Guild Wars 2

Ayakaru.6583:

Everyone is saying that the My Biggest Fear plotline is missing, but I completed it on my Thief last week and started one on my elementalist today. it’s still there.

Danikat.8537:

I think there’s a bit of confusion because there’s 3 different possibilities.

1) Your character had finished the story
Originally the September 9th patch changed the story journal to show the new format. On the 16th this was reverted so characters who had already finished the story had the Greatest Fear arc included in their journals.

2) Your character had started the level 70 arc before the 9th September
You will get to play through the original format, including the Greatest Fear arc. I wasn’t able to confirm this myself but I believe all the other chapters will be in the original order too.

3) Your character had not reached the level 70 arc before 9th September
This applies to both new characters and existing ones below level 70. These characters have to play through the new format, where the Greatest Fear storyline has been removed.

I’m 100% sure that 1 and 3 are correct. I’m not willing to risk taking one of my permanent characters who were below level 70 through the story to check 2 but that’s what’s been reported by other people in this and other threads.

DarksunG.9537:

Leah Hoyer.9382:

Thanks for the feedback, folks. I appreciate your comments and will say that consistent, complex, nuanced characters and storytelling are absolutely my goal as well. I’m soaking up all the existing story that I can, via gameplay, wikis, our novels, and lots and lots of conversations with my coworkers who have great insights (and opinions) on our expansive lore. I really love the game and am excited to be a part of it moving forward. Keep the comments coming!

Leah
(now with fancy, red ANet banner)

Are you going to continue going with the feminist flavor they’ve added to the GW story?

If you mean “Are you going to keep treating men and women as equal?”, then I definitely hope so.

If you’re trying to ask anything else, please go re-read the ToS and stop posting here.

Back on topic, I actually think a large part of Trahearne’s problem is the voice acting. He sounds dismissive and arrogant. So even when his lines are innocuous people react badly. Add in some lines that are genuinely dumb and the usual NPC pathing/AI issues, and it’s no wonder people don’t like him. There’s also the way he’s introduced much earlier and more effectively with 1 race but not with all.

Event tokens – puppies and kittens, no. Currency creep is a bug, not a feature! We already get gold and karma from events, why do you want more? I would like to be able to use karma for more things, but we don’t need a new currency to replicate karma.

My suggestions:
1) Karma should be useful for more items. Right now it’s kind of a wasted currency. There used to be many things we could get for karma, but they keep being removed, especially bulk purchases of cooking ingredients. This is very frustrating, and I wish those would be restored. They were account bound, so they couldn’t even go on the TP.

2) Traits need to be changed. A few ideas:

• Unlock a trait account wide once earned. Ex: I unlock the Line 1, Trait 1 on one character. The Line 1, Trait 1 is now unlocked for all professions. The goal is less boring repetition.
• Have a quest/event chain/story step that unlocks traits at each level. Each profession would have an adept-unlock chain, a master-unlock chain and a grandmaster-unlock chain. This could be an early PS step that reuses the characters that disappear like family members, warbands, etc. Or it could be a special Living Story type chapter. Or maybe just an event chain that players get pointed to after they hit a certain level.

3) Housing instances are basically unused. Tie them into the story or lore. We need to rebuild LA now, could players donate or perform an event chain to get special things for their home instance? Perhaps characters we met through the PS and LS can show up sometimes in our home instance? I want to see our homes integrated into the game so they actually feel like homes.

4) Exploration should be fun. I want to find hidden awesome in random crannies instead of feeling like the only reason to explore is to hit all the POIs. This doesn’t need to be hidden chests. Great places to hang out in (there’s a wonderful hidden pool in Caledon Forest that would be great for RP), interesting area-specific mob behavior or hidden events are good too. The skritt undermountain area in Brisban Wildlands is a good example. It advances lore, has fun NPCs, is visually interesting and has fun events. Exploring there was rewarding because it was fun, even though it’s not lucrative.

I know some people are very interested in raids.

But a lot of people aren’t.

My big concerns for raids are:

1) How many resources are they going to take away from other content? There are still significant areas of the game that need improvement (also, better process management and QA/bugfixing, which takes developer resources).

2) GW2 has a focus on easy content access – not requiring large guilds to play content, easy grouping, de-emphasizing the standard combat roles to favor flexible group formation, etc. This design was a big part of why I purchased GW2. I worry that raids would encourage tensions between focused players and more general players, which are already stressful, and gate off content behind large guilds.

3) How much will raids impact the ability to do existing dungeons? If all or most of the focused dungeon runners move on to new content, will that effectively make dungeon running much harder? Since dungeons are required for PvE goals like legendaries and some armor, I can see this being a major roadblock to people without large enough guilds.

It would be great for GW2 to have content for more player types. Some players aren’t satisfied with the current dungeon content – OK, that should be addressed. But I’m wary of content that could deepen the divide between some groups of players. There’s always going to be people who need more content or harder content or better farming areas, ad infinitum. I’d rather the game didn’t cater to any niche group. I think GW2 has a good balance going at the moment and don’t want to lose that to favor 1 playstyle over another.

Random closing thought – what if WvW could be improved for group combat or add raid-style content?

I’m playing through the Blood Legion story, finishing up Time for a Promotion. The last part of the instance doesn’t make any sense. When the warband is down to 2 members and a new recruit, why does Rytlock only give us the option of taking 1 Charr on?

For those who don’t play Blood Legion, the setup is:

The head of our warband was a blustering idiot. We got promoted to his job. Immediately after promising a better leader, we are informed that we can only choose 1 of the 2 needed replacements to bring our warband up to minimum strength. Also, we need to make that choice now. No chance to interview or get feedback from existing members.

Warbands are supposed to be 5-15 strong. The PC warband is:

• PC
• Sparring partner
• Lady from supply run

That’s 2 short of the minimum 5. Taking only 1 of Rytlock’s buddies keeps us understrength. If both Charr need a new warband, we should take both.

We could pick which one to ask first. But it doesn’t seem logical to not ask both NPCs to join us.

Unless I’m missing something major here, this seems like an unnecessary and foolish choice. Warbands are supposed to be military units and families – this is handled badly from both perspectives. It makes me feel like an idiot and bad leader.

Warband as military:
1) Good officers don’t deliberately keep their unit weak. This ‘choice’ is a complete about face from the scene’s emphasis on good leadership.

2) The appropriate reaction to a suggestion from the general who just promoted you is ‘Sir yes sir!’. Lieutenants don’t get the final word on who is in their units.

Warband as family substitute:
3) Adding a new family member is tricky. The right way is to go talk to both options and see how they’d work with existing warband members. But we don’t get the option to go do interviews, or even ask for feedback.

TL;DR
This choice doesn’t work with either paradigm for a warband. It’s bad from both the military and familial perspective.

It’s also incredibly tone deaf to force a choice between boneheaded alternatives immediately after we promise to not be a bonehead.

Eles are fun in WvW. Just match the weapon to the situation. D/D is good for damage and mobility. Staff is good for a large zerg, especially when you’re not on the front line. Use a Focus when for extra defense. People seem to like scepters now, but I don’t use them much.

The real trick: Be situationally aware and get out of fights overwhelming fights early. Pick skills and traits with an eye on mobility, especially when using d/d or d/f. Eles either spike opponents down or land them with tons of conditions, either way we spend a lot of time dodging and manuvering.

For WvW I prefer a mix with Soldier’s/PVT over straight zerker. Zerker is fine if you aren’t going to be a target, or if you know the encounters well. For unpredictable or laggy environments like WvW the ability to survive a hit you don’t see coming (and can’t dodge) is important.

Elementalist forums have a lot of good info.

Really, it depends on what works for you. Some classes I don’t play because their mechanics don’t work my instincts. Figuring out how you like playing and what class works well with your preferences will make you more effective regardless of the current meta.

I prefer D/D for mobility. I found that D/F was better in some circumstances, but when roaming solo the movement and firepower that D/D brings makes a difference. I"m not running an optimized meta build by any means, but my D/D does decently. Especially if you go for the squishier builds make sure to take escape skills and the Arcane Abatement trait. Being able to mist form over the edge of a cliff and air#4 to get away has been useful more than once. YMMV, as always.

GW2 is designed so that things don’t really change after reaching 80 – there isn’t an endgame per se. A lot of people start working on whatever part of the game they’re interested in, like map completion, fractals, WvW or PvP, skin collection, whatever floats your boat.

syn.9756:

Alright how do I change servers? I know it’s been two years since I played on whatever server I am on now, so I don’t mind switching to meet up with someone that is trying to help me and maybe we can game together a lot. Umm I know I won’t be on for a few days but I’m going to check out some more videos and read up on some wiki stuff so hopefully I’ll be ready to start a toon. Thank you again for offering to help. Just pm me how to switch and add you.

There’s no need to switch servers. You can guest to any server, and if you are on a map that is part of the megaserver you will meet up with people from all servers. Finding a good guild is probably the best way to meet people in-game. You can check out the guild recruitment forum, or…

A good new player guild is Operation Union / Legion of Honor (full disclosure: I’ve been in LoH since nearly the beginning). We try to provide a good, casual introduction to the game for new players and also have guild missions, etc for the more hardcore. The guild site is http://operationunion.enjin.com/

John Corpening.9847:

Hey Guys,

Normally I like to summarize the discussion as it is happening but today I’ve been away from my desk for most of the day and just popped on to see that we are at 6 pages! YIKES! It’s going to take me a bit to catch up because I read every post in a thread that I’m engaging in. I’m making this post to let you know that I am reading this thread but I’d like to absorb everything everyone is discussing before I make my next response.

Thanks,
John

The problem I see with most of the suggestions (especially population caps) is that they don’t address the root issue. The root issue is that WvW doesn’t scale well with player count. Server population is the most important metric for server success. I think we should take a look at WvW mechanics to make WvW fun at a wider range of populations.

GW2 gameplay really is group focused. Most of the game content is possible to solo, but really designed for multiple players working together. This extends from combat mechanics to content design. When there aren’t enough players around, the game is more difficult. Also, WvW maps have a certain number of objectives, and a certain size. This means that there is a minimum number of players to effectively attack and defend a single map. These players also need to be sufficiently organized.

This all makes WvW much harder below a certain concentration of players. While server merges to boost player numbers and population caps to limit zergs are tempting, they don’t solve the issue of WvW design being essentially unfriendly to small groups.

I used to play on Henge of Denravi, which was heavily outnumbered and suffered badly during that period. Here are some things I would have liked to see, and some things that I’ve noticed on high pop servers that I think could be replicated for lower pop servers:

1) Man Up When Outmanned
There’s a village on each borderlands map. When players are few, spawn more NPC guards and villagers to defend their homes. The NPCs should act semi-independently in their server’s home area to replicate the feeling of PCs. They could also offer to accompany players to replicate some of the feeling of a group. Players still have the option of solo play, but they can also be backed up by helpers when wanted. A population-dependent NPC cohort also helps keep a few PCs PvDooring overnight from decimating a server’s score, which can be very depressing.

2) Shout For Help
Make it easier for outnumbered players to coordinate and fight together by providing more communication. Treat commanders from the outnumbered server like a POI and have the minimap point players to them. Popup an event when a player from the outnumbered server gets into combat. Try to provide some of the communication an organized WvW guild would.

3) Tune the Outmanned buff
Weight or tier the Outmanned buff so that it scales more effectively with the population difference.

4) Siege the Suckers
If a server is heavily outmanned, maybe they should get more siege, or get easier access to other WvW assets. Provide a counterweight to the higher population so that fewer players can still effectively defend the large WvW maps.

5) Downed But Not Out
Make the downed state less of a certain-death experience for players on an outnumbered server. Right now, going down when outnumbered is very hard to recover from. Make this less of a hurdle to players who don’t have allies in WvW to back them up. Grouped NPC revivers could work (and wouldn’t impact other areas of the game).

6) Shiny New WvW Gameplay
Make WvW specific mechanics and gameplay that people can access when they’re outnumbered. This would also reignite interest in WvW.

7) Shiny New Small Group Gameplay
Guerilla warfare has a long and storied history. I would love to be able to play a small group raider in GW2, but zergs are so powerful that other grouping options aren’t fun for most players (including me). New party or small group features would change WvW to make high population and constant coverage less important. It could also be an interesting new feature for PvE. 2 birds, 1 stone!

I think the basic problem of WvW is that a certain number of players is needed to play effectively. Having a coherent WvW strategy (or even surviving a play session) below that threshold is frustrating. Population caps and other stopgaps won’t fix the design issue of not scaling well with player populations. I know they’re probably easier right now, but I think they’d make the WvW population problem worse in the long run and cause many complaints in the short term. I hope my suggestions are a good starting point for how WvW could be tweaked to disconnect server success from server population.

LS has had it’s ups and downs. Flame & Frost actually got me invested. I know some people complained about the pace…but there were also a lot of people who loved it. The slower pace meant that people with jobs could actually participate in the story instead of rushing through it, and the way it was clearly happening in a few zones focused the story and players.

LS1 seemed to be trying to do everything at once. It worked OK at first but got unfocused, and soon it felt too rushed to hold my interest.

Flame & Frost’s problem was not fitting smoothly with the personal story and my game experience. LS1’s problem was being boring and overwhelming at the same time. I finished F&F and bought a molten axe pick. I even didn’t finish LS1.

All of the professions are fine for leveling, and all of them have something competitive in PvP (I think). Which profession works for you is going to depend on how you like to play. I mostly do PvE but here’s my take:

People like elementalists for their constant motion and strategy – you always have to be on your toes and thinking a few steps ahead, but elementalists played right can do everything (played badly, all they can do is die).

People like warriors for their straightforward nature – you can survive hits and take foes down quickly.

People like thiefs for their control of the battlefield and high DPS – you can be in and out before people know it.

People like guardians for survivability and group synergy – guardians can stand up to foes well and are welcome everywhere.

Rangers are great at distance with a longbow…and otherwise get to practice carefully controlling the battlefield.

Class preference is more about what fits with your habits and how you think. Any class can do almost anything in PvE. The key is how they can do it, and if you’re comfortable playing that way. With PvP and WvW, that’s even more important – you have to be very centered in your classes’ skin.

Everyone always complains about nerfs. Every single patch. I haven’t heard anything major except for the ranger change. If warriors and thiefs did get a nerf, then it’s about time. I’m sure they’re still fine to play, just not as dominant as they once were.

Chiming in to say that the new trait system is complete BS. There’s no way I’m making a new alt like this. Thankfully I’d already made the alts I wanted, they got the unlocked traits for pre-existing characters (AFAIK – if that’s not true I won’t bother leveling).

If the new unlocks were account wide, I could understand that change. But putting level gates and gold gates on essential gameplay features on a per character basis? What on earth were they smoking? Besides the dollar bills they’re assuming are going to roll in from people buying gold to buy traits?

This change makes me mad because:
1) It makes the game much more tedious for everyone
2) It means that new characters are much less powerful than old ones
3) It kills build experimentation in a game that already suffers from focus on meta builds
4) If ANet is willing to gold gate an essential feature like traits, what else will they do it to?

All of these make me less interested in spending time and money on GW2. I have stopped recommending it to friends, and have started steering people away from it.

Leah Hoyer.9382:

Thanks for the feedback, folks. I appreciate your comments and will say that consistent, complex, nuanced characters and storytelling are absolutely my goal as well. I’m soaking up all the existing story that I can, via gameplay, wikis, our novels, and lots and lots of conversations with my coworkers who have great insights (and opinions) on our expansive lore. I really love the game and am excited to be a part of it moving forward. Keep the comments coming!

Leah
(now with fancy, red ANet banner)

Great to have you on board!

My issues with the main storylines (Personal Story and Living Story) can be boiled down to lack o’ acknowledgement and loss without replacement.

Loss without Replacement: Others have talked a bit about how the LS feels like constant destruction without reconstruction. I can go along with destruction, but only so much, and then it feels like the writers are messing with me and just taking fun parts of the game away. This also causes problems with suspension of disbelief, because no actual living people are going to stay in the same state for a year. They would rebuild, move, etc.

Nothing has really replaced Lion’s Arch as a city that feels intriguing, surprising and alive. Kessex Hills’ story is all confused now – the human story and the Living Story both run through there, and they don’t get told well. The Sylvari racial story is also heavily impacted, although I haven’t finished LS2 so I’m withholding judgement on that.

I would love it if we could do in Dry Top what we were told would happen in Orr – cleanse the land of the dragon’s poison. That would be awesome, and a refreshing change from battling bitterly to preserve the status quo and failing even at that.

Lack o’ Acknowledgement: Both the Personal Story and the Living Story suffer from this. Players want to see that their choices matter. Without that, it feels like the stories we play through are fake, or wastes of time. This is totally separate from whether a zone is impacted or not. My experience of Tyria’s story is basically the same see-monster, slay-monster regardless of the zone art.

A game that does this better is Elder Scrolls Morrowind. In Morrowind, you start the game as nobody. As you gain power, merchants start remembering your name. Your guild members notice your achievements (sometimes only to insult you, but still). Political and religious rivals threaten you. This is all 99% text changes, but it makes the world feel alive, because it reacts to your choices.

That’s hard to do in an open world MMO, sure. But in Living Story instances, where the game knows who is there, it’s jarring to be treated like a random shmuck. The LS plots are written as a complete do over, which negates most of the work we put into the Personal Story. Why don’t people get excited about one of the heroes of Orr coming to help them? In LS1, a remark in the molten dungeon instance if the party leader had certain story achievements, for example, might have made things feel more continuous.

Both of my big issues boil down to continuity – Tyria’s stories don’t feel connected to each other or to my actions in the game. So far, the Living Story has been about losing fun experiences for a plot that ignores my choices.

I don’t want to get invested in people and places if their inevitable fate is to be disintegrated all over the landscape. I do want to see Tyria living and growing and dealing with previous changes. Dialogues in instances, letters from people I’ve met and organic changes to address the effects of previous story updates might help to tie the stories together.

TL;DR Stories that are all destruction, doom and failing to preserve peace get old. Time for a change. That change should include ways for players to see that their previous choices were important by having the player experience acknowledge those choices and not just by changing the zone art.

EDIT: Changed “lack of” to “lack o’” to avoid kittening.

The first few levels are the hardest, and it honestly gets easier as you go along. It doesn’t take very long to level, and you don’t have to work at it. Don’t worry about gear either, just use dropped gear or karma gear. Once you get to 80 you’ll understand how the game plays and will be able to start building a spec, but while leveling just replace things as better gear drops and you’ll be fine.

One tip about crafting stations – they also give you access to your bank, so you don’t need to go into the city to find a bank if you can find a nearby crafting station.

You probably won’t be able to keep yourself geared by crafting on your first character, it’s just hard to get mats quickly enough. However, crafting is very good for XP, or for making specific sets in the late game.

Ele is the compromise class – they can do a little bit of everything but you have to spec for something to make it powerful. Also, they take a lot more work and strategy than some of the other classes. I dived into ele as my first class and love it, but it’s kind of tiring to play.

Warrior and Guardian are good first choices.

Thief is also squishy and I haven’t gotten the hang of its mechanics. My thief is my trading mule at this point.

Ranger is a lot of fun! But you do have to be careful in PvE.

Haven’t really tried mesmer or engineer.

Every person has their favorite class (I love elementalist and playing a warrior puts me to sleep ), so try as many as seem interesting. Buying extra bank slots is definitely worth it if you like to collect things at all.

Elementalist has to move around a lot more than other classes, they are the lightest armor and lowest HP class in the game. If they stand still they will be squished. But they are super fun if you like constant action and their moves are very flashy.

Warriors can facetank much more effectively, as can guardians. Warriors do high DPS. Guardians can also protect and buff (grant boons) to their allies very effectively.

Thiefs are squishy and need to be strategic in battle, but can ambush from invisibility.

Rangers have pets to use as tanks, which is quite nice. Pet AI is one of the perennial Ranger complaints though.

Mesmers can do long-distance portals. Everyone will want to be your friend so you will port them to the end of jumping puzzles.

Necros have the coolest downed state and are very powerful with conditions (the opposite of buffs / boons).

Not sure about engineers.

The most important thing is to have fun. The game is built so that if you don’t like a part of the game you don’t have to play it.

Hi!

I’m in NA, so I can’t be a leveling buddy. Feel free to add me ingame if you have any questions!

You could try finding an EU guild that focuses on helping new players, or just asking the people around you if they want to run together for a bit. I know there was an EU branch of Operation Union, but I don’t know what’s happening with it now.

First off, welcome!

XP is earned a little differently in Guild Wars 2 than in other MMOs. Everything you do earns you XP. There is literally nothing you do that doesn’t give you XP except for changing / re-dyeing your outfit. I’ve seen some new players make the mistake of thinking that they are supposed to go straight from one personal story instance to another. But the game is really set up with the expectation that you are exploring, gathering, doing events and hearts as you go along.

Most people level by doing the following:
Hearts (big yellow hearts on the map once done, empty hearts before completion) give karma and access to merchants (and XP) once completed.
Events (orange circles, monsters or swords on the map) give gold (and XP).

Gathering crafting mats with a pick, axe or sickle gives easy XP plus a mat to use or sell.
Killing mobs also gives XP plus drops or mats.

If you are in an area where the mobs and events are above your level, you should go back and finish exploring lower-level areas. Or, you can go to Lion’s Arch and go through Asura gates to get to the other beginning zones if you want.

Also, class can make things harder. Some classes are easy to start with, some are much harder to start with, but get more powerful in the late game.

Leveling with other people can be much more fun. There are several guilds that help new people. The guild I’m in (Legion of Honor / Operation Union) was specifically founded to help new players, the thread for signup is here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/players/OPERATION-UNION-Bringing-Players-Together/page/36

There’s someone who’s going to be doing a group-leveling event, the link for times and places is here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1j7au4/figured_i_would_extend_the_offer_here_if_anyone/

ColinJohanson.2394:

Hope that helps give more insight into what we’re trying to do here, these changes are directly tied to feedback we’ve received. You don’t have to agree with them, but it’s important we explain why we’re doing them so folks understand the end goal, which I don’t believe we’ve reached yet until the rewards are there as well.

And now off to do that work thing, thanks for the feedback folks, as always keep it coming we really appreciate it!

Thanks so much for coming and talking to us!

Honestly, I don’t think the basic problem is monetary rewards. The problem is there isn’t anything besides the monetary rewards.

Cosmetic aspects of the game aren’t well integrated into the gameplay, and we don’t have tools to set and strive for cosmetic goals. Farming is fun, but I’d like to have other options at the end-game.

Take minis – it’s hard to see them while running and fighting, and it’s easy to accidentally deposit them. Frustrating + useless means that I’m don’t care about minis. Giving minis more functionality (pet contests, mini displays, loot pickup, pokemon-style minigame, etc), making minis more prominent while in Tyria, or at least making them less irritating, would be more fun and rewarding.

Same for skins. Discovering different skins is difficult, and experimenting with outfits can be expensive. We could use a better way to model complete outfits, and definitely some way to know where we should go look for the skins we want. Give players the tools to find and strive for the perfect outfit.

Town clothes can’t be used in 90% of the game. Better integration here would help a lot. Guards that insist we disarm before entering a shop? City NPCs giving different dialogue depending on town outfit? Option to equip town clothes automatically when entering a town? There’s all kinds of options. Right now town clothes feel like a waste of time and money.

TL;DR There’s nothing much besides monetary rewards for people to aim for. Comestic aspects seem disconnected and unimportant. Expanding and integrating them would make the game more rewarding and give people something to do besides farm.

GuzziHero.2467:

I am levelling all 3 in stages. Theyre at lvl 10 now.

Necro I have not been downed.
Mesmer I got downed once each in story and defeated once.
Ele I got defeated 14 times.

Yeah, I think you have an answer

Yup. Ele survivability really depends on player skill. When I was leveling I got downed in every other fight. Now that I know my way around the class, even the karka queen doesn’t put me down while other players who rely on their class’s defensive abilities fall like tons of bricks.

Ele and mesmer both really depend on traits and skills that you don’t have access to at low levels. They’re like D&D wizards – super squishy and ridiculous to start with, but you bear with it because the endgame is great once you know what you’re doing.

That said, the bunker build really is the only viable build atm. I’m not sure how else it could be, since with the ele being the squishiest class we have to make up the lack of armor and HP somewhere.

Yeah, ANet hasn’t quite gotten storytelling right yet. It’s like they have a wonderful story, but then fall down on telling it to us.

Maybe an in-game newsletter or some other way for rumors to pop up would help. The Heralds are nice, but could we also have randomly added NPCs running around city zones talking about events? Signs and newsletters posted up in small villages for people to read? The mailed letters are nice, more of that? IDK which options are better, but I’d like for story quality to be more even.

It would also be cool to have NPCs who could direct people to events that haven’t fired in a while, or let them know about secret places when they first enter a zone, etc. Just some way to learn the often empty mid-level areas better than relying on hearts.

I would buy something like the Torchlight ferret in a heartbeat. Ooh! Even better, ANet could charge to add the feature to a mini! It could be a gem store item that you use and then select whichever mini you want to have the feature. I’d finally have some way to use my mini collection.

I would also pay for a Town Clothing bank tab. Even just a Skins bank tab that I could put skins into manually so that I wouldn’t be taking up regular bank space.

More inexhaustible gathering tools. I’d settle for ones with no animations if ANet made them cheaper.

Auto-sorting bags sounds like a good idea. I don’t play fractals much.

Auto-salvaging sounds a little risky. I mean, at this point it’s not worth it to salvage high-level cloth or leather items, I just sell them instead.

The best way I found was to pick a few things and try just one or two at a time to see how they sold. After about 2 weeks you can get an idea of the weekly cycle (if the item has one, but most do) and whether you want to flip it or not. A lot depends on risk tolerance. And a lot of the time, items that look good don’t sell quickly. My rule of thumb is, if it’s been more than a week it’s definitely time to relist, and I try to relist if it hasn’t sold after 3 days. I deal mostly in items that don’t move much though, so YMMV depending on what you’re flipping. I find that there is usually a distinct weekly cycle though, and if something hasn’t sold in a whole week than I’ve probably just priced it wrong.

Staying away from high volume, low margin items is definitely the right way to go, since a small shift on those can wipe out profits for the whole day. once you get to high income levels I hear larger volumes become more important, but I’m not that interested in super competitive trading so I focus on the small potatoes markets.

You may well be in a minority. The only thing this thread shows is that you’re not the only one.

For the record, I think town clothes need to either be more useful (use in combat, they all have special abilities, etc) or they need to not take up storage space. I’m not buying any more skins at this point because I don’t have the room. If ANet really wants to make money off the collector mindset, they kind of fell down on the job here.

I would be happy with a weekly update of non-patch changes.

My 2 cents:

This was definitely worse that F&F, but there was also a lot of fun stuff here.

Good

• Lots of events and event variety. There were some events with funny dialogue, some for big zergs, some for small groups, etc.
• The backpieces. I didn’t have a lot of time this month, but I could still get cool stuff.
• MF buff. Seriously, this had a big impact on relaxed and fun the island was. I didn’t feel the pressure of ‘This is a waste of time, why are drops so bad’ that I do in regular PvE. When a mob was hard I felt like the work I put in was worth it. I felt like I was progressing on my overall goals as well as the event content instead of having to choose one or the other.

Bad

• There were places where the speed of development impacted content quality and made my playtime less fun. Things weren’t as polished and didn’t flow as smoothly, I felt like I lost the thread of the story at several points and relied on guides to get back on track.
• RNG boxes. I know why you do this, I definitely don’t like or agree.
• Timing. I haven’t tried the instances yet, due to lack of time. Next month is also going to be crunched. I know you guys want to put out regular content updates, but I’d be happy if you went to every 6 weeks or every 2 months instead of every month. At this rate, I feel like I don’t have time to play the regular game anymore. I have to choose between the temporary stuff or the rest of the game and that’s kind of irritating.

Overall, this was OK, but not actually fun in the way F&F or SAB were.

Overkillengine.6084:

Maximillian Greil.1965:

That’s the general idea. Look at the Wintersday Skins, no one uses them because they were soooo common. It’s been 5 months since Wintersday and the skins are still at less than 10 silver.

The idea behind rare items is to give them value. Yes, putting them in lottery boxes is a way to make money, and yes they are a company that needs to make money to continue to keep the game running, but no one is forcing you to get this skin. If you think it’s unfair or you don’t like the way it’s implemented… the solution is simple, don’t get it.

Rarity has jack all to do with no one using the Wintersday skins. They were ugly/goofy looking.

I liked the Wintersday gemstore skins and bought several of them. The particle effects are nice, and I’m looking forward to getting my warrior to level 80 so he can use them (no sense in transmuting while leveling, it happens too fast). If you’re talking about the toy skins, then yeah, those are weird looking. The only nice one is the Princess Wand. Hammer is maybe good to keep around for next Christmas.

Honestly, I’m tired of fighting the RNG battle. There’s so many nice skins in the game already that I honestly don’t care anymore, I can always find something I like. At this point, nothing we can really say will stop ANet from putting these out, and there’s a whole huge gambling industry to show that building a business on the back of suckers and addicts is viable. ANet isn’t going to turn down that revenue stream.

marnick.4305:

Gilosean.3805:

marnick.4305:

In PVE, having an API call every second is more than plenty for almost all purposes. Most relevant calls are on hour-long timers, and a few minutes won’t make a difference.

With a few exceptions – the Maw metaevent can actually start and finish in under a minute (I only saw this once). So I think reasonable timing also depends on how many people you expect to swarm the event and finish it.

If that happens, do you think it’d have made a difference? Such a time presumes overflow.

You mean the area was probably already overflowing? Maybe. The thing is that if we are relying on accurate timers and not hanging around the area, events probably won’t go into overflow before the event starts. So it could still make a difference.

I’d still say that for events that so many people are interested in, pinging more frequently is a good idea. Maybe not down to ms, but once every second. No need to do that for regular events though. Just have a the single-event queries for the metaevents with chests and get a general event dump every minute, something like that.

penatbater.4710:

I’d rather that you lose those stacks if you unequip your weapon with the sigil stacking thing,

That would be terrible for eles, because each attunement change counts as a weapon swap. Even though we’re still using the same weapon.

I find that there’s lots of things to do. I like gathering, I like doing puzzles, I like just running around looking for lore, I have fun doing events with friends or helping new players learn the ropes. I don’t mind dungeons, maybe because I don’t grind dungeons. Crafting is kind of boring – it’s basically just gathering and inventory management – but I honestly don’t like crafting minigames so that’s OK too. I like WvW in small doses. I’m not interested in sPvP, but it’s there if I want it.

I agree that if you like minigames there isn’t a lot to do, and minis should be made more interesting.

Where are you seeing NCSoft saying anything about an expansion? In the Q1 results call they just had, they praised how well GW2 was doing and said that they weren’t thinking about an expansion yet since sales (box + gem) were still doing well.

Anyone can start a business in the US. They go out of business if they can’t satisfy customers.

Try complaining to the Better Business Bureau (https://www.bbb.org/us/), that can light a fire under people and make them do what they promised. If you used a credit card, you may also be able to request a chargeback, although frequently there are time limits and you may be passed them.

Other options include suing in small claims court (not sure how that would work across international borders). Or just suing in general, but paying for a lawyer can be kind of expensive.

marnick.4305:

In PVE, having an API call every second is more than plenty for almost all purposes. Most relevant calls are on hour-long timers, and a few minutes won’t make a difference.

With a few exceptions – the Maw metaevent can actually start and finish in under a minute (I only saw this once). So I think reasonable timing also depends on how many people you expect to swarm the event and finish it.

Awesome! The API is really exciting news, and I’m so happy to see that people are already doing stuff in C# with it. Anyone thinking about using Mono/Xamarin to get an Android app out of this?

Some people are setting up a GW2 Trello board and chat room to help coordinate development. The thread is here if you’re interested: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/community/api/Want-to-collaborate-on-GW2-apps-Start-here/first

Awesome. I’d love to program with people to make GW2 apps. I currently work in C# and SQL, but I could start dusting off Python if there’s more interest in that.

Trello – @gilosean
Not on Github or any source control system yet.

I agree that it is a better idea to let individual projects choose their own source control with maybe a central person who has access to all of them so even if devs leave the project can keep going with new people. We might want to have a central development spot for things that everyone will be using, like an API wrapper for each language?

Leablo.2651:

Gilosean.3805:

Honestly, filesize and storage space shouldn’t be an issue unless the game is coded weirdly on the back end. Which could well be, but it’s just odd. If they’re that worried about it, just charge a lot for it, or maybe make bank slots more expensive after the X number or something.

I don’t think it’s a technical limitation necessarily. Every game I know of has some upper limit on total inventory space, even offline games where the dev doesn’t have to worry about file sizes. IMO this is more a discussion on design and whether inventory limits serve a real purpose or whether it’s just a habitual trope inherited from decades of RPG experience.

In one of the videos they were talking about filesize being a reason they weren’t doing skin lockers I heard. And the choice of 250 for max stack size could well be related to space concerns. 256 is the max size of a byte, anything over that and the storage space needed is automatically doubled. Inventory limits were originally about space issues. At this point it’s a standard part of the game, but memory and storage limits were a huge problem for computer programs. It’s only recently that storage has become so cheap that space isn’t a top concern.

Now, this could well be a game design choice, or some combo of game design + storage. But it just seems odd that a game designed around collecting things would limit storage space like that. There’s no vertical progression, it’s all about different looks and builds, so the game sounds like it should be about collecting multiple sets of skins, armor, etc. But the way storage space is set up, collecting multiple sets is actually a problem. It makes the game seem a little bipolar.

The best way to get karma is to do the daily. While you’re farming for mats or in WvW, just make sure to tick off the daily categories. Store the jugs in your bank. Wait until there are karma boosts up in LA and drink all the jugs at once. If you stack all the karma boosts available, I think you can nearly double the amount of karma in a jug. Even after you get all your shards, you can use the karma for the RNG Orr boxes to turn karma into gold.

For mats and gold, maybe mix farming up with your dungeon runs? Make sure not to get DR farming and then bring it to the dungeon, but dungeons are more regularly rewarding than PvE lots of times.

For gold, the standard answers – CoF, TP, world bosses – do work. You can mix and match those for decent money and mats. If you need a break from Orr, try farming in 35-60 zones. There are fewer people farming there, so you can sell T3 and T4 mats or mid-level cooking mats for surprising amounts of money. Not as good as T6, but it’s not bad.

Most dungeons definitely aren’t casual. Why? Because you need to schedule a large chunk of time for them. They’re appointments you make with people, and even the lower-level ones can take a while (3 hour AC Story run for a lowbie friend a few months ago is my record, but I know someone who was stuck in TA for 4 hours >.< ). I frequently can’t play them because I usually don’t have that kind of uninterrupted time.

Dungeons have 2 parts, story and explorable. Story goes over the dungeon and ties into personal story. It’s like an intro section. You can’t start explorable mode until you have done story, although if someone else is opening the dungeon they can bring you in even if you haven’t finished story mode. Explorable gives tokens for end-game gear and is full of combat, etc.

The most important thing when doing a first dungeon is to tell your party members you’ve never done it before. Most people are perfectly willing to help a new person, but you need to say that at the beginning or they won’t know.

Wiki link, you really do need to read this: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dungeons

+1 to Living Story cutscenes being better. Just that bit of immersion that makes the stereotypical plot lines work better. The actual dialogue isn’t better overall, but being a part of the scene helps smooth that over. And I didn’t notice any specific lines as bad as some parts of the lines in the main story. Better immersion + no absolute clunkers = much smoother story.

I’ve gotten gems from mining. It’s just like a regular pick, only with the animation and no swapping.

Yes, we definitely have too many currencies.

If there was some way to exchange tokens that would be great. OK, so not dungeon tokens for another dungeon’s tokens (that defeats the purpose of having separate token systems for each dungeon). But there’s all kinds of exchanges we could make.

I have an odd number of dungeon tokens sitting around, that I can’t buy anything with and I can’t find people to run with. It would be nice to be able to give them to a ‘Dungeon Explorer’ NPC who would give me gold or karma in exchange. Or, we could exchange them for crafting mats or something, just like laurels. Basically, I want a way to clear these odd-numbers stacks out of my inventory and to get something in return.

And there should be some way to use up old event currencies. I know people who had captains council commendations and couldn’t use them.

I would definitely pay for more bank slots. Or even just something to store skins in – I would definitely pay $$ for a reusable skin locker, or to unlock higher stacks of crafting mats.

Honestly, filesize and storage space shouldn’t be an issue unless the game is coded weirdly on the back end. Which could well be, but it’s just odd. If they’re that worried about it, just charge a lot for it, or maybe make bank slots more expensive after the X number or something.

That said, the guild bank trick is very nice and I appreciate ANet allowing multi-guilding so we can use it.

More generally, the banks are wherever you see a little gold circle icon with a bag in it. It looks like the TP icon, but with a bag instead of a balancing scale.

NevirSayDie.6235:

tl;dr—if anyone understood how good lemongrass is, they’d stop dying to my condition builds in WvW.

Ignorance is bliss – for the ones who avoid it.

Emissary of the Mad King on my main, nothing specific on my others.

The Halloween events were my first experience with GW2, and they were awesome. There were bad times – ANet was so bad at communication back then, it’s amazing how much they’ve improved. And there were good times – the community really pulled together to help lower-level characters do stuff in higher-level zones. No event since has been as awe-inspiring as Halloween. I wear the title as a badge for my main, because it was her formative experience in GW2.

Not sure what titles to use for my other characters. I’ll probably stick Golden on the thief once I get it ( I mainly use her for playing the TP). Avenger of the Dispossessed may go on my warrior, not sure yet.

I run into people almost everywhere, except in the middle of NA workday. There’s lots of reasons why some times places would be empty.

Some zones are emptier than others – bad mats, not convenient to a city, etc.

Lots of people focus on the temporary content, so this past month people were focused on the SAB (instanced jumping puzzles) and the Molten Facility (temp dungeon), so there were lots of people in Rata Sum and Wayfarer Hills / Diessa and fewer people elsewhere.

The megaboss changes mean that people are more spread out and not just focused on end-game zones anymore.

Fractals (and COF P1) keep people in instances instead of the open world.

People spending more time outside, going on vacation, etc, mean they’re not in a virtual world as much.

If where you are has a low pop, try guesting onto a higher tier server and seeing if there are people there. Tarnished Coast has people in almost every zone I’ve been in, even the ones that were out of the way. I’m sure the other T1-T3 servers are about the same.

Leveling in dungeons can be done, but if you don’t get your party to agree to it beforehand they can get pretty upset. If you really want to level up, just map completion or crafting is really quick.

Honestly, there’s no real reason to work at hitting the cap. Just play the game and you’ll level pretty quickly.