Guild Wars 2

The switch up of ideal/virtual/actual threw me for a few questions on the second page. If someone isn’t paying very close attention, it’d be easy to just go through and answer as if they are in the same order on each page.

Interesting survey. I definitely play my ideal self in games.

It occurs to me with LA in the state it is, either they had to revamp at least the Halloween nodes and decorations around it for this year, or LA will get a series boost in its reconstruction.

There was a blog post back in the first year when people were complaining about all the festivals. They explained that they were spending a lot of time on festivals that first year, but that they would become foundational content that could repeat each year, allowing the development teams to focus on giving us more in the living story.

They’re supposed to be filler content that can be easily switched on to give us a little to do each year while we’re waiting for new LS content.

CureForLiving.5360:

… I sometimes wonder if ANet shouldn’t implement a policy that prevents people from posting on the forums if they haven’t logged-in to the game in 6 months… But on the other hand it would also lock out a lot of the pitchfork and torch wielding crowd…

So all they’d have to do is log on once every six months? That’s not a lot of effort if they are really determined to storm the castle.

I suppose it would lock out anyone who has uninstalled the game.

Astralporing.1957:

The greatest problem now is not that i don’t know what Anet will release next week (though it is a problem. Some surprises are good, but some stability and information is good too). The problem is that i had a pretty good idea about the game themes and direction when it launched, but now i truly have no clue. And i start to suspect that someone here doesn’t want me to have that clue, because maybe (if i knew) i’d decide it’s no longer going in the direction i wanted, and it’s time to abandon ship.

This.

When GW2 launched, it was pretty much what I expected it to be, because there had been such clear presentation of what ArenaNet was hoping to achieve with it. Some things might have been in an immature state, for example, the DE system. DEs were pretty much as described, and I could see a future in which the concept would grow and mature through iteration to something amazing.

Even with bugs, things not quite complete, GW2 felt and played like the game ArenaNet told me they were making.

That kind of vision-casting has become more and more infrequent over the last two years, but clearly some major changes of direction have occurred. We get “hey, we’re going to turn the ship some” but that doesn’t seem to be accompanied with “and here’s where we’re going now.”

“We had a problem with new player retention, so we revamped the new player experience”. Okay, change in direction. “We’re moving toward more permanent content so that people can replay the living story later”. Gotcha, the course has shifted based on player feedback. “We want to work on the guild experience.” Yep, another direction shift coming up here.

So the boat’s getting steered. But it’d really be helpful to get a clear presentation of the our intended destination.

mtpelion.4562:

The biggest challenge with a token system is determining how wide or narrow the use of the token is.

Too wide, and you’ve got the SWTOR issue.

Too narrow, and you’ve got 300 different currencies to earn.

One of their initial design goals ArenaNet stated for the game was the ability to play whatever portion of the game you want, and still get to the top tier rewards. Having a nice wide use for the token and a wide variety of activities that reward them would return to this design goal.

John Smith.4610:

We do need to be very careful about ideas that flatten the experience entirely as that quickly becomes not fun at all.

You say this as if it’s obvious, but I don’t see it.

Am I just wired weird? I get a lot of satisfaction out of seeing the steps toward a reward and working through them to get it. When I get a lucky drop that’ll sell for a few gold it’s more like, “Huh, cool” post it to the TP and forget about it a day later.

If everyone ends up with the same rewards for the same level of play, how does that diminish anyone’s experience?

Gaile Gray.6029:

Yes, that’s definitely true. As Mike O’Brien said in a recent post, “We’ve set a clear policy in the past year: we don’t talk speculatively about future development. We don’t want to string you along. Creating fun is an uncertain business: sometimes things work out and sometimes they don’t; sometimes we go back to the drawing board over and over before we get something right. If we make optimistic promises and then can’t deliver on them, everyone suffers. So when we attend a trade show or give an interview, we’re there to talk about what we’re getting ready to ship, not to speculate on what we might ship someday.”

We truly understand the interest that our loyal players have in knowing more, but we’re not able to share too much at this juncture for the reasons that are stated above and outlined in more detail in Mike’s post.

I’ll reiterate that we could really use some vision casting for the game. A series of “state of the game” posts. What, when they look at the game, do the executive design staff see? Where do they hope to take it? What are the core values against which every design decision be weighed and tested?

I remember a time when Rift was close to beta testing. I had a feeling it wasn’t going to be all that special. I remember explaining to people how I’d probably give Rift a try, but that I was sure GW2 was going to be so much more of a game.

My reasoning? Trion talked a little bit about their rift events. They made some vague noises about how the game was built so that they could change it frequently and add new content. But mostly, there wasn’t much information about how it was developing and what exactly was going to make it special.

In contrast, ArenaNet people were frequently speaking passionately about their hopes and dreams for GW2. What they wanted it to feel like to play it. What really cool project they were currently working on. I remember the initial reaction to the Sylvari followed by the announcement that they were going to get a redesign because green-skinned elves just wasn’t awesome enough for this game.

I knew GW2 was going somewhere because the people making it spoke boldly, and frequently, about what they wanted to do with the game.

It doesn’t have to include specific time-frames or book-jacket story spoilers. It just needs to be an expression of where the game is going, and that the people at ArenaNet are still passionate about it.

What does the CEO say to the department heads when he gathers them together to point the way forward? What does the design director say when he calls meetings of all the design team leaders? Where is this ship going?

As much as I like the idea of ArenaNet listening to the player base, I’m not sure that’s really the problem. Some of the most controversial decisions do seem like they were motivated by a reaction to what the players were saying, only in a direction no player would have imagined. That’s part of the reason many of us are getting the feeling that we have no idea what to expect.

We have CDI’s for ArenaNet to listen to us in an organized way (though I’m still firmly convinced 30 minutes of reading over the top page of the forums on any given day will give you most of what ends up being expressed in a CDI anyway) but what we really need is ArenaNet speaking back to us in a smeaningful, substantive way.

“Oh, that’s interesting, tell me more” is the bare minimum of conversation. It’s what therapists tell patients to keep things going without actually getting involved. Or husbands say to wives when their attention is really on the television.

While these forums could use a lot of work, I’d rather they put the development time into the actual game.

Once you hit max MF, essence of luck become consumables.

Fine EoL: +10% MF for 30 minutes
Masterwork EoL: +25% MF for 30 minutes
Rare EoL: +25% MF for 1 hour
Exotic EoL: +50% MF for 1 hour
Legendary EoL: +50% MF for 3 hours

The problem is, given the way they typically price trading post items, it’d probably be cheaper to change gems to gold and buy three years worth of single-use transmutation charges than what you’d pay for one infinite-use transmutation item.

The way clothing reacts to in-game lighting is very strange.

I made a pinky-purple Sylvari to match the Mesmer theme color. In most lighting his skin looks consistent to the overall color shift of the environmental lighting. Clothing, however, is a crapshoot. In the dye window I can find dyes that will make parts of his clothes match his skin, and in some areas of the game they will continue to do so, but in others they will become drastically more blue or pink. I can redye to make the item match his skin again, but then in another area they will skew off into another color.

You’d think lighting would shift most materials in the same color direction, but apparently not.

I think the big thing I am missing in dev communication is vision casting. What is the mission of future development? What are the core values against which newly implemented changes can be weighed?

I’m not talking “we are working on a precursor scavenger hunt and it will be done by X date” and forums erupting into flames when that date comes and goes.

I’m talking the kind of stuff ArenaNet gave us in spades during the development process and for a little while after launch. Things like, “We want you to be able to play whatever part of the game you find most enjoyable and still get the best rewards the game has to offer”. That could be followed up by “we have recently done X, and Y to that end, and we know that Z isn’t living up to that goal.”

That makes room for the player base to provide the other half of the conversation with “Thanks for X, it’s great, but Y isn’t exactly working like you intended, and here are our ideas for tweaking Z to make it fit that goal you said is core.”

One of the oft repeated statements in the last year or more by many different players is that there is a feeling that GW2 doesn’t have a vision, a direction. I think that’s because the vision is no longer being communicated clearly.

We may still be getting X and Y implemented, but without any idea of why they were prioritized over hundreds of other things, or why they look so different than what the players seemed to be saying back in the CDI six months ago.

We also don’t see a clear presentation when past design goals shift, and why. To continue with my previous example, “Play how you want, and get to the rewards” seems to have changed to “we want to pull people into all parts of the game, so we’re actively designing rewards to require you to diversify your activities if you want to reach them efficiently”. There have been some minor comments to that end (I remember a Devon Carver statement to that effect in the WvW forum about why the road to some reward in WvW was so much longer than in some other part of the game), but ArenaNet never came out and said “Now one of our main design goals is to incentivize participation in all areas of the game”.

It has become accepted throughout the community that ArenaNet’s original vision for the game has evolved. Witness the many “manifesto” discussions that have appeared on the forum over the last few years, and how they are decreasing in frequency.

What I think we’re missing is not so much “we have six team members spending 80% of their time on feature A with a target patch date of B” so much as “Now, two years after launch, let us tell you what we want GW2 to be. These are our highest priorities going forward. We know that GW2 falls short in this area and that, and you’ll notice that we’ve recently implemented that awesome thing as a first step to our current vision of what this game can be.”

TL;DR What we need most is not more transparency about specific things being worked on or target implementation dates, but an overarching vision for where the game is headed and a general shape of the route ArenaNet is planning on taking to get there.

References to bodily functions are prohibited under the naming policy. “Fart” isn’t as bad as a racist comment, but it could still be considered a violation.

nopoet.2960:

It would be fun to see the skritt as a playable race but…
1. Players would have to be able to control a pack of skritt not just one individual
2. I don’t think the devs should do it because there is no way they can come close to how I picture it in my imagination and anything they design would just be disappointing

I’d love to play a group of Skritt as a player character.

In Allod’s Online, there was a playable race that almost always functioned in groups of three siblings. Some of the animations were very clever, with one of the trio wielding a main weapon, and another the off weapon. One would duck when another fired a spell over its head.

Their “/sit” animation, I think it was, was great. The three would sit down in a circle and pull out beer mugs and start quaffing.

Realistically, it’d be too much work for ArenaNet for the niche crowd that would enjoy playing them. It’s the kind of great idea someone has when the game is still in development, and does the work to make it happen. It’s not the kind of thing you do after launch with the accountants looking over your shoulder asking how it will help the bottom line.

It’d be nice to have more armor options that show the glowy Sylvari parts we already have. Or Charr fur patterns for that matter.

I agree with Blaeys.

Get your full set of exotics. Only takes a little gold or karma depending on what you need for your build.

But, unless you have a taste for repetitive grind, avoid setting yourself to chase ascended or legendary gear at all costs. Instead, do whatever seems interesting in game, and do everything you can to ignore that the game only feeds you a trickle of reward for playing that way.

Eventually, you’ll look at your collection tabs and account wallet and see that you’ve slowly accumulated enough stuff to make a stab at crafting an ascended item or Mystic Toilet weapon for the looks.

Sit down and figure out how many dailies, gathering nodes, world bosses, or gold you need to accumulate to get to a given reward is a recipe for turning the game into a 9-5, minimum wage job.

Vayne.8563:

It’s likely Guild Wars 2 is the second most popular MMO on the market right now.

How can it not have a future?

If “have a future” means continue for a significant time without shutting down, then yes, it clearly has a future. Enough people are playing to keep it going.

Whether being the 2nd most popular MMO right now means much… I’m not so sure. I think that has as much to do with the failure of ESO and Wildstar, and Archeage being a mess as GW2’s intrinsic ability to keep an audience.

There are, undoubtedly, plenty of people happily playing GW2. It is my perception, however, that there are also plenty of people playing GW2 because it’s the best option at the moment, even though it doesn’t excite them much.

1. It’s possible that GW2 is due for a shakeup that will reinvigorate the game and give it a new upswing.

2. It’s possible that it’s going to keep chugging along as it has been for the last two years, never quite getting the excitement back up to anything like shortly after launch, but still be the “best non-WoW mmorpg available”.

3. It’s also possible that EQNext or Camelot Unchained are going to really click and be the next MMORPG industry darling.

From my viewpoint, the second scenario is by far the most likely, though I hope the first or third come to pass. I’d love for GW2 to have a renaissance, or failing that, CU to get RvR right, or if nothing else EQNext to find the sandpark sweet spot.

Unless something major happens to WvW or Camelot Unchained fails miserably, I do expect WvW to finish dying off toward the end of next year as anyone interested in 3-way mass warfare moves to CU.

If it worked, though, they should be happy to demonstrate it to us.

Hopefully soon there will have been enough time to collect the data and put it into pretty charts for our consumption.

I know I’m not supposed to bump threads, but I also know I’m not supposed to create multiple threads about the same topic. A dilemma.

But I am interested in whether ANet plans to give us some sort of blog about how successful the NPE changes were in retaining players during the free trial week. When they reveal that a significant percentage of new trial players continued past the level where people used to stop playing and that more free trial players went on to buy the game than after any free trial before, it’ll really help us vets to realize that while the NPE changes diminished GW2 a little for us, it was for a good cause.

And it would be great just to know that new players are responding to GW2.

I suppose I should throw out a question for the community as well. During the free trial week, what we’re your experiences with new players? Did you interact with many? Did they seem to need less guidance now that the game has spread the learning curve? Any anecdotes about positive reactions to the game on the part of newcomers?

Vayne.8563:

It’s also relegated to the first hour of play, during which new players are getting their feet under them.

That depends on how one plays. I spent a lot of time thoroughly completing starter zones at launch before moving on, even though that meant I was way over levelled for later zones. A year later, when my wife started playing, she also spent a lot of time in those early zones before moving on. It’s one of the things I like about GW2. You aren’t quickly ushered on to new zones like in other games.

But yes, it’s a small part of the game, relatively speaking.

I can see why you think it’s sad. I can agree that it’s removal of character…but the character isn’t greatly affected unless you knew it was there in the first place. It’s removal of character to you. The game still has plenty of character left for new players.

In a sense, yes. Those players can’t tell me something’s missing that used to be there, because they don’t know. They still, however, are getting something with a little bit less variety.

I work as a professional artist, and I learned long ago that there is a level of detail people will have no idea is missing. I often get people telling me they thought my work was done before I added the final layers. If I didn’t go that extra step, they’d never say it was missing, but going that extra step is what makes people respond so well to my work.

I’m not sure I’m articulating that well. Hopefully you understand what I’m trying to say.

When my friend was playing he kept stopping to listen to ambient dialogue. At one point he was listening to two conversations at once and he marveled how one got louder and the other dimmer as he moved between them. This is stuff we take for granted, but a lot of games don’t have.

This reminds me of shortly after launch when I was looking around inside a tent and some NPCs approached, talking to each other. I was wearing headphones and realized I was hearing their voices pan between the headphones matching where they were with respect to my character. I was stunned, and spent some time just running around listening to sounds while turning my character. It is, indeed, that kind of detail that made me initially love this game.

It’s the attention to detail that always made this game great. Does it matter if you have five skills or one as a snow leapard for a guy playing the game for fifteen minutes….probably no so much.

Yes, you can pretty easily dismiss them as minor things that don’t make a great difference. Still, they add up. It’s the fact that there are hundreds of little details that give the game that polish. If you lose a handful, it’s still a loss.

Over my time with GW2, it got to feel like the original GW2 I loved was dying by the proverbial death of a thousand paper cuts. That’s why I stuck with it as long as I did. There wasn’t one change that made me rage-quit. Even the introduction of Ascended gear, which felt like a betrayal, was easily defended with comments like “But you don’t need ascended because the stat increase is so small”.

The problem is, add enough grains of sand together, and you eventually do end up with a lot of weight.

So the first free trial week after the New Player Experience was implemented has come and gone. My question is, did the NPE changes work?

Can someone at ArenaNet give us some numbers on the increased new player retention brought about by the NPE changes? How many continued to level past the point where players typically stopped before the NPE? How many went on to buy the game?

Vayne.8563:

Not being able to feed the bears in Wayfarer Foothills is removing content? So noted. I think everyone can take what they want from that list.

I’d say more than the removal of “content”, the great shame of some of those early area NPE changes is the removal of “character”. A lot of what is now missing is some of the uniqueness that this game used to present to new players as soon as they left the starter instance.

It boggles the mind, when I think about the other MMORPGs I’ve played in beta recently. One of the most common refrains in both of them was that questing was bland and too “kill ten rats”. People expect more variety in a contemporary MMORPG. GW2 had a lot of that variety in it’s starter areas, but a portion was removed because it was just too confusing to new players.

Maybe it has significantly increased player retention. It’s still sad.

Mireles Lore.5942:

This game is about a year away from being free to play. Why? its because “credit card” gamers have become easy and lazy. To these gamers, to compare how long it takes them to earn a in game reward compared to how long it takes them to earn the real money required to buy that reward, and to choose the obviously quicker path, has become a actual rational thought process. This should scare the hale out of people that actually enjoy quality challenges inside games.

It is really the fault of the majority gamer community, because alot of us found it acceptable to translate game progress to the effort of real life currency, this is not a job, you are supposed to play the game to enjoy it, not to earn shiny stuff that give you in game social status. The practice of extracting real world money will not stop until gamers stop the practice.

It’s not solely the gamer’s fault. It’s a feedback loop that both players and developers perpetuate.

When a developer’s idea of adding new content is creating new checklists of things to be repeated in game often enough for new rewards, without actually adding new stuff to do, they are participating in making the game equivalent to a job just like players who compare what it takes to earn in game to a real life job.

When the gameplay becomes an ridiculously long repetition of the same event to get the shiny, it’s natural that people start comparing it to other ridiculously long repetitions like their RL jobs to see the most efficient path to the reward.

But it’s not just the developers fault. The reason they put in “do this a hundred times” to get the reward is because players want to be able to log in for 40 hours a week. No game company, no matter how large, can keep producing that quantity of engaging content. The only way to keep those people busy is to require them to repeat the old stuff over and over for the carrot they want.

So both sides continue to enable each other, and are dissatisfied with the result. Players start to feel the grind, developers are strained trying to keep players satisfied.

It’s not as simple as “lazy gamers” and the “credit card generation”. This same generation made Dark Souls popular. Most of the time people aren’t comparing their RL jobs to the game because the game is difficult, but because rewards are placed behind dull grinds in order to keep people playing longer than the content actually warrants.

ipan.4356:

But if they want to grow – if they want to expand, they need to do something radical.

Anet needs a moonshot moment.

Quoted for Great Truth

Divinity’s Reach is definitely worth a visit for a first time player. Other than that, yeah, follow their lead.

ShadowDragoonFTW.3418:

@ShadowPuppet – I rather like that idea. Incentivise it, even if it’s something small. It will still get more people interested to spend a few minutes on it.

I’m no statistician, but isn’t that pretty much guaranteed to skew your results? More players who are willing to jump through hoops for small rewards?

Metrics crits Player Desires for 5.2 million damage.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Here’s the challenge, and we’ll see if it’s possible and reasonable: Share your opinion about how to improve the end game in (roughly) 100 words or less.

Make playing in mid-level zones almost as rewarding for a level 80 character as playing in level 80 zones (or explorables or “world bosses”). Tyria is a beautiful world full of hundreds of DEs that reward a pittance compared to farming level 80 zones. Remove my need to choose between pursuing endgame goals or doing a huge amount of the content.

In 104 words, I don’t have space to detail it, but there have been many ideas on the forums for how to do this without creating new “champ train” like farms and wiping out the populations doing world bosses, dungeons, and Orr Temples.

As long as people play mmorpgs like full time jobs, there will never be enough endgame for them.

Except, possibly, PvP. If the foundations of PvP are really good, people can get huge amounts of time out of it without unrealistic amounts of developer input.

Developers will never, however, be able to keep enough content coming into a game to meet the demand of players burning through it 30, 40, or 60 hours a week. The only way to keep those people hooked is forcing ridiculous amounts of repetition for rewards (through currency systems or RNG), but even that wears out over time.

I know a few people will agree with a few of these items and will ask how they would ruin the game, so here’s my reasoning.

1. Clearly the game would have died without Ascended gear, or ArenaNet never would have implemented it in the first place. Right?
2. So many people say “At this point I just log in to do my dailies”, that removing them would decimate the population.
3. As ArenaNet has said, people like the zerg. Even though WvW isn’t at much of a high approval rating at the moment, there would definitely be an exodus of zerglings when small teams start wiping whole swaths of them.
4. All the fractal regulars have at this point is a sense of being the elite of GW2 PvE. They certainly don’t get much in the way of in-game rewards. Making Fractals this easily accessible would heavily undermine that.
5. See the mount-haters burning down the forums and staging massive anti-mount rallies in LA?
6. Who isn’t going to freak out when I start removing shinies from the game?
7. All the people who hate how single-player the game is will burn me at the stake for this one. The dungeon community hasn’t gotten a new dungeon in a long time, and aren’t getting great rewards either. Now I’ve let the uber-casuals crash their party.
8. Okay, not sure if anyone would care about this at this point. Maybe I should remove it from the list of ways I’d ruin the game.
9. Clearly, this would kill the game. ArenaNet said they tried adding more DEs after launch and the players largely ignored it. It’d use up a bunch of developer resources for not enough return, causing the game to crash and burn.
10. Efficiency players would flock to lower level zones to farm, which would annoy people who want help in Orr as well as players of low level characters working through those zones for the first time. Clearly, rewarding endgame players meaningfully for playing in low level zones would be catastrophic to the game and economy, or ArenaNet would have done it by now instead of trying to keep us all doing temple events and world bosses ad nauseum.
11. Face it, the most die-hard players play MMORPGs like full time jobs because it’s easier than disciplining yourself to achieve something real. Take away the elite, bragging-rights rewards by letting players achieve anything in the game in a reasonable time by playing casually and many of the most ardent players will quickly leave in disgust.
12. Letting people get to their rewards in any area of the game would show that there are some game modes people are just not going to play unless there’s a unique carrot behind them. This would ultimately be good, because ArenaNet would need to either choose to scrap that area altogether or fix the things that keep people from wanting to play it. In the meantime, however, there would be population crashes in some areas of the game, which would kitten off the die-hard players who still want to engage in them.

Theundersigned.4761:

I think a lot of people are misinterpreting (and abusing) this thread for their own agenda. This is about posting ideas you really love but know a lot of people would really hate

You’re right. I completely misunderstood.

Here’d be my real list:

1. Scrap all ascended gear and return to a hard and fixed power cap.
2. Eliminate dailies completely.
3. Make a goal of nerfing the zerg in WvW. I’d aggressively pursue a balance point where small groups of skilled players could decimate a zerg, but people still find it useful to run in zergs from time to time.
4. Allow players to run one fractal at a time and still get rewards. Allow them to choose which fractal to run.
5. Remove at least 2/3rds of all waypoints in the game, and introduce 60% speed boost, auto-dismount in combat and cities, land-only mounts.
6. Remove all rewards from achievements. Leave achievements for people who really love them, but get rid of the carrot that pulls people who don’t into pursuing them anyway and gives ANet a shortcut to making old content seem new by putting new achievements into the game.
7. Make 2-man versions of all dungeon paths.
8. Make every successful dungeon run yield enough tokens for one piece of equipment.
9. Scrap the linear, living story concept and return to non-linear story contained within the web of DEs across zones, adding more DEs to existing zones and slowly adding new zones (without hearts) to expand this holistic, rather than episodic story.
10. Make playing in pre-80 zones almost as rewarding for a level 80 character as playing in a level 80 zone.
11. Achieve diversity in character appearance by the sheer amount of different possible skins rather than having certain elite, hard-to-get or time-limited skins.
12. Consolidate all the currencies in the game to a much smaller number. The goal here would be that you can earn currencies toward rewards doing pretty much what you want in game. Every reward could be achieved through dedication in DEs, sPvP, WvW, or instanced PvE. Hey, even dedication to mini-games could earn those rewards. I’d completely scrap the design choices that have been made to get people to do some of everything in order to get their rewards and return to “Play how you want” philosophy ArenaNet was still trumpeting only last year.

Since activity variety is too confusing for new players, all hearts have been simplified to “Kill 42 of a nearby creature” in order to complete.

Since skills are too confusing for new players, all characters now have the exact same skills, only their particle effects are different in color (purplish pink for Mesmer, amber for Warrior, etc) to identify the different professions. Since it is the easiest profession to use, as evidenced by its preference among gold-farming bots, the new standard skill set for all professions is the Ranger skillset.

Since the variety of pets are confusing to new players, the only juvenile creature now able to be tamed is now the bear. In order to make the learning curve more accessible, a juvenile bear will be waiting in front of a character upon entering the game from the introductory instance. Upon taming, the bear will turn the appropriate color (blue for Guardians, green for Necromancers, etc) in order to keep the professions distinct.

In order to make the open world easier for new players to navigate as they level, only one zone of each level range will remain in the game; all others have been removed. It was difficult to decide which zones to keep, but we ultimately decided the Ascalonian portions of the map were the clearest with their relatively muted color palette.

Since the GW2 Wiki often contains out of date information, it can be needlessly misleading to new players, so we have shut it down, and have included new language in the Terms of Service agreement that prohibit the publication and distribution of any guides or reference sources referring to the game. Dulfy has been issued a Cease and Desist Order.

Left click to turn camera has been removed. In order not to confuse new players, the camera is permanently fixed to face in the direction the character is facing.

The option to rebind keys has been removed, as internal testing found the variety of choices on where to bind keys far too mindblowing for new players. For the same reason, mouse turning has been disabled so players don’t have to choose between it and being a keyboard turner.

Keybinds for skill use have also been disabled, as trying to keyboard turn and activate skills with keys is far too difficult for our internal testers. All skills on the skill bar must now be clicked with the mouse.

Internal tests found that most players find choosing a name to be the most agonizing part of creating a new character. To help streamline this process, characters are now assigned a random string of three to nineteen ascii characters for their name.

While I admit the ooze research used to be a little confusing, it’s even more so now. Instead of the gun you used to receive, you now have to go to an NPC and get a colored key card which lets you activate a third of the turrets around the area. Blue key card activates blue turrets, for example.

The turrets, however, look identical. They aren’t actually the color they are, you just have to trust that it is a “blue turret” because when you get close enough you can see it written in the air above the turret.

The change brought absolutely no increase in clarity or simplicity to that heart. If anything, it’s worse. I may have missed it, but I didn’t see any indication of how many times I can use a key card before I have to get a new one (3?), and instead of using an experimental weapon directly, I’m activating turrets for obscure reasons.

ArenaNet’s vision for the future has been made clear in five short words.

“Nothing is off the table.” -Mike Zarodojny, originally 2013, reiterated beginning of this year

Colin Johanson

It’s extremely important that we stay true to our philosophy that you should be able to play Guild Wars 2 the way you want to play the game in order to reach the most powerful rewards.

That one’s not even two years old, but seems to also be obsolete, as the current design philosophy seems to be one of directing play rather than opening up more freedom.

Which, of course, is just a way to distract from the real point, which is that at one time ArenaNet had a bold, clear vision for the game, which no longer seems to be the case.

In before “The manifesto was so long ago, things change.”

I was in the prologue on a new character when the patch came available today. At the end of the death cutscene for the final boss, the game closed and auto-patched. My son was ready to play, so I let him get on my desktop pc I’d been playing on, and moved over to my laptop.

Upon logging in to the character, I found myself at the beginning of the prologue again, now level 2. I ran through the prologue, fought the boss, and at the end of the death cutscene, the game closed to auto-patch. Once the game was up again, I found myself again at the beginning of the prologue, and now level 3.

I had to run through one more time and defeat the boss to finally enter the game.

Conncept.7638:

You forgot that they also stated there would be varying methods of obtaining ascended gear released within the same time frame. Still one single method for armor, weapons, and, accessories; even trinkets and rings, which have more than one, are only at two.

Colin Johanson

It’s extremely important that we stay true to our philosophy that you should be able to play Guild Wars 2 the way you want to play the game in order to reach the most powerful rewards.

Sokia.3710:

I’d be fine with the no-hearts original version where everything was run by dynamic events.

Yes. There was a beautiful, unique game in the original vision. Guess it was just too risky for ArenaNet to try and build an audience for that game.

I remember blog posts before launch about the DE system, underwater combat, and even bundle items replacing your skill bar with new skills to play with. So many of the selling points for this game ended up being the things that they felt they had to throw overboard in order to keep it afloat.

Bertrand.3057:

You can’t find any quests? Follow the compass! New challenges await you in Dry Top!

There are plenty of quests all around the area, but none that will let me learn fighting technique from my Blue Chevron Hylek friend.

I think I may have gotten a letter from someone about a place called Dry Top, but it also said something about being level 80. I am only level 7.

Blue Chevron Hylek is level 3, I think. This is another thing that makes me think the idea about becoming higher level and coming back must not be right. How could I learn fighting technique from a level 3 Hylek if I am much higher level? Wouldn’t I be teaching him at that point?

Sokia.3710:

The Inquest aren’t evil, they are just determined and a little loose with ethics. OK, a lot loose with ethics.

They were poisoning the brothers and sisters of my Hylek would-be Sensei. That’s pretty evil in my book.

As far as the hylek, I can’t help you with that one. Have you tried leveling up so that you are massively overleveled for the area, and then talking with him? That might help.

That’s an idea, but there must be a more logical solution. My dialogue option is that I am too busy. Maybe I need to take care of my to-do list before I come back. I didn’t finish the checklist up in the right hand corner of the screen before I logged off. Perhaps if I had done so, I could go back to Blue Chevron Hylek and say, “I did my chores for today, now we can spar”.

I’ll have to try that next time I play.

Perhaps they are planning out a detailed, extensive scavenger hunt to unlock character builds. Those things take quite a lot of time.

What shark? Was there supposed to be one in the lake?

As far as I could tell, the lake was completely empty. No inquest. No skelks. No salmon. Not even some ambient fish creatures to one-shot. There is a cool-looking underwater base, though.

Do you know where the quest is that will let me learn fighting from Blue Chevron Hylek?

Hello, good people at ArenaNet. I’m level 7, happily exploring Metrica Province. I saved a village of Hylek from being poisoned by those evil Inquest. Once the Hylek were saved, I met a large Hylek in an enclosure with a blue chevron over his head. I talked with him, and he offered to fight me to teach me, but all I can respond is that I don’t have time right now.

But I do. The inquest have been driven off for now, I’ve found myself in this helpful Hylek’s village, and I’d love to learn some of his Frogjitsu. Unfortunately, there must be some quest or something I have to do to get another dialogue option with him. I can’t, however, seem to find it anywhere in the vicinity. What do I need to do to be able to learn from this Hylek master of martial arts? And why is there a blue chevron over his head?

Also, while I have your ear. There is this really great underwater Inquest base in a lake not too far away. Someone clearly put some time and effort into designing that thing. It occurred to me that it might make a great place for a few dynamic events. Perhaps there could be some sort of cool Asuran magitech beacons the Inquest use to power the base that Tyrian heroes could destroy to undermine their evil research.

It’d be really cool if some sort of Inquest monster could be released as a follow up. Maybe a creature enraged by the poison the Inquest are releasing in the area? A crazed kraken, or maybe an oversized shark.

There was a time when I would have agreed. But if they are going to screw with the game this much, I don’t care any more if they add a bunch of new content.

Most everything in the shop is less efficient than simply buying gems and converting to gold. As MtPelion said, the shop prices never make sense in terms of in-game currency. They are priced to be enticing for the people who regularly use the shop.

Salvagers, infinite crafting tools, boosts… they all cost more real money for the gold you will earn with them than if you simply sell gems for gold.

skepticck.9714:

The cynic in me can’t help but notice that Mr. Johanson wrote “the China VIP system” and not “any VIP system”.

You don’t need to be a cynic. At this point we have a pretty detailed history of careful speech intended to leave room for future surprises.

As ArenaNet has said, “nothing is off the table”.

Vayne.8563:

Anet has very detailed metrics. They’ve talked about them before. They know how many people attempt dungeons, how many people finish them, how many people die to each time of creature even. Risen thralls killed millions of people the first year and was the deadliest creature in Guild Wars 2. Anet published the exact number.

So Anet knows not only how many people run Fractals, but how many people have ever run them.

Except even extremely detailed metrics can miss the “why” behind them. They have a very accurate picture of what people are or are not doing, but it gets fuzzier when you have to determine intent, especially if you don’t ask people.

So a large number of players try the game and leave before level 10. Most of them never dodged during those ten levels. Did they drop the game because dodging was too difficult to understand in early levels? Or did they never dodge because it was never really necessary in lower levels and they left for another reason?

I posted a long while back about why the metrics for my play probably show me enjoying Ascended crafting. I gave it a good try when weapons came out. I have one weapon craft maxed, and two others halfway done. I did champ farming, world boss farming. Eventually I realized this isn’t the kind of game I wanted to play. But it took quite a while before I stopped spending money on gems and drastically reduced my play time, so my metrics would probably never point back to the introduction of vertical progression into the game.

There’s a reason most businesses try to talk to their customers, whether through surveys, focus groups, or customer advocacy departments. Metrics only show part of the story.

Studies have shown that one complaining customer represents about six others who don’t bother to complain, but just take their business elsewhere.