Guild Wars 2

leman.7682:

+ the dev said he really wanted to work on the Abaddon fractal.

The only dev preference for a specific fractal I know of is https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/cutthroat/IMO-ArenaNet-favors-Evon-Unfair/first#post2473277 and it isn’t the Abaddon one.

It’d be hilarious if they somehow work breast-like forms into the design of the TR fractal.

Not going to happen, but it’d be hilarious.

IMO, https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/cutthroat/IMO-ArenaNet-favors-Evon-Unfair/first#post2473277, is reason enough to have voted for Kiel.

They’ve clearly stated they won’t make both fractals.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/cutthroat/IMO-ArenaNet-favors-Evon-Unfair/first#post2473417

It was rigged all along. Kiel was going to win no matter what.

That’s why there was a bug that had the Heralds announcing Evon’s victory.

amirite?

Zale.9645:

The Abaddon fractal was the only thing that mattered in this election. Thaumanova is garbage and so are the temporary reductions. No one cares even remotely about the RP nature of this election. It was about adding the Abaddon fractal and that is an absolute incontestable fact.

I’m trying to figure out how the post where one of the developers said he wanted Kiel to win because they had such great ideas for the Reactor fractal fits into the incontestable fact above.

Thanks, Colin!

15Charrs

Unknownhero.6745:

Lol, Websters dictionary?? Oxford dictionary?? I am pretty sure the Divinitys Reach Public Library does not have a copy of either of those books. Its safer to assume The Tyrian Dictionary of the Common Language has its own meaning for “jubilee” :P

Technically, the TDotCL wouldn’t have a definition for “jubilee” at all. They speak New Krytan, and what we see as “jubilee” would be an English translation for the word the characters in game are using.

So if you want to get technical about “jubilee”, you could argue that the New Krytan name for the festival would better be translated “decennial celebration” rather than "jubilee.

In the end, though, jubilee is just one of those words that has evolved over time. It started out meaning the 50 year celebration after seven Sabbath years, but has come to mean a grand celebration.

Lothirieth.3408:

Maybe Evon had it rigged all along? Seems odd to come back from such a deficit. Who knows.

The announcements were always couched as “exit polls”, which aren’t totally accurate. Is it possible he was in the lead all along, and the results we were being given were made up to give us a surprise turn around?

Fallout.1798:

Avatara.1042:

Heralds are probably bugged. It is the anet way.

I find it odd that the Heralds immediately knew who won.

With mind magic and teleport technology, there’s any number of ways to explain that in game.

Fallout.1798:

So how come I wasn’t told in advance when the polls were closing?

You were, just not very well. ANet seems to have trouble communicating these kinds of things clearly to the player base.

I missed this information myself until seeing it on the forums earlier today. You’d think some sort of big warning in player’s event tracker on the upper right hand corner of their screen would have been a clear way to go. That, or an in-game mail.

Hmmm, kind of expected that. The apparent loser turning it around at the end usually makes for better story.

I wonder, though, if ANet has a hanging-chad story up their sleeves, where we will find out that Ellen actually got the majority vote, but Evon somehow got rigged things to win.

Perhaps there was something more sinister than badly constructed foundations behind the great collapse, and at the end of the festival the earth will open up once again and swallow the Crown Pavilion.

But yeah, I’m with you on the disappointment over temp content. Though I should probably point out that there are plenty of threads addressing it already.

hplee.2839:

Gibson.4036:

What we need is some serious organization over this issue. Are people upset enough to really do something about it?

What if guilds and servers got together and organized a “No more temp content pressure!” demonstration in game? Could be a mass gathering in DR, or perhaps an agreed blackout date where people don’t log in for that specific day.

It would only take a portion of the player base to send a significant signal that this kind of thing hakitten a threshold. A dip of a couple hundred thousand players on a weekend day, or enough people standing in one spot on countless overflow servers.

Then again, maybe, like poeple are fond of saying, there’s only a small minority of us here on the forums who are really upset by this kind of thing.

We had hundreds of players on reddit urging arenanet not to remove SAB from the game…that worked out great, right?

I was thinking a bit larger scale than that, and in game.

But yeah, based on past experience it’d have to be pretty freaking huge to get ANet to really change.

stof.9341:

So, a map has 75 players and 6 arenas. So the queue is composed of 69 players. At a rate of 6 new players that enter every 2 minutes, it means on average you have to wait 20 minutes between the time you leave an arena and can reenter to try again.

I suppose that’s better than having to stand somewhere afk for an hour hoping that a Quaggan will do a brief, non-interactive show so you can get an achievement.

Of course, you only had to do that once.

Ronah.2869:

Al least we should have a “take off cutscene” before the loading screen and one “landing cutscene” after it Something similar to the “elevator” in the Grove

You mean the ones where you see your character standing at your destination as the seed pod that is supposedly carrying you there slowly floats down next to you? :P

What we need is some serious organization over this issue. Are people upset enough to really do something about it?

What if guilds and servers got together and organized a “No more temp content pressure!” demonstration in game? Could be a mass gathering in DR, or perhaps an agreed blackout date where people don’t log in for that specific day.

It would only take a portion of the player base to send a significant signal that this kind of thing hakitten a threshold. A dip of a couple hundred thousand players on a weekend day, or enough people standing in one spot on countless overflow servers.

Then again, maybe, like poeple are fond of saying, there’s only a small minority of us here on the forums who are really upset by this kind of thing.

StinVec.3621:

Pro-RNG VS Anti-RNG
Charr VS Human
Male VS Female
Evon VS Kiel/Trahearne 2.0
Abaddon VS Reactor
GW1 VS GW2

Nice list, but I think you missed one thing.

Kiel is an orphan who grew up to be a Captain of the Lion Guard. Evon is businessman with a monopoly on trade. So to add to your list:

Adventurer VS Capitalist

And while Wall Street hasn’t been on most people’s hero list since the end of the 80s, love for CEOs took a huge in 2008.

Phaedrus.7159:

• A PC can’t “take advantage” of it by using waypoints more, "

Why not? There are plenty of people who moderate their use of waypoints to avoid spending too much money on them. Lower waypoint fees could easily mean increased use of waypoints.

Why vote for the #1 most cuddly Charr?

Tybalt has him beat, paws down.

• In terms of supply and demand, this INCREASES supply, making it cheaper

Supply of mostly usekitten osters that everyone has stacked up in storage any way?

And just to make sure, everyone knows that cheaper keys won’t pull any gold out of the economy, right? Buying gems with gold so you can buy keys just transfers the gold to another player.

And having more BLTC stuff on the TP won’t decrease the cost of all the things you don’t get from BLTCs, which is pretty much everything that’s actually useful.

P.S. Although I’ve made this to look like a typical “propaganda” piece… this is actually a really, really valid reason why you shouldn’t vote for Kiel.

Probably the most convincing part of your propaganda. Adding “really” before anything makes it extra true. Adding a second makes it like unto Holy Scripture.

Just make sure they never try melee combat, and they’ll be fine.

I was always a range type player as well before GW2. I’ve taken four professions (classes) to 80 and geared in exotics, and two others into their 60s, and I can tell you that the ones I play the most are the strong melee professions.

As a general rule melee simply does more damage, while not being all that much harder to survive. You’ll find a lot of people have more fun doing melee even on the classes that seem to lean toward range. Dagger eles were everywhere for a long time, a huge portion of mesmer builds include sword as one of the two weapon sets, and even the assumed bow-and-arrow ranger can do a lot with melee.

Ranged weapons are perfectly viable. Just stay away from melee weapons so you don’t have a comparison.

GW2 converted this ranged player into a melee player.

If the guy who will be designing the winning fractal has reason to want Thaumanova to win, shouldn’t we be listening?

Vote Kiel!

Ah, okay. Thanks.

Um, don’t non-mesmers already have access to a portal bundle item for PvE?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Experimental_Teleportation_Gun

On the whole, I’ve found the stories in GW2 that weren’t trying to be epic more engaging than those that were.

The dragons are so massive and so impersonal that they become kind of ho-hum.

Some of the small stories around the world are much more interesting. I enjoyed Tybalt’s bumbling good-nature, the grandfather and grandson talking about the Dolyak graveyard, the Skritt who recognize their own lack of intelligence when there are enough of them to make them more intelligent (sort of Flowers for Algernon poignant) and the potential in the Caithe/Faolain romance (though I haven’t seen it fleshed out at all, if it is somewhere in the game) to name a few.

How do you care about trying to defeat weather patterns or the shifting of tectonic plates? We need smaller stories with individuals who want things and have obstacles to overcome to punctuate the massive battles and mountain-sized monsters.

In the best stories, the slam-bang, special effects fireworks saturated moments are incredible because of the smaller stories that led up to them, making them important.

There could be improvement in how the stories are crafted and delivered, but making them bigger and flashier, IMO, isn’t what’s necessary.

nico.2946:

To all the ppl that want a realistic hammer….

What is more fun to run around with in this fantasy game where all nearly is about how you look… The 2-handed realistic warhammer or the burning oversized unrealistic 2-handed one?

I like the middle ground, honestly. I’d like them to look hefty, but not silly. IMO, they’ve done a pretty good job finding that middle ground in a lot of the designs for this game. Most heavy armor doesn’t look like the character is swimming around somewhere in the middle (though most shoulder armor is still too large for my taste, thank the devs for the ability to hide it) and greatswords are usually on the oversized side but not so much it looks like the character would fall over while wielding it.

Hammers, however, are an exception. Many of them don’t look like they’d go thunk when they hit.

While we’re at it, it’d be nice if hammers would sit lower on my back when I’m not wielding them. The center of gravity is so high, it looks weird way up there.

Zacchary.6183:

Complaining about people letting you win….

Um… yeah. It makes the game pointless and dull. I wouldn’t think that would be so hard to understand.

generalraccoon.3857:

Personally I couldn’t care less if it is exclusive or 99% of the population is using it, only that I like it.

Agreed. And people often miss the fact that the phase of “everyone is wearing them” only lasts through an update or two, until the next item takes everyone’s fancy.

I’m very happy about both the shattered wings and zenith weapons, because they fit what I was going for with my Sylvari Guardian when I started playing him at launch. Sure there are a lot of people are still wearing the wings, and zenith weapons are everywhere, but I’m already seeing fewer shattered wings than when dragon bash was running, and I expect in a couple of months I’ll be one of the few still running around with them.

You’d think if the rewards were really awesome, it wouldn’t matter if they were “exclusive” or not.

Weirwynn.2390:

Gibson.4036:

Sad that so many people can’t enjoy something unless they know other people don’t have it.

It’s sad so many people don’t know what it means to actually achieve something.

Not the same thing. I’m not saying things should be handed out for free. I was glad no one stood back at the finish line when I was doing Sanctum Sprint so that I could legitimately get first after playing many games and improving.

There should be things that are hard to get.

It’s sad, though, that it’s so easy to find posts saying that if something isn’t extremely rare, it’s worthless. As if something can’t be fun if other people are enjoying it as well.

titanlectro.5029:

Gibson.4036:

Game Update Notes

LIVING WORLD

• Evon Gnashblade has won the seat on the Lion’s Arch Captain’s Council. For the next two weeks he will be near the lion fountain where you can congratulate him. He will reward you for your support with a back piece that looks like a slot machine.

• Black Lion Chests now have a rare chance to drop a Mouth of Torment Key. The Mouth of Torment Key is a soulbound consumable that adds the new Fall of Abaddon Fractal to the fractal roll table for your party for one hour. Mouth of Torment Keys can only be obtained from Black Lion Chests, and only for a limited time!

BLACK LION TRADING COMPANY GEM STORE

• Black Lion Keys are now on sale for 20% off! Get your Mouth of Torment Keys while you still can!

Fixed that for you. There is no way they will just give you the keys for gems, you got to RNG for it and put an unnecessary and vague time-limit on it!

(P.S. Gibson, your post made my day.)

You’re right, your fix works better. Thanks!

Remember the Searing!

Vote Kiel for the Council!

Sad that so many people can’t enjoy something unless they know other people don’t have it.

Game Update Notes

LIVING WORLD

• Evon Gnashblade has won the seat on the Lion’s Arch Captain’s Council. For the next two weeks he will be near the lion fountain where you can congratulate him. He will reward you for your support with a back piece that looks like a slot machine.

• Black Lion Chests now have a rare chance to drop a Mouth of Torment Key. The MoT Key is a soulbound consumable that adds the new Fall of Abaddon Fractal to the fractal roll table when your party enters.

BLACK LION TRADING COMPANY GEM STORE

• Mouth of Torment Keys are now available from the BLTC for 300 gems.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

I wonder what kinds of things would happen if you mixed the Mists with chaos energy…

It might send a thaumentropic wave backwards through time, driving a god of secrets mad enough to rebel against the other gods.

Weird science: allowing you to have your cake and eat it, too, since the 1980s.

CryxTryx.9208:

I’d say for the Keg Brawl that does take away the fun of it. Of course there is nothing stopping you from just scoring. The other team would either have to try and stop you resulting in the actual game being played, or you should just win rather quickly.

True, as long as you are willing to ignore the harassment in chat. I suppose you could just put all the other players on ignore.

Good points about Sanctum Sprint

Good points. Though I felt a lot better about finally winning first after trying over eight or nine games and coming in 2nd a few times than if I had blown over the finish line only to see people standing there waiting. That’s what happened one of the times people did stop at the end.

The real trouble is when players don’t choose to stop at the end and are subject to harassment by those who have.

fadeaway.2807:

Which race?
Which class?
Which order?

Why?

Sylvari – I like their nobility. The character models are actually more attractive than the humans which have a strange, barbie/ken doll quality about them. Asura would be second, but being forced to choose, I’d go awesome over comic.

Guardian – I like almost all of the professions, but Guardian is most able to perform well in all aspects of the game. I love my Mesmer in small scale combat, not so much in large. Same with thief. Warrior for PvE, but not PvP. Ele is pretty good in many different areas, but it’s hard to beat Guardian’s survivability and damage output.

Order – Whispers for Tybalt.

My apologies, this was really about my experience in keg brawl, systemic exploiting of mini-games for achievements and harassing of those who don’t. I accidentally posted after writing just the first paragraph, and had to go back and edit in the rest.

Almost all of the runs of Sprint I have played were very competitive. I think I’ve only seen somebody stand shy of the finish line once or twice.

There has been a lot of discussion surrounding Sanctum Sprint and people stopping to let others have first place. Is it just good sportsmanship, or is it ruining the fun of those who want to play the race as intended and earn their first place?

Today, for the first time in a long time, I stopped by keg brawl, which happens to be included in the dailies. When trying to play the game as intended, I was told not to try and stop the other team scoring, because everyone was trying to get their assists. I was supposed to “play on my own side” and make the score come out even between the teams.

Clearly there’s a problem here with the way achievements and mini-games intersect. It divides the player base between those who actually want to play the mini-game and hope to get their achievements/dailies along the way, and those who just want to exploit their way to achievement completion.

Kneejerk reaction would be to remove minigames from achievements altogether. Achievement hunters can go off and get their points in other parts of the games, leaving people who actually want to play the minigames to enjoy them. The consequence of this, though, would probably make it so that it’d be hard to find anyone ever doing mini-games, outside of the current living story one. Would people be regularly playing keg brawl if there was no daily tie in?

Is there a solution to this that would keep people playing the mini-games as intended?

Agreed.

/15char

RedCobra.7693:

my bad :C i might be responsible for your QQ, ive been camping in OS with my thief for 5 days straight, i let very little people past xD

I’ll make sure to bring my Asura.

Christos de Soufre.3802:

Guru really could have done a better job of finding a host for that show.

I suppose it depends on how much choice they had. They’ve repeatedly put out calls for a PvE version for hosts, and haven’t got anyone qualified enough to do it.

I wonder how many people they had to pick from when they established the PvP State of the Game.

Apotheosis.3786:

Honestly its all the same to me. I don’t like the “Sci-Fi” genre at all. Fake science is nonsensical. Science and fiction are more or less antonyms. I’ve never seen the 2 put together where it doesn’t make me cringe.

I understand.

Fake science (science fantasy) is a lot more common than real science fiction, expecially in movies/tv. Star Wars is a lot more Lord of the Rings than sci-fi which takes the real science of the time it’s written and extrapolates into the future.

One other thing to point out…

What part of the personal story do most people report to be most engaging?

Fighting through hordes of undead in a land saturated in evil juju on the way to fighting a mountain-sized lizard shaped force of nature?

Or the relatively smaller story in the first thirty levels involving things like a competition to win a prize for your Krewe’s invention or uncover the manichinations of a corrupt politician?

I think it’s telling that people, by and large, feel engaged for those smaller stories then lose interest when the personal story tries to turn epic. And as much as I dislike Trahearne like everyone else, it’s not just his fault.

Someone earlier in the thread said it’s easier for writers to make an engaging sword and sorcery story than political intrigue. I’m not so sure that’s true. You can keep making the monsters bigger and the particle effects flashier, but at some point the audience just responds with “ho-hum” if there’s no story there. I’d say it’s easier to find a couple of engaging character who each want something badly, and to cross-purposes with each other than it is to make a terrifying monster and flashy fireworks we haven’t already seen many times before.

IMO, the biggest hurdle for the MMORPG in creating an engaging story is that, by nature, they go against the structure of great stories. In an video game you have a series of challenges to overcome and you move on to the next one by gaining victory over the last.

In a good novel, the story is often advanced by the protagonist failing to overcome the challenges, and when she does get victory she ends up in a worse spot than before. She escapes the current threat, but then realizes she’s taken two steps back for the one she took forward. This builds the intensity to a meaningful climax where she gets her final victory.

Apotheosis.3786:

I just left SWoTR for this. I don’t like syfy at all, and this game is starting to feel very syfy

Technically, Star Wars isn’t even sci-fi. Space Opera, Science Fantasy, but there really isn’t any attempt at science in Star Wars.

And Syfy is the cable channel.

Zedd.8239:

Because they mentioned the books and George R.R. Martin right after mentioning Game of Thrones.

Actually, I wasn’t referring to the television series, which I haven’t seen, and I wasn’t referring to the book series, which I haven’t read. I was refering to the novel, A Game of Thrones which is the first of the series, and the one I am currently reading.

Fantasy does no require heavy magic in order to be fantasy, and the novel A Game of Thrones has plenty of supernatural elements in it even though it is the first in the series. Not only are the White Walkers and Old Gods constantly present in the characters’ conversations, omens figure heavily into the story starting with the discovery of the direwolf hounds, as well as mystical visions like Bran’s while he is unconscious or Ned’s dreams.

It’d probably be clearer for the OP to state that he would like the game to be more Sword and Sorcery or Pulp Fantasy.

I’m not saying that the political elements in GW2 are particularly deep or engaging like the books I mentioned, just pointing out that the assumption that political intrigue doesn’t belong in fantasy is wrong.

Thanks to Locoman for the addition of the Discworld series for a world dripping with magic that still heavily features political and corporate intrigue.

Available for a limited time =/= never available again.

C’mon. Companies do this all the time. Shamrock shakes are available for a limited time every St. Patrick’s day, big screen TV’s go on sale every Memorial day weekend (this sale won’t last forever!), and if you translated “for a limited time” to “I have to by it NAOW!” then you fell for the marketing pressure.

It doesn’t screw you over at all the next time they become available “for a limited time”.

For the record, I have no interest in these things, so I’m not saying the above out of self-interest because I want them to become available again.

Honestly, I get a little overwhelmed with gear in its current state. I know it’s amazingly easy to get full BiS gear compared to other games, but I still get a little lost.

Figuring out your ideal stat spread takes some trial and error, so there’s currency/time lost in trading pieces in and out. Then there’s evaluating whether it’s better to get certain traits from armor or trinkets, and whether it’s best to get them from karma, laurel, guid commendations, gold, or dungeon running.

Then you find out that if you want to optimize, you should probably have a different set of gear for different activities like WvW roaming, Zerg v Zerg, Endgame Dungeons, and open world content and that adds to the sense.

Not complaining, just sharing my reaction.

The only time it bugs me is when doing guild events. I got tired of my main after many months, and have moved on to another character that I know consider my main, as I play him 90% of the time.

Now, I have two options.

1. Keep playing the new character for almost all content as normal, then switch to the old character for Guild events. Eventually my new character will have enough of the world unlocked to reasonably participate.

2. Do some Waypoint grinding where I ignore everything and just try to blast through zones as quickly as possible to get enough of them open on the new character.

Option one is all right, but it’s frustrating to play a character you’ve tired of just because they can keep up. Option two is dreadfully dull.

I understand having each character explore the world fresh. I just wish there were away around the dilemma above.

Yes, she’s holding it with one hand, but she’s… well…. Buffy.

Give it a longer handle and it would make a very reasonable two-hander for the rest of us.

Something more like…?

Game of Thrones wants to have a word with you.

Not to mention Under Heaven, The City and the City, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, The Scar, The Iron Council, Perdido Street Station, Sailing to Sarantium, and many others, all incorporating political and/or coporate intrigue into fantasy.

Every title in this post was a nominee for the World Fantasy Award.

There can be plenty of emotion evoked in trade agreements and employment contracts. It’s all in how you tell the story.