hunters who are there just to grind through it.

tl;dr: Yes, the balance is in the cr4pper, but nobody really cares, including most of the players who play the activities.

My advice would be not to give away your stuff for at least a few months. You never know if you’ll like what you migrate to more then GW2. Besides, maybe hell freezes over and GW2 pops out an expansion that you’d like to try.

Bottom line, have fun in FF and disregard the trolls, the game is very much alive (then again who cares either way if you’re having fun there).

silvermember.8941:

Freeelancer.2860:

silvermember.8941:

Outfits allow for my creativity in design compared to having to make sure each armor pieces fits and blah blah and might lead to less clipping.

Who needs variety when we can all wear tracksuits. I could finally unleash my creativity when choosing between all dem’ screamin’ colors and brands of white sneakers.

Armani’s got nuttin’ on my fancy neon orange Reebok. #schweg

Except that most people end up with the same look. Then people spend hours writing essays on how clipping is terrible.

Also illusion of choice is not really a choice.

I don’t really care about most people and their lack of imagination/style/time/care or whatever else is preventing them from tailoring their custom looks.
I’ve been regularly complemented on my ensembles, and I’ve seen some pretty awesome works of imagination both ingame and on forums.. None of that would be possible if we all wore uniforms.

One set with 4 color scheme has allot less variety (and thus opportunity for expressing creativity) then 6 armor parts each with 1-4 color choices. I don’t think you need a math or art degree to figure that one out.

silvermember.8941:

Outfits allow for my creativity in design compared to having to make sure each armor pieces fits and blah blah and might lead to less clipping.

Who needs variety when we can all wear tracksuits. I could finally unleash my creativity when choosing between all dem’ screamin’ colors and brands of white sneakers.

Armani’s got nuttin’ on my fancy neon orange Reebok. #schweg

Liz.1497:

Do you personally think it’s a good idea to punish people for not logging in/not having acquired the game though? I’d much rather see them encourage people to stick around through positive reinforcement…..

Inherently, I’d think it’s a bad idea. Then again, considering how little effort one needs to keep up to date with the story (as far as cost goes at least) I don’t mind it one bit. If I were for some reason unable/unwilling to spend one second every two weeks/months to just log in, then I’d have no issues with paying for the content I’ve missed.

Liz.1497:

Well, someone made a suggestion to continue the journal earlier

Isn’t there already a journal entry for each episode? Even those that weren’t played AFAIK give a brief summary of the content.

Liz.1497:

I get that people keep comparing this to a tv series and other such things, but the truth of the matter is that this is an mmo, and regardless of what the developers want it to be, players will approach it with the expectation of playing an mmo.

MMO is not a game defining genre. Uninformed people coming in GW2 could expect holy trinity, traditional combat, 10 skill bars, mounts, P2W and all other sorts of traditional trademarks of MMO’s. None of those are however present in GW2.
GW2 has never attempted to shoehorn itself in the traditional MMORPG expectations, and that is one of the primary reasons I’ve played it much longer then any other MMO out there (and I’ve tried quite a few).

I personally love the feel of LS and prefer it vastly over what competition has to offer. Some might not, and some might think that’s a gamebreaker, and while that saddens me, it’s also fine with me.

Liz.1497:

Why would anyone think it’s a good idea to tell new players “well, your bad you missed stuff… better pay up for old stuff or google what you missed sucker”? ….. How is it in anyone’s interest to deter new and returning players from playing the game and perhaps even purchase older chapters because they found the current one enjoyable?

The 200 gems “punishment” is actually an active way to address player retention. The only thing that is required of players is to log in once in those 2 weeks/month and they’ll have the episode unlocked forever. If someone does miss the chapters and find current ones enjoyable they can buy the older ones, or if they are too stingy the can play them through with a buddy who has them already unlocked.

Liz.1497:

an easy to implement incredibly economical way that’d take the dev team a couple of hours at the very very most to implement would be to compose one mail per living story season sent out to all characters that missed the season (because they weren’t around or because they simply haven’t been created yet), and one mail per season chapter missed. These mails should only trigger if the player actively peruses the living story in order to avoid information overload spam. Any halfway decent writer could compose these in a way that they sound engaging and actually advertise the content missed, while making the new chapters accessible.

That really is an elegant solution, and a good suggestion (IMHO) but as you said so yourself, I’m a bit worried about the oversaturation with information.. I doubt anyone who was on a year long hiatus would care to read through a dozen (or more) walls of texts just to get up to speed. I’d reckon gameplay from the latest episode would do much more to persuade him to buy the older chapters (and commit some more time to the game in order to avoid the fee in future).

I understand why you’re being a bit defensive considering some of the hostility in replies, but I think your initial stand is not as rock solid as you might think..
Since you dismiss the comparison with a TV show, allow me to put it this way: If I started playing Mass Effect 3, would it really be fair of me to ask who the hell is this Wrex guy and why is my character all buddy-buddy with him? Or jumping in Walking Dead ep.3 and asking who the hell are all these people and why should I care for/hate them? Or any of the number of serial games with any kind of story?

Liz.1497:

Pretty much every response in this thread so far is opposed to my suggestion for the sake of being opposed to it, while not being able or willing to provide one single reason why it’s actually a bad idea… very strange forum!

I think the issue is the point of view. From your point of view new/returning players should be able to drop in mid-season and be provided with a summary of what they’ve missed. From the perspective of some of the replies, you can’t really cry foul if you didn’t take the time/effort to go through earlier releases.

As far as issues go there is the fact that first season is not available for play. There are summaries but they aren’t available ingame. That’s, as you said, an issue for both new and returning players.
Another thing to consider is what one of the replies already mentioned, and which I’m gonna paraphrase now – summaries of missed content would have to be tailored to each individual player. You said you worked in game development. Taking into consideration current technology and resources available to ANet, how do you envision these summaries?

Solutions usually come from compromises, so I’m going to offer one: If youtube video of S1 summary was made available ingame, would your LS experience be sufficiently improved?

Outfit converter, 300-500 gems.
An item that converts outfit to a weighted armor.
Pro’s: Players would have to obtain both the outfit and converter (total value 1k-1.2k gems, 50% above the usual armor skins price)
Con’s: Work required to convert/weight/rig/etc outfit pieces.

Outfit weight conversion examples:
Light: Ancestral, Cook, Witch, Fancy Winter
Medium: Bloody Prince, Executioner, Pirate Captain, Shadow Assassin
Heavy: Ceremonial Plated, Mad King

Speaking for myself, I’ve gotten almost every armor and armor piece from gem store.
I’ve also converted quite a while ago ~4k gems to use for future purchases and I’m still sitting on the same amount of gems because, even tho I like outfits, not being able to mix’n’match is a deal breaker for me.

Outfits do have their uses. For example for people who like to look pretty while leveling or for people who are too lazy to build their own style but somewhat care about estetics etc. The fact that ANet pops outfits regularly means that people clearly like them and buy them. Outfits are also much easier to make then armor sets, so it’s a win/win situation for ANet.

The only case I see ANet changing their practice is if the amount of money that could be earned from releasing outfits simultaneously with weighted armor sharing same skin is greater then the amount of money/effort that converting outfits to weighted armor requires.

bad photoshop, I can clearly see this is fake..

tho I would like a chat window in character select screen.

I was checking out the prices of Tempest skins, and to my surprise they weren’t more expensive then previously introduced gemstore skins.
I thought that with keyfarming nerf the prices of newly released skins would at least double in initial value, but apparently I was wrong.

Are people burning through the tickets they got from collections and monetizing on them? Are they farming keys using birthday tomes (or tomes of knowledge for PvP players)?
Or am I just missing something obvious?

Aaron Ansari.1604:

Plus, what would a charr even ride?

Tanks. Tanks and Harleys.

I have two very important questions about the economy:

How many Mini Queen Jennahs exist in the game, and how many will remain after the Jennahcide patch (stole the name from another forum user)?

Nemiros.3590:

Dont get the legendary if it means you will be branded with that evil sign. dont listen to these pve scrubs

This. I don’t even play other single player games or any games with PvE because I’m that hardcore.

I have PvP tattooed across my chest.

Do you honestly expect them to spoil future content? Unlike many other times when it wasn’t necessary (or productive), in this case I actually expect ANet to be evasive about upcoming releases.
After all, I’d rather see and experience for myself what the story is about then for it to be revealed in a show.

Eric.6109:

Ok, ok; so it’s not an armour it’s a skin.

It’s an outfit.
Armor – pieces of equipment with stats.
Armor skin – pieces of equipment without stats, appliable to existing armor pieces free of charge.
Outfit – One click cosmetic set that masks the armor you are wearing and it’s unfortunately slowly fazing out the old armors/skins.

This is the internet where you are never alone \o/

I thought the same: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/A-precursor-for-precursor

I love some of the new outfits on offer (and the ones that’ll be on offer in the future). However, I love the mix and match advantage of armor skins much more.

ANet has access to all the data, and I’m assuming that by their decision to faze out armor skins in favor of outfits, with at least 5 (or more?) outfit sets down the line they reckon that the amount of transactions they lose from disengaging mix’n’match people is justified by drastically reducing the workload needed for creation of said outfits, compared to armor sets.

While, if I’m correct in my assumptions, this decision saddens me, I can understand it. Logic dictates that allowing people more choice is always better. Then again, for most people convenience is more important then choice, and what could be more convenient then having a fabulous looking set one click away.

And here comes my question: For those of us who are stubborn and uncompromising in their dedication to mixing and matching, will there ever be any hope for gaining access to gemstore outfits?

Most of the elites are kitten? I’m sorry, are we playing the same game? The only elite (outside of most racial ones) that I can’t find a possible usage for would be the engineer mortar..
Apart from mortar the only niche ones would be warrior rampage and engineer elixir x, both of which are highly situational for any game mode.

That being said, I’d love to see more elites that synergize with utilities/traits more (I’d love to see previously mentioned underwater minion or spirit weapon elite).

Chameleon Dude.1564:

I thought we were hoping for a “scavenger hunt” for precursors, not a “needlessly time-gated grind, partially influenced by RNG or just buy the component… thing”.

I was thinking more along the lines of a variety of activities (yes, timegating and RNG included) and interesting challenges that’d take us all over the Tyria.
In order to get the back piece you need to finish the LS chapter, do a jumping puzzle, have 3 crafting masteries, do some world exploration, some timegated crafting (a great source of income btw) and several world events (Dry Top t4 or t5 and a bunch of Geodes).
Again, I find the concept quite interesting and wouldn’t mind if eventually we got something similar (on a much larger scale ofc.) for precursor crafting.

I’m talking about the new back piece. I like the general idea of it and I’m hoping ANet is experimenting with it as one of the possible alternatives to precursor crafting/scavanger hunt. Thoughts?

On a personal level I agree with you. There are many unexplored territories and possibilities that’d be great both for flashing out characters and making player feel more immersed and whatnot.. Tho I’m not sure if LS team would have enough time/expertise for such a feat, and I’m not sure how much player base would value all the hard work necessary to bring us a more complex and engaging LS.

On the other hand, and I’ll use Gates of Maguma example as well… “Where is Miner Toska?”
I rest my case.

Jennah is the mother of dragons.

Soinetwa.5193:

where the kitten is she?
on the throne sitting is her illusion she herself probably observing all this while perma stealth^^

She’s in your bedrooms watchin’ you play flappin’ bird.

phys.7689:

MatthewMedina.5419:

Hey guys – I can tell you that we have certainly looked at this issue, even as far back as Lost Shores, and it did come down to technical and logistical problems we are, at this time, unable to solve. Jia Shen is correct that our instances do not use separate maps from the open world, so if those maps change because of a larger world story event, like Lion’s Arch being laid to waste for example, then the story instances that take place in those maps will reflect whatever the current state of the world is.

We do have some limited ability to do phased instancing of certain elements within those maps, but not the kind of sweeping large scale terrain changes that result from the major changes we want to make to the world.

Solving this for our existing instances was not as simple as reserving a custom map for every instance, either, as that would entail a significant number of new maps to be generated, which would all need to be downloaded and stored in the DAT. There are hundreds of instances for the personal story, so even compressed that many custom instance maps would add dozens of GB to your DAT. So at the very least, we determined that we couldn’t accomplish this retroactively, but we are certainly still discussing all the implications of this limitation, and how it impacts your experience with our storytelling.

Even though there are hundreds of instances in personal story, they arent 100 different instances, we only have 25 maps, and essentially all of them are happening in the same general time frame.
so you would need 25 maps (if there is a ps in everystory) for essentially all lore that took place on release, and most of season 1.

though honestly you would only need copies for majorly changed areas.

Also for the future, you could start essentially cutting maps for the decided upon zone. that we can actually walk, for story/lore related zones.

but if thats too big a deal, you can sacrifice consistency, for all but the major ones.
I think old lions arch deserves a place in the dats. And it would be good to be able to reference it from a lore point of view, when you are showing the past.

Completely agree with this post.

EDIT: just realized my alternative proposal wouldn’t work.

If you want to play serious game, but not with or against a team play Soloque.

Because if NPC were competent enough to constantly perform their feats they wouldn’t need the PC and we’d all be stuck playing TP all day long while NPC would be having fun blasting Mordemorth with thousands of illusions, meteors and other bling-bling.
Same goes for the part about story delivery and whatnot.

I somewhat disagree about the handholding part. I must’ve read the “Where in the hell is the Whatshername the miner at?” line on local/guild chat or TS at least 20 times…
People are generally idjits in the sense that they have none. On top of that everyone complains about everything good or bad in this game, even if it doesn’t concern or influence them in any way.
For me personally, I’d love if they gave us only hints and left us to our own devices and investigations (with assistance from dynamic detective duo, wide-eyed kitty tracker, child prodigy and meat hunk.. allot of perfect opportunities for character development), but as far as the health of the game goes, I’d say no dice.

I also disagree (or maybe better put, agree that it’s just him being jaded by Scarlets story) about the sylvari part. Probably because I don’t really care which races/classes are our protagonists and antagonists.

As far as everything else goes I generally agree with him.

EDIT: Also, apparently Kasmer has some sort of a gift, and that’s the reason she can tell if someone is lying sometimes (it’s been hinted at before this patch a couple of times but this is the first time they said it up straight), not because she’s a mesmer.
Personally, I’m having doubts about the way Kasmer is being set up power-wise.. I don’t want her to become the next Mary Sue.

ricky markham.8173:

feed him the chicken feed

Related to chickens, what’s with the pair of chickens stuck in the wall some 20m above ground level between the town and mine? I haven’t noticed them before.. has anybody else seen them?

Elden Arnaas.4870:

re: @Elden: Just out of curiosity, what kind of reply would you expect and/or would you find satisfactory? – If jump-challenged people can skip past all the jumping/ZA use and pick up in whatever episode is after that point, that would let jump-challenged people enjoy at least part of LS S2. If the majority of the rest has heavy jumping/ZA use, then there’s really nothing for the jump-challenged in LS S2. Also, if the majority of the rest of LS S2 has jumping/ZA use, it would clue us in to the fact that Anet is shifting their play style focus towards play style that is not for us.

Fair enough. I do think that people will be able to skip LS chapters and jump in whenever they wish. We’ll see in a few days whichever the case is.

I doubt that implementing some zephyrite skills in LS release revolving around zephyrites is a “clue… to the fact that Anet is shifting their play style focus”.
To be honest, having vertical challenges in every story release would get old very quickly (at least I think so, considering it was the same case with zergy content and most of the populous adores that for some reason), and more importantly I think ANet shares this opinion.
EDIT: Not that I think that there are any real vertical challenges in this release, at least no more then in most of the previous releases.

Why don’t you use quotes?

Coloxeus.3480:

just wondering why did anet include this in Solo Que ONLY but not in Team Que? this map is just really made for engies

Actually, that’s a common misconception by people who don’t know any of the classes, including their own. The only class that doesn’t have at least 3-4 useful skills/traits/utilities for side points/hammer is elementalist, and even they can somewhat adapt.

@Elden: Just out of curiosity, what kind of reply would you expect and/or would you find satisfactory?

Raenzjar.4210:

I see we are back at the point reached a few days ago, pre merge. Funnily enough with some of the same people again who clearly have a really hard time understanding what was explained over and over again in great detail.

Funny how that goes.

Well, it goes both ways actually…

On one side you have people who, for whichever reasons, are either not willing/able or find it too difficult to do the content and who feel there should be an alternative way to explore map/do LS/gather achievements.
They feel that making aspect crystals obligatory is not the proper way to introduce the content. Some suggest increasing timers on the crystals and a way to alleviate some of their hardships.

On the other side there are those who say this content is not obligatory and can be ignored if one is not willing/able to do what’s necessary to go through with it.
They also raise the legitimate question of absence of public outcry when the same mechanic was present in earlier releases, or general public outcry towards most of the other game mechanics that require more involvement and accomplishing harder tasks then those which are put in front of us in this LS release.

Apparently these two sides are unable to recognize the other side of the argument, and in most cases resort to either claiming moral high ground (sidestepping the entire argument) or lack of skill (choosing not to recognize that some people, for whichever reasons, are simply not able to do some of the tasks some other people find easy).

achieve·ment
noun \?-?ch?v-m?nt\

: something that has been done or achieved through effort : a result of hard work

: the act of achieving something : the state or condition of having achieved or accomplished something

laokoko.7403:

They will ad 500 jewelry in December. Because December is the last month for 2013 earning.

They will release jewelry crafting in December. So poor people will buy gems to boost Anet 2013 earning.