3) Create polls to see what players think of new ideas before releasing them.
This. I can respect a company that has a creative vision that says, “We know best, shut up and play it.” And I can respect a company that says, “We’re thinking about doing this, what do you think?” But the middle ground of releasing something terrible, and then asking, “Uh, you guys were okay with that, right?” is… unhelpful.
Personally I think I’d prefer the “shut up and play it” approach. None of the single player games I play ever ask me what sort of game I want. They just make a kittening game, and then I buy it or don’t buy it. Design by committee often produces something profitable but rarely produces something special.
“Do you believe players should be immensely rewarded for being able to do the one time event?”.
This was not a relevant question to me. Players get rewarded for doing special things. Whether you’re in a high end guild with a regular dungeon schedule, or just looking to see the special events, excelling at an MMO means sometimes you have to show up at inconvenient times. And it’s appropriate that if you show up, there should be rewards. The two definining characteristics of an MMO are that it’s persistent and it’s social; both persistence and social imply that it doesn’t run to what might happen to be your ideal schedule. You deliberately asked for that when you chose to play an MMO instead of some other style of game.
Many single player games have great save-state editors where you can dispense yourself whatever rewards you feel you deserve at a time convenient to you. This may be the experience you’re looking for – have you tried them?
In reverse order:
(1) More frequent blog posts about their design intentions so I don’t have to trudge through all the forum whining to find out what Anet is thinking.
(2) Better QA on new content.
(3) Better grouping/guilding, including guild login/logoff notifications, LFG tool, guesting, and ability to bring a whole party to the same overflow server on demand.
Also that was a terrible survey and didn’t let me express my actual opinion about the event – that it was a well-conceived and artistically sound idea that would have been awesome if it worked, but that it didn’t work in any way, shape or form and was probably the least technically competent thing I’ve ever seen added to an MMO.
In short, that I want them to do this kind of thing again, but take the time to get it right, rather than not to do it at all.
It is entirely in keeping with my experience of Lost Shores that the link in my email didn’t work as intended. Anet has really gone the extra yard to ensure consistency in event quality from start to finish. :-)
Yes! If there had been no lag, and no DCs, and the reinforcement waves had scaled properly, the final boss would have been amazingly good!
The idea was sound. The implementation was lacking.
GOOD:
- The ideas were good. Every stage, when you explain to another person what was intended to happen, sounds like a good idea.
- The art direction was mostly good. Which is to say that the Fractals of the Mists is gorgeous, and the new weapon and armour skins are pretty. Southsun itself and the Karka were a bit dull and generic but still fine.
- The quests on the hylek/quaggan/largos scavenger hunt were fun when they worked.
- The bits of the final boss fight that weren’t reinforcement waves were really fun when there was no lag, and if this had worked as intended it would have been great.
- Fractals of the Mists seems fun.
- New jumping puzzles are well designed, and I like that there’s both a hard one and an easy one.
- Phase 3 event rewards were good, although I would have liked something unique to the event to remember it by.
- The scavenger hunts were clearer this time round than they were at Halloween and I was able to work out where to go without having to use the wiki.
- Rewards, drops and progress were largely account bound so I didn’t feel pressure to re-run the content on my alts.
BAD:
- Bugs and server issues. And I want to be clear, this just drowns out everything else. Doesn’t matter if every other aspect of your event was pure genius, these bugs and server issues were a dealbreaker. Almost every aspect of the event was beset by bugs. Most stuff like this has some annoying bugs that affect some players; that’s par for the course for an MMO. THIS event, though, had progress-blocking bugs in almost every piece of event content, and they affected almost all players. Canach, Noll and the Largos all bugged to the point where many people missed completing these altogether. The Phase 2 cutscene didn’t trigger in overflows. The Phase 1 and Phase 3 karka battles suffered from lag rendering them unplayable. The boss battle had disconnects and login issues. The game engine had difficulty prioritising showing important information (such as enemies) in large fights.
- Karka were boring. They were visually uninteresting, had no particular personality, and their fight mechanics focused on prolonging the fight in monotonous ways and scoring one-hit kills with their rolling attack. They were fine in small doses but by the time we were a third of the way into the final boss battle I was sick of them.
- Phase 1 event rewards were terrible.
- Consortium Chests, and their drop rates, were lame. Just sell us the minis and skins directly next time, please, or make them frequent drops during the event. (I never had an interesting drop during the entire event so the rates can’t have been very high.)
- Communication about the event was good in phase 1 but then vanished. There were no meaningful dev posts on the forums about phase 2 or 3 at all. There was little to no communication about the bugs or when they would be fixed, and certainly nothing at all for players who don’t visit the forums. Many players in game didn’t realise things were bugged at all and thought they were doing things wrong. Information on where phase 3 would start and how long it would run for was vague. The devs were obviously aware of the many, many issues with this event – a simple post saying “We feel your pain” would have gone a long way to making us feel less ignored.
- No closure on phase 2. Because there were no scavenger hunts etc in phase 2 it was difficult to feel like you’d “finished” it.
- Once again it was difficult to get into the same overflow as my friends. Being unable to play with your friends in an MMO is a killer; this should be a top priority to fix.
- Difficulty tuning and scaling on the final boss fight was borked. Reinforcement waves took way too long to kill. Intensely dull.
- Southsun is a little bit unsatisfying. Because there’s no quest hearts there’s not really a focus to exploring the island, and no sense of completion or closure to your exploration. There’s not a point where you’re “done”, or any meaningful progress towards such a point.
(edited by GregT.4702)
Completely happy with game as whole. 9 out of 10.
Completely dissatisfied with Lost Shores event. 1 out of 10.
lol 3 things…? Yikes. That’s pretty dire.
To be fair “pretty much all of Southsun” is a big thing that rolls up a lot of content.
And Fractals of the Mists also mostly works, although it apparently has a lot of DC issues.
But yes, vastly more bits of the event had gamebreaking problems than didn’t.
I’d just like to highlight all the aspects of the event that worked as intended without crippling bugs or server-end disconnects and lag.
- Lion’s Arch donations / commendations appeared to work as intended.
- Questing / jumping puzzles / generic events on Southsun appeared fine.
- No bugs were spotted relating to Consortium Chests or Consortium Dye Packs.
So let’s hear it for those things! Yay!
cries
I just want it to be over.
Can’t use skills due to lag. Can’t play when lag isn’t around due to one hit kills. And the ancient karka just keeps summoning kittening piece of kitten reinforcements.
cries
No event for us either, straight to ship being available.
On Yak’s Bend LA overflow, nothing happening.
The event text updated but nothing else.
So far, about this event…
I’m liking:
- Storyline and storytelling
- Quality of in-game communication about event (through mails et cetera)
- Quality of out of game communication about how event is intended to play (forum, wiki, site for event, etc)
- Fractals of the Mists first impressions, particularly diversity of content and gorgeous level art
I’m disliking:
- Abysmal quality assurance of event, and buggy coding.
– The Karka Invasion event in Lion’s Arch was unplayable due to server-side issues. Got to watch a bunch of stuff die very slowly and jerkily while my skills refused to fire.
- Canach is bugged. (I’m on Yak’s Bend.)
- The Largos is bugged.
- As a result both these major quest lines cannot be progressed.
- Could not join party members in Lion’s Arch because their overflows were full.
- Could not play Karka attack events in Caledon Forest as Karka will not render.
- Entering a fractal strips my food buff.
- On party wipe in a fractal sometimes not all of party are able to resurrect. - New Mystic Flush mechanic to receive commendations.
- Commendations seem worthless. Why would anyone flush enough stuff to get one of those exotic Lionguard weapons when you can buy a comparable weapon on the TP for 1.5 gold, or get the same skin for ~60k karma? - Consortium chests.
- Once again drop rates are poor and the rewards are underwhelming.
Guys, I realise it’s hard to beta test events because you can’t get a realistic number of players online at once without spoiling the surprise. But if you can’t QA your event content better than this maybe you should just leave them alone and focus on things that won’t screw up within half an hour of going live? Especially if it’s only a three day event and a couple of hours of bugs are going to kill a significant percentage of the event’s running time.
UPDATE: As at 7 hours into event Canach and the Largos are still bugged on my server. That’s now over 1/8th of the total event time that the two major casual quest chains have been unplayable. I still like the idea of the event, and I still think the art, design and writing staff have done a great job on it, but the cripplingly poor technical implementation just completely overshadows that. No matter how much I want to like the event I just can’t when it’s not playable. If you can’t QA this stuff properly, or at least have a hell of a hotfix team standing by when it goes live, then don’t release as a time-limited event.
(Edit: Someone retitled my thread to include “Constructive Feedback”! Thank you, I guess?)
(edited by GregT.4702)
I’m expecting a very small island, a very hastily thrown together dungeon, and some events of a similar scale and quality to Halloween (which I thought overall was a pleasingly ambitious and entertaining event, even if some bits didn’t quite click).
I think that’s an achievable expectation and I’m unlikely to be disappointed in it.
Anything over and above that will be delicious candy.
…unless he server hops. He just got the game a week ago. His goal was to 100 percent the map. A justifiable goal, can be done with time. Until I told him how the map works in Eternal Battlegrounds.
He was actually quite frustrated. The server I’m on has been blue for the past month now with no signs of an actual color swap any time soon (we are going to be in this tier for a while at number 2). Eternal Battlegrounds is very defensive and our cluster is VERY competitive. Rarely, if ever, does one color actually take another colors keep. I’ve seen it happen once.
So, anet, any changes any time soon on this? What about random colors every week? No one cares if they are blue, red, green, supposedly the tactical advantage is the same. It would bring more people into WvWvW too as they would pop in for there vistas then maybe think its cool and stick around.
I feel even worse for those on servers that get stomped. They have zero chance to get world completion.
More regular colour swaps is a fine idea although I’m not sure it’ll solve all your problems.
But I agree with the larger point that making WvW count towards 100% explorer is a poor choice. It undermines WvW by having people run around collecting things instead of fighting, and it undermines the exploration gameplay by making explorer-types hang out in what is traditionally their least-favourite kind of content (PvP).
I got a bit annoyed – level 1 to 70 I kept finding all these awesome greatcoats for my female medium armour. Then I get to 80 and suddenly it’s all fur bikinis and dresses (or otherwise bog-standard studded leather like the AC medium set).
Is it too much to ask for something like the level 1-70 coats, except epic?
You can transmute the stats of Lv80 exotics onto any piece of gear. /facepalm
Yes, I know that. What I’m saying is that considering that level 80 exotic stats are more or less irrelevant – one 80 exotic is as good as another – it would be nice if the 80 exotic skins didn’t look quite so much like a pile of dead kittens. If you’re not paying for the stats (and you’re not, because why would you when a full crafted set is less than 6 gold) then it would be good if it were worth paying for the skin.
What if the cost of upgrading was removed, and the price of siege removed (or changed from costing money?)
That would be an improvement but (for me) it’s just tinkering around the edges. It’s that time it takes to get to the battle, and then get back to it after you die, that’s the killer.
I realise the time’s there for balance reasons but there should at least be a minigame or something I can do while I’m jogging.
I’d also like to add to my list above:
(i) No closure. There’s no in-game notification of who won the weekly match up – no congratulation mail to players who helped win, no suggestions for improvement to players who sucked. I like this style of play, but I like it in discrete units. It needs either shorter matches so I can stick around till they’re over, or a bigger fanfare when it finishes so I’ll get reminded of what I did to help two days later when I’m off PvEing somewhere.
(edited by GregT.4702)
Remove all the chain events leading to dungeons.
Here you go, fixed your problem Areanet because everyonce clearly see your are not compentent to do that .. for over 2 months now.
Yah Areanet why u no do this? its as easy as runnina simple splelcheck.
I don’t WvW much because:
(a) Takes forever to run from the spawn point to the action. Too much downtime before I get to have fun.
(b) Things are rarely balanced at the macro level. Too often we either control the entire map or we control none of the map and are penned up at our spawn point. Either way, not fun.
© Things are rarely balanced at the micro level. Either I’m part of a huge zerg and everything’s already dead before I get to it, or I’m on my own and I get hunted and killed by the first enemy to spot me.
(d) I’ve done it already. Same reason I don’t go back and replay the zones I’ve finished much – I’ve seen the content and moved on.
(e) No recognition of personal effort. I pull out my big AoEs and things die – but everyone else was doing the same thing. Was my AoE helpful? Or did I miss entirely? Am I just sitting here being useless? How would I know?
(f) Costs of being relevant are too high. I don’t want to spend my silver buffing outposts or buying siege plans when we’re just going to lose all the terrain again overnight. I have better things to do with that silver that I’ll see the benefit of personally.
(g) The map’s confusing. The shortest path from a spawn point to the action is rarely a straight line – there are cliffs and bridges and water and falling damage and gates and it’s just a pain trying to actually find the battles and take part in them.
(h) PvP players are the worst. They’re exactly the people I’d least choose to hang out with of my own accord.
it not one-weekend. its a permanent map.
That’s not my point, but it’s a reasonable clarification.
The specific answer to your question is that they’re intending to make it more accessible to low-level characters than Halloween was.
The more general answer is that if you can’t get a character from 0-80 in the time between when they announced Lost Shores and when it goes live, then how on earth do you care enough about the game to be posting on forums and hyping yourself for the event?
I really can’t see Primordus being the whole point of GW:EOTN, Zhaitan being the end boss of vanilla GW2, and then having us take down Bubbles in a one-weekend event.
Anticlimactic much?
Yes please. Interface option to increase cursor size would be great. I’d ideally like it to change colour to red when I’m combat and get about 3x the size.
Also an option to stop it vanishing when I’m holding down the buttons.
Would make my Engineer much more effective with grenades!
I guess I’m confused since I only play PvE, but what exactly is the benefit of even having this title, if any? Just to have a big icon that blocks people’s sight?
(a) It enables you to form a “squad” (group of more than 5 players) for the purposes of WvW.
(b) It identifies you as someone who’s played long enough to get 100g and cares enough about WvW to waste it on a shiny badge – i.e., someone who, statistically speaking, might know more about WvW than average and might, on average, be worth at least listening to.
© It enables players to track the commander easily in WvW which makes it easier to stay in a zerg rather than getting split up across several sub-objectives.
It’s pretty useful in WvW providing the Commander’s at least halfway competent.
It would help to be able to turn it off in case they’re not, though.
I would prefer them to just remove the title, honestly. It encourages people to play the game “against the grain” – avoiding WvW, avoiding large events, avoiding dungeons.
Keep it as a tracked statistic to please those who want to challenge themselves this way, but take away the achievement – it’s play that should be recognised but not encouraged.
Also, yes, I think mine is bugged as well, and has been since the monthly.
Looks better live than in preview, IMO. But I understand that’s not your point.
I’ve come to realise that preview just doesn’t give me a good idea of what armour is actually going to look like. It made me not want to get the dungeon sets and culturals for ages because of how terrible they looked in preview, and then once I had them they were fine.
Throughout Caudecus Manor, the info text for ranged enemies consistently suggests they do more “damge” to moving targets.
Should be “damage”.
That’s all. Thanks.
I’m not clear why Commander displays in towns at all.
I can see it might be relevant in dynamic event chains, and certainly Straits of Devastation / Cursed Shore etc. But I can’t think of any reason why anyone except the Commander would gain any joy from it displaying in towns.
And it’s only going to get worse as more people fork over to get one of these, right?
The whole point of WvW as opposed to sPVP is that it tests leadership, organisation and communication in addition to your mechanical skill at playing the game. If you can’t:
-[a] convince talented players to stay on your server ;
-[b] organise a guild of sufficient size to enable you to meaningfully assault WvW objectives; and
- © create an atmosphere of friendly competition and high morale among your server population,
then you are failing at exactly the skills that WvW is intended to test.
This is the game. These are the skills. Saying your server sucks because all the good players are leaving is like complaining you can’t kill mobs because you don’t have any equipment and you don’t know what your skills do. Go out and GET some good players. Make friends with them. Form a guild and offer them some leadership, or join a guild that already is. In WvW showing up is literally more than half the battle and it’s intended that that half be as much a test of skill as the rest.
And as for:
What will save WvW in our server?
The answer is: mostly time. Lose a couple of weeks, like I said, and you’ll be up against servers just as hopelessly unsociable as your own, and you can ravage their poorly defended keeps like a hungry dog finding a garbage bin full of meat.
(edited by GregT.4702)
Max – WvW matchups are based on a ranking system. If you stick around on your current server you may have a couple of bad weeks as you sink down through the ranks, but eventually you’ll bottom out fighting servers as terrible as your own and you’ll start to have semi-competitive matches.
To put it in perspective, as of 2 November, Gunnar’s Hold is ranked 16th out of 27 servers. There are 11 servers who are objectively worse than you, who lose more often, et cetera. You can look forward to having some really slapstick fights against the dregs of the league in a couple of weeks as you meet Underworld, Fissure of Woe, or Ruins of Surmia. And based on your current performance you’re likely to dominate those match-ups.
You can see the WvW rankings here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Updated-World-Ratings-Nov-2/first#post690321
I’m playing an elementalist… (etc)
Sorry to put it such stark terms but the short answer is you’re doing it wrong.
The medium answer is some combination of:
(a) you haven’t played past about level 25 and/or
(b) you don’t understand some core mechanic of the class.
Elementalists certainly can be fragile but there’s no reason they have to be. If you find yourself dying too often try moving your traits into earth, take skills like arcane shield, and remember to use and understand all of your four elements and not just the one you’re most comfortable with.
I had a hard time keeping my elementalist upright levels 1-15 but as soon as I got my first five point trait bonus he’s been doing on average as well as my engineer if not better.
Just thought I’d share this. I’m apparently the only member of my (admittedly casual-heavy) guild that visits the forums. I brought the forums up in guild chat the other day.
Me: A lot of people on the forums complain about magic find at endgame.
Guildy 1: There are forums?
Guildy 2: What’s on the forums isn’t “people”.
Guildy 3: I don’t plan to visit the forums until I have something to complain about; hasn’t happened yet.
Guildy 4: Ugh, forums are like LA map chat but worse.
Me: You can find out a lot of stuff on the forums.
Guildy 3: Isn’t that what the wiki is for?
Might provide some perspective. Or might not. :-)
I’ve played a lot of MMOs, and none of them ever had actual roleplaying as anything other than a weird niche community. I mean, SWTOR tried, I guess, but even then it came down to a choice of two characters you could play: puppy-kicking jerk, or insufferable do-gooder (with minor variations by class – the bounty hunter was “gruff heart of gold” rather than “insufferable do-gooder”).
The essential problem with roleplaying in an MMO is that:
- (a) it’s nigh-on impossible to mechanically reward good roleplaying, and players go where the rewards are,
- (b) it’s already hard enough to communicate with the illiterate numbnuts you find in these things without also filtering it through “roleplaying”, and
- © a lot of people are just flat out terrible at roleplaying and I’d prefer to not have to watch them try.
Upon reflection I’m just going to go with this being Mad King Thorn being.. well, mad.
He misses the gargoyles, so he just dressed up some hellhounds and told them they were gargoyles now.
I figure hanging out with Mad King Thorn when it’s not Halloween is probably a lot like hanging out with the Ice King from Adventure Time.
I don’t want to get into an argument, so this is the last statement I will make here:
Of the data that I have seen. Which is significant. It is reasonable to say
1) Goldsellers are a criminal group
2) Goldsellers damage games
3) Goldsellers cannot be classified as competition because they are not in the same industryThese are not statements of belief. They are statements of statistics.
Agree to disagree. My position:
1) Many but not all goldsellers engage in or benefit from activity that would be criminal under American law.
2) The service provided by goldsellers is a benefit to games, but the actions they take in procuring and advertising their product usually cause more harm than the benefit.
3) Goldsellers clearly are in competition to Anet in that they benefit from the sale of a product (in game currency) that Anet also benefits from the sale of, and their profits in this regard are mutually exclusive. Even if they value their product at exactly the same price as gold on the TP, they would still be a more attractive option to players, and would still be profitable, because of (a) real world currency exchange rates, and (b) eliminating Anet’s cut of the transaction.
The long term solution to this for any MMO is carrot and stick – to continue identifying and prosecuting destructive gold sellers, while encouraging and working with legitimate ones to create a regulated, vibrant and safe gold market to players. That is to say, accepting the fact that people want to take real money out of your economy as well as put it in, and start planning for that admittedly more complex scenario. If GW2 survives as a popular game more than five years it’s going to be something that external legislative, legal and cultural forces are likely to make you do anyway, so you may as well start planning now.
(What you’re saying is the equivalent of:
- a statistically large number of Australian motorcyle gangs are involved in criminal activity (true);
- criminal biker gangs endanger public safety and undermine law enforcement activity (true); therefore
- when you make a commercial trade with a person who owns a motorcycle you are supporting the corruption of Australian police forces (nonsense).
Moral: You can have unassailable statistics on your side and still end up talking nonsense if you’re not willing to engage with the complexity of the situation.)
(edited by GregT.4702)
My desktop wallpaper has been shuffling between various GW2 wallpapers ever since I discovered them on the GW2 site back in the first open beta. Uniformly gorgeous art combined with desktop friendly layouts that let me see my icons AND the art!
Any chance of getting one or more Lost Shores wallpapers?
(On the topic, I’d also love if a wallpaper based on the Mad King’s Clocktower concept art, if possible.)
I did not enjoy Dredgehaunt Cliffs, particularly that southeast part of it. Least enjoyable zone I’ve played so far.
My favourite zones are the Charr / Ascalon areas.
They really are thieves though. No more legitimate than a person selling illegal copies of DVDs or CDs for 5 dollars each versus the 15 or 20 dollars the publishers are selling them at.
No, the person bootlegging CDs was originally a person who was enegaging in a civil breach of copyright, and now by changes to legislation in most western countries is committing a criminal offence. Their criminality theoretically derives from reducing the value of the legitimate good by creating unathorised copies of it; it’s the same principle as counterfeiting currency.
A gold seller creating gold from farming or botting is selling a good that they obtained in the same way that everyone else obtains it – by playing the game. They obtained it perhaps more efficiently than other players, but other players could theoretically generate gold at the same rate by doing exactly what the bots are doing. The difference between five bots running a loop and five players doing it is only that the time of the players is saved.
Given the design of Guild Wars 2, the effects of botting behaviour on gameplay are minimal – they break immersion, the make some content easier by being present, and obviously if they are also spamming advertising for their product they are being unsociable and creating digital noise pollution.
Even in the case where botting accounts used by gold sellers are not stolen directly from players, they are often paid for using stolen credit card numbers. The majority of gold sellers are indeed thieves of one form or other.
The majority of people are thieves of one sort or another. That’s not to the point. The point is that it’s simply not correct to say that all gold sellers are engaging in criminal theft to operate their business, and inasmuch as John keeps basing his argument on that he’s debating dishonestly.
If Anet wanted to fix this problem they could immediately make all valuable goods account-bound, and effectively disable the economy side of the game. But Anet have gone the other way, and deliberately designed a system capable of supporting a resilient and realistic economy, to the point of even hiring an economist, and it’s immature to now throw up their hands and say, “Oh, but we didn’t want there to be competition in our economy.”
Anet have more tools available to manage their economy than any national government. For example, they get to say, “Our competition are criminals,” which I’m sure Coca-Cola would love to put in their next advertising campaign but for some reason aren’t quite allowed to. They also get to exact unilateral sanctions against their competitors’ customers. They don’t need to win an ideological war here; they just need to continue using the tools that they have to make the Anet product more attractive than the gold seller product.
Mostly I get annoyed when I see someone wearing awesome armour and then it turns out they’re a poor person who can’t afford gems. I would like it better if I could tell whether they were a real person or a poor person by their armour. Maybe if all drops were rags and tunics and then the good armour was only available from the Black Lion? I think this would improve my experience and be more realistic.
You only get repair costs when you die.
If you find yourself dying, you are doing something wrong.
Stop doing it.
Alternatively treat the dungeons as your dailies. With a little practice you should be able to find a dungeon you can regularly run in less than an hour without dying; a complete dungeon run should net you between 50s and 1g. And you get tokens and karma too.
(edited by GregT.4702)
I got a bit annoyed – level 1 to 70 I kept finding all these awesome greatcoats for my female medium armour. Then I get to 80 and suddenly it’s all fur bikinis and dresses (or otherwise bog-standard studded leather like the AC medium set).
Is it too much to ask for something like the level 1-70 coats, except epic?
I picked a Norn female because I was both amused and grateful to find Anet had made a character model that was hot without being an unrealistic body shape.
I really want a new Koenigsegg. At the moment I cannot get one. I am an upstanding citizen and will not steal a Koenigsegg. I will hire someone to steal one from someone else and give it to me. If they weren’t so hard to get I wouldn’t NEED to have someone steal one. Oh, but would I want one if they were easy to get?
I keep seeing John making the assumption that “gold sellers = thieves”, and it’s offending my intelligence every time. It’s no more valid than “person who sells things = thieves”.
Clearly some gold sellers are selling gold stolen from player accounts. Clearly some are not, and are selling gold from combinations of botting and efficient farming. The first class are engaging in criminal activity. The second are merely doing something Anet wishes they wouldn’t.
You can make the argument that it’s hard to buy from a gold seller without accidentally dealing with one of the thieves. You can make the argument that buying from gold sellers creates a market that encourages the thieves (but I don’t think that’s a particularly valid argument).
But please stop saying that all gold sellers are inherently thieves. You’re smarter than that, John, and I’d appreciate if you’d assume that we are too.
@ Greg, Gurrrdyan has been so much fun for me that I’ve been completely neglecting all my Alts which is something I never had an issue with in GW1 or any other MMO. If someone’s not having fun on them, I think it’s because they just don’t quite get the whole Consecrations // Battlefield-Architect playstyle with heavy weapon swapping …or they just hate ground targeting or something… (and can’t do it accurately or fast enough). I notice it also takes a while to adapt to releasing one’s virtues more liberally.
Most of my guildies who play guardian were tanks in WoW, and I think they’re mostly just frustrated that it’s not a traditional gain-the-aggo-and-hold-it tank.
But “Magic” is such a cop-out answer most of the time. I want some explanation, some hard science here! (Physics minor/Biochemistry major here)
The world of Guild Wars is driven by five fundamental forces: gravitation, electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, and wizarddiditation.
Wizarddiditation is responsible for floating islands, food that makes you lucky, and the magical force fields surrounding my female Norn engineer’s fur bikini that enable it to protect her exposed midriff from bullets and fireballs.
I agree that the medium armour choices are pretty rotten, at least on a female norn.
I’m still wearing styles I got in level 1-40, despite having a sweet collection of dungeon tokens, just because all the endgame armours look so trashy.
The AC armour, just for example, looks like you’re a henchman in some evil overlord’s army. A henchman. It’s just basic studded leather.
Also I’m glad the game has that saucy hat with a feather because that’s the only half-decent headpiece I’ve seen for medium armour. Here’s hoping that the Lost Shores patch mostly consists of new medium armour hats. That’s likely, right?
People seem to like guardians in their group. Mostly because they’re pretty good at getting you back up if you get knocked down. Anecdotally my friends who play them suggest they’re not much fun to play as, but I’m sure there’s people here who’ll put the contrary viewpoint.
Condition damage pistol engineer with healing turret, supply crate, grenade kit, and two other skills of your choice.
Healing turret place/detonate/aura combo plus regular turret or crate plus offhand pistol gloop makes for a terrifyingly survivable PvE character. Cooldown reductions or heal-on-crit runes make it even better (although I prefer to take a small hit to survivability to up my damage when it comes to runes). Haven’t found an overworld anything that I couldn’t solo, including champions and group events.
(EDIT: Sorry, to be honest I can’t solo some group events in Straits of Devastation / Orr. But they weren’t designed to be soloed so I feel all right.)
Groups of veteran mobs with heavy ranged stun/slow or single champions with rapid-fire ranged condition damage sometimes give me problems and are more trouble than they’re worth.
I possibly might have trouble with soloing a world boss but I’ve never had the chance.
(edited by GregT.4702)