Guild Wars 2

I’m a happy customer now – mail arrived with chest this morning (06:30 GMT on December 8th). Bag, trinket, 2 level 80 rares and 2 level 80 exotic armor pieces, one which will be good for my guardian alt and one which sold for about 4 gold. This was pretty much what I was hoping for.

Actually had a very prompt and helpful response to my support ticket which I sent yesterday – got an answer within the hour advising me to check my mailbox was not full, but when I replied to confirm I had checked this got another response a few hours later explaining they are indeed looking into cases where players were at the event but had not received the mail. Shortly after logging in this morning the email arrived.

Nice one, Anet – thank you

Hi mattdel -

Welcome to the game, you’ll have a lot of fun here. The gameplay and environment are superb, with a huge amount to do. It is very friendly for casual players but there is some real challenge available in the dungeons and PvP parts of the game. It’s worth taking your time and really ‘smelling the roses’ on your way through because the game shows a huge amount of attention to detail in the world design – hundreds of wonderful little touches to be found.

I wouldn’t pay too much attention to the negativity on the official forums at the moment. There have certainly been a few teething problems but the game is only three months old. Personally I have not found any ongoing issues which have spoiled the gameplay for me, and in my experience both here and in GW1, the developers have a pretty good record for getting things sorted out in the end.

The main issue that I think does need addressing is that a lot of the playerbase is currently hidden away in the new Fractals of the Mist dungeon, which is making some of the open world zones feel emptier than they should be. However, Anet have stated in several forums that they are aware of the issue and will be making the high level Ascended gear (which people are chasing in FotM) available elsewhere in the game, which should help to resolve this.

So yeah – welcome again, and may your steps be relentless

You got me – lol…

But, erm, when the lady from social services comes round, just tell her it was a misunderstanding, OK?

:D

Congratulations on the award – no arguments from me, this is certainly the best game I’ve played. My family and I are having a lot of fun and will be here for a long time to come.

This level of mainstream attention might even help us to tempt a few more real-life non-gamer friends to give it a go.

Updated entry:

Attended, did not loot – now received mail after sending support ticket (as of 06:30 GMT on December 8th)

Actually had very prompt and polite service once I submitted ticket – they said they are looking to cases where players were at the event but have not received the email with the chest. I did offer to send video of the event but they did not need to see it in the end. Happy customer now

Look – I just don’t see why Anet cannot admit they kittened this up royally and just send the email out to everyone – at least with the bag, trinket and basic exotics, rather than precursors.

That wouldn’t mess up the economy, and would at least improve the mood of many of their customers. I’m a long-time fan and Anet apologist most of the time, but after not getting the email today, despite sending a bug report, doing the survey and recently sending a support ticket, am very annoyed, especially seeing examples of the ridiculous ‘your account does not qualify’ email posted on the forums.

These are virtual items for baby cat’s sake – there is absolutely no cost to the company involved here, so just do a blanket send and be done with it. People have had multiple goes at the chest, and apparently some people who looted the original event chest have received the email so I can’t see how this approach would make anything worse right now.

Attended, did not loot due to lag, d/c and unable to log back in, no mail

Also, never underestimate the therapeutic value of hitting something with a very large axe (or two) after a bad day at work

Great pic, and merry christmas to you too!

I’d like to see ascended items in lots of places – but most importantly in the open world. It is vital we encourage players to get out into the beautiful world and the lower level zones, to bring some life back into them.

So – scavenger hunts and world bosses would be a great start. Then let’s have the mini-games or activities planned for the five other cities and offer ascended items for them by way of tokens etc – perhaps you’d need to do activities from each city to get a full ascended set.

Bring in some form of weekly activity like Nicholas the Traveller that will encourage players to visit new areas each week – and then saving up 250 presents will reward an ascended item.

I would prefer it if there was far more variety than just more RNG via the Mystic Forge and dungeon chests.

Gotta catch ’em all! Love it…

Yeah, I’m working towards getting 8 level 80’s myself as a personal goal – got three so far (warrior, engineer, ranger) and my guardian and ele are on the way.

We had this problem in my family as my oldest son couldn’t decide on a profession, and yet we needed him to have one character he could bring to try dungeons with the rest of us. The trick is just find one that isn’t perfect but that you don’t mind playing for now, get it to 80 and then you can relax and work on the others in a more relaxed way. Thief is not a bad choice if it’s already closest to 80.

Tips for levelling – well if you haven’t already, do some crafting – you’ll get 20 levels from taking two craft skills 0-400, especially if you use a crafting booster from the gem store. Be prepared to spend a few gold on mats to get you through any sticky areas where you run out of fine materials (claws, bones etc). Worth doing and will get you a little closer to your goal.

With your friends, get them to wingman you through the highest level area you can manage and do hearts and dynamic events, which give a lot of xp; don’t forget xp boosters, maintenance oils, and foods (+10% exp each for the latter two). If you are in a group the hearts and events are likely to be easy and fun. Get to the next highest zone as soon as your level permits to keep getting the optimum xp.

Story mode dungeons give about half a level worth of xp each – good to do with friends. Good luck!

I suspect it is indeed a storyline reward – they do seem to give cultural skins. I haven’t received armor myself but the other day the human storyline gave me a Light Pistol (about lvl 30 or so) which has the same skin as the Tier 3 human cultural pistol.

FGreenOak – thank you for this, I agree completely. I hadn’t come across that quote from the Dalai Lama before, but it is so true.

So a very Happy Wintersday to all from me and my little clan of GW2 adventurers…

By the way – I love the picture from GW1, very fond memories. The Shining Blade costume was one of my favourites too.

Guild Wars was always about the little goals you set yourself. For me I really enjoy getting into the different playstyles of the professions; at the start I made eight chars, one of each profession and including all the races, (will help when the birthday presents start coming next year) and one of my goals is to get them all to level 80. So far I’m about halfway there. Levelling is not exactly slow in GW2.

Each profession is another 100 hours or more of entertainment for me, on top of which there are opportunities to see different parts of the story, earn more map completion rewards, try out different builds etc.

I may not play them all regularly but I do tend to find jobs for several of the characters – my main tends to be the one I’ll go to for high-end content such as dungeons, I have another geared for WvW, another in MF gear for farming, another geared for group play and support etc. It’s fun to be able to pick a char and play without fiddling with gear, and the variety of gameplay keeps it interesting.

I agree this approach is not for everybody – there are advantages to just playing one character – but this is my perspective for the benefit of the OP who wanted to understand the motivation.

I agree – it doesn’t seem to stack; best to use the offhand sigil for something combat related, or for condition management etc

Paul.4081:

I wish I was a Risen sometimes in game, they can run like atheletes compared to me. They are more like the infected from ‘28 Days Later’ than the undead.

Risen as the next playable race, anyone?

<j/k>

I’d really recommend the engineer, given what you’ve played already. My main is a warrior but I’ve made an engineer alt that I recently got to 80 with exotic gear, and have had a huge amount of fun with this class, especially using flamethrower and elixir gun builds (maybe not as much damage as grenade builds but more fun IMHO).

The engineer has great versatility with the ability to swap toolkits on the fly, and works particularly well with group play, and I suspect would go well with a thief or other melee companion.

I agree that the lower levels can feel more limited – the engineer really shines when the toolkits are acquired and the trait points open up some of the higher level options, but levelling is not exactly slow in this game. You could kickstart this by doing some crafting early on (10 levels per crafting skill to 400) together with running the storyline and mapping all the starter areas quickly for extra skillpoints, which are crucial for an engineer to unlock the toolkits.

Yes – it’s the whole name string, first name + surname, which needs to be unique. So you could easily do this as long as the whole names you chose were not already taken.

With Christmas coming up I was looking around online to buy some of the new gem cards as stocking fillers for my children who play the game with me. I live in the UK, and at present it seems there is no supplier over here.

This got me thinking. It would be great if there was a system in the gem store for buying gifts for other players – as an example, Steam has a system which works well. I’m sure this would be a great earner for Anet around holiday season.

It would also be very useful for families with several players in the same household. I have four sons who play the game with me, and at present if they want to use some of their pocket money to buy gems, I have to do this as a separate transaction from each account – the boys are not yet old enough to have their own paypal accounts. It would be great to do this in one ‘shopping cart’ from my own account and send the items as gifts in-game.

Just a thought, and I’m sure there are higher priority issues, but I thought it a point worth raising.

Me too. Absolutely love the game and will be here for years to come.

Love the sound of this. Wintersday was always my favourite event in GW1 as well. Good to hear all the cities will be involved, too.

Hope there are some proper costumes and nice things in the gem store though, not just RNG chests.

I thought long and hard about letting my children play this type of game with me. In the end I came to the conclusion that most of the action in GW2 is no more graphic than the cartoon violence the boys would see in programs like Ben 10 and similar action cartoon series, or live action shows such as Doctor Who, Harry Potter etc. Young boys seem to naturally gravitate towards play involving battles, guns, etc whether or not they see it in a game. I agree with GraynX that the key factor here is how we deal with it as parents.

I have found that playing together actually gives plenty of opportunities to discuss issues like fighting and violence, war and peace, the difference between real and make-believe, and how to behave ethically and honourably. We also emphasise the roles of helping and saving, etc rather than focusing on ‘killing’ and it helps that the GW2 hearts give non-combat options.

I think there are a lot of positive learning experiences children can gain from playing games in family setting. Reading and numeracy are important in understanding what is happening in the game, and managing a characters inventory and gold is a useful exposure to handling money. Only last week my 7-year old complained he did not have enough coin to travel to a waypoint, so we sat down and looked at ways to save money and make money in the game, which he enjoyed, and now proudly tells me how much money he makes when he has gathered loot and sold it to a merchant.

Gaming also teaches skills such as teamwork, map reading, making and following plans, and going on missions together gives them a chance to find their niche in the group and shine. Some of my fondest memories are of times when the boys learnt to be brave like GraynX’s son and fought valiantly to the end for the team.

So overall I came to the conclusion that the positives outweighed the negatives, especially in this information age they are growing up in. We have to set boundaries about amounts of screen time, homework and outdoor activities etc as the boys would easily play too much if I let them, but that is pretty standard parenting for any activity.

I guess we all have to follow our consciences as parents and make our best judgement call based on knowing our children. Sadly there is still a lot of rather alarmist and ill-informed nonsense in the popular press about video games in general, so is nice to see parents looking at the pros and cons carefully and making thoughtful choices.

What a wonderful heartwarming thread – thank you GraynX for starting it. That’s a great story – I’m a gaming dad myself, so I can just picture the scene, and I’m sure you and your son will have many more great gaming moments.

I’ll share my story as a gaming parent: I have five sons, aged 11, 9, 7, 5 and 2 years old. We started gaming together in GW1 about 2 years ago when an old med school friend of mine introduced us to the game, and we played through all the campaigns as a little guild of four. The boys loved playing rangers because of the pets, and we found pre-searing Ascalon to be a great playground for son number three to run around happily with his wolf, getting the hang of the basics.

We moved on to GW2 when it was released, and are really enjoying the game. My oldest son has tried a few professions and has now settled on a Norn guardian. The younger boys still love their rangers and enjoy exploring new zones like a safari, looking for new creatures to tame. This week I finally gave in and bought an account for my five year old son. This was earlier than I’d planned, but he had been taking such an interest, and had learnt so much about the game from his older brothers that I could see it meant a lot to him. He’d even been practicing his reading more than usual, and explained to me that this was because he knew he needed to read all the words in the game! My nine-year has had more mercenary thoughts on his mind however, and on realising that he was better at jumping puzzles than I am, offered to do them for me for the bargain price of 100 gems a puzzle!

Last weekend we had a proud moment in our little ‘fathers and sons’ guild. The boys had been working hard to get a favourite character to level 40, and we all tackled our first dungeon together. I was so proud to see the teamwork and spirit they showed in the dungeon, even when things got tough – and we got through the Catacombs with only a single party-wipe first time. Good times.

I feel very lucky to be able to share all this with my children, and I hope it’s a hobby we’ll carry on with for years to come. Gaming has allowed me to keep in touch with old friends far better than if we were not sharing this pastime, and I’d like to think that even when the boys leave home this will be a way we can still spend time together.

By the way @ Ualtar – I know what you mean about the IT costs. I’d recommend looking at reconditioned notebooks from eBay to start with. I found some five year old Dell Precision M6300 graphics workstations which run GW2 very well (they were top of their line in their day, but very cheap now) and are built like the proverbial brick outhouse. Good if you need to get a few extra computers for the kids to play on. My old study has now become the family ‘man cave’ with a spot for us all to sit together while playing.

@ Rynarx -

An excellent point – while I think the Fractals are a very clever design for a dungeon, it would be sensible to have ways to get the same rewards in the open world or risk losing most of the player population to The Mists.

That way playing FotM would be by choice and for the fun of the excellent dungeon, not because it is the only way to progress your character.

And I’d love to see the vampiric dragon sword make a comeback as one of the unique rewards!!

I agree completely – it’s a shame to see some of these beautiful zones so underpopulated now, and it can cause difficulties with the balance of dynamic event chains which often seem to be stuck in the ‘bad guys have won and taken over the camp’ phase.

Great suggestions above – especially for themed seasonal events.

Three more suggestions – two of them are not particularly original but deserve repeating…

1) Zaishen Dailies, from GW1 – you could have the Zaishen Bounty (kill a particular champion); Zaishen Vanquish – redo a particular zone completion; Zaishen Event – picks a dynamic event or chain. For those not familiar with these from GW1, the dailies would have players flocking to different zones and would given a number of special coins or tokens in reward, which could be exchanged for valuable items from a vendor.

2) Easter Eggs and Scavenger Hunts – perhaps a little like the Halloween ones but spread over a longer period, with a new step added every week, in different zones around the world. Again, make the end reward a unique and useful or fun item such as an ascended trinket or exotic minipet, make it tricky to solve and last over several months.

3) Nick the Traveller’s descendents roam the world once more. This was a really fun feature in GW1 and had people farming a different trophy each week in a different zone.

@cesmode -
I think the point is that the chat servers can spot simple measures to circumvent the anti-spam filtering.
While you are technically correct in your assertion that your entries were unique because of the single character changes, from a practical perspective this is irrelevant because those changes are insufficient to fool the spam filter. I suspect it has the ability to parse your input to a certain degree, and identifies letter-groups such as ‘lfg’ and ‘lvl’ even when you rearrange them slightly.

Firstly thank you at Anet for the Lost Shores event; clearly a lot of effort and hard work went into designing the new zone and dungeon and I’m sure my family and I will have a lot of fun there in time to come. We all love the game, and the problems with Lost Shores will not change that, even if we might be a little peeved at the moment.

I’ll +1 the comments of the many people who had lag problems and got disconnected in the final event, but if you do manage to sort out some sort of reward – just the 20-slot Karka Chest would make me a lot happier on this front – that would be OK

My main point is that I think Anet missed an opportunity in the gem store with this event. Where were the new skins and town clothes for sale? All we could buy were RNG chests with poor odds of getting anything exciting at over £2 per chest. I’m not into gambling and simply won’t buy this sort of content – makes me feel like the sad people in corner shops who spend their money on cigarettes and scratchcards.

In contrast, I have spent quite a bit of money on gems for myself and my sons (four players in our household so far and two more sons who will be old enough to play in the next few years) in order to buy actual products such as costumes, character slots, minipets etc. In Guild Wars (1) I bought every costume in the store and various other products. But I won’t buy a virtual lottery ticket where I’m likely to be wasting my money.

Now – if you make sure with each event you have some actual products in the gem store – nice skins, new minipets, new services like character modification etc, in addition to chests, you would make money out of someone like me every time. If there are only the chests, then you won’t.

I agree – I have no problem with these big live events, and even though I was one of the unlucky ones with disconnection problems, I really appreciate the effort and wonderful design of the new zone, the new dungeon etc. The final karka event was really epic in scale and my sons and I had great fun playing it while it was working. After Halloween I was really looking forward to Lost Shores and I hope Anet keep these interesting events and new content coming. I’m looking forward to Wintersday.

BUT – I do hope they learn from the problems of the Lost Shores event. It is such a shame that an event with so much potential suffered from so many simultaneous problems for so many people. GW1 was my first MMO and I have always had a huge amount of respect for the Anet team – it would be so sad for this to be shaken by a recurring pattern of problems like this.

It would be nice to think the NPC has gone because they are going to change it to offer the Karka Chest as well…

Well, here’s hoping anyway

Actually I’d be really happy just to get the 20-slot bag!

I’m not too worried about precursors – that’s always just a RNG gamble and I’d never expect to be that lucky even if I hadn’t got disconnected before the end of the event. For me, I just like to have a nice memento of each event, and if it is something genuinely useful like a 20-slot bag so much the better.

So Anet – if you could put an NPC up at Pride Point giving out the 20-slot bags, or email them to people who have had connection problems etc then you will have regained one happy customer.

I agree with the OP that the intentions and design of the event were excellent – great new map, and nice to have a moderately challenging new 80 zone. The new dungeon looks very well done and I’m sure when the bugs are ironed out will be excellent.

The final event felt wonderfully epic in the time I was able to play it, but all this was let down by the ultimate lagfest and disconnections which prevented me, and many others it would seem, from finishing the event and enjoying the unusually generous rewards.

The problem with this event for me was that there were just too many bugs and glitches. A few bugs in a big complex MMO are of course forgivable, and Anet clearly does try to work hard on correcting these. Unfortunately with Lost Shores there were problems with every part of the event on my server, Gunnar’s Hold – horrendous lag with the opening event, glitches in both scavenger hunt quest lines with Noll eventually fixed but the Miyani one never was, and finally the diconnections in the final event.

It’s not the end of the world, and I still love the game, but it’s a shame to see the wonderful ideas and work of the design team let down by the execution and technical performance of the servers.

Quite unhappy with this at the moment.

Seriously love the game and have spent about 600 hours enjoying it so far, but I was really disappointed with the execution of the Lost Shores event. The design, new zone, new dungeon were fantastic, but the lag and bugs left me unable to complete the Miyani investigation and then final event.

The final event was especially galling as like so many others I battled the ancient karka for hours until the lag made the game unplayable and I finally got disconnected, then could not log back in to game or forums for over an hour. Of course it’s all over by then and I find I missed out some very useful items such as the karka box. I’m not even particularly bothered about the chance of a precursor, but it would have been nice to have a decent and useful memento of the one-time event.

Just feeling rather jaded now and starting to lose confidence in Anet – and I really didn’t see that coming. This is certainly not a frame of mind conducive to spending any more money in the gem store, by the way.

Gunnar’s Hold, events in Queensdale bugged at 1/3 doors for last 2 days. In Gendarran Fields have run around doing all three events repeatedly without any indication of doors reversing.

Now in Kessex Hills, I have a message on screen ‘The Mad Engineer’ The doors have been reversed… etc but I’m just seeing one ordinary trick or treat door in the area with no access to the Mad King’s Realm. This is the second day now I’ve not been able to get into the realm at all.

I would be really grateful if you could look into this – thanks in advance.

At present we can’t dye weapons, but it would be nice if we could, as in GW1. I think this would add to the general ideal of making it easy to have our characters look the way we want.

It would be great if this ability would be added at some point. It would be fine to have some special skins non-dyeable, such as the legendaries or certain special exotics that are supposed to have a particular look (destroyer skins etc). It could even work in Anet’s favour with a special ‘weapon customisation stone’ available in the gem store.

I really enjoyed the scythe on my warrior in GW1, so that would be fun to see come back.

Also agree 2H axe, offhand pistol, and knuckles would be great. Daggers would be fun too but perhaps best not be too greedy

Like the ideas for a third soldier profession in future. I remember having a nice warrior/necro build in GW1 with melee plus casting damage for range. Something along those lines, like the ‘inverse-guardian’ as someone mentioned earlier would be interesting for a future expansion perhaps.

One thing I liked was that you can hit a grenade key (1-5) and point your ground effect target where you like, then hold right-mouse down +/- left-mouse to move around, and the grenade target stays in the same relative position to you. The you can move around spamming grenades by double tapping the 1-5 keys. Takes far longer to describe than to do. Good for retreating lobbing grenades behind you, or put the target to your left or right and circle mobs lobbing grenades. Takes a bit of practice but seems like fun to me…

I agree warrior would be worth a try – gives you good melee and ranged abilities, and is resilient enough to take some hits as well, especially if you put some points into the defence trait-line. Still having fun with mine at level 46 so far, and there are subtleties to the warrior builds that you can get into later if you wish to.