Guild Wars 2

ProtoGunner.4953:

Typo, happens, doubt it will ever addressed though :-) Also Human Gods only value as a part of a collection is rather funny.

A typo is “teh” instead of “the”. It’s a mistype. Unless their team autocorrects Abbadon to Dhuum?

This is pretty clearly just a history fail. That NPC should be fired.

Verificus.4320:

I think people complaining about the price of precursor crafting, and that it sometimes is even more expensive than buying it outright don’t really seem to grasp the point of it. In the past, everyone, even those playing only an hour per day due to work/family, could farm all the mats for the legendary on their own, without help or without the need for gold. It would be a very tedious process yes, but if say, you farmed SW, with EXP boosters, Karma boosters and good magic find for an hour each day and then maybe another hour to open all the chests for the keys you’d farm, you’d probably be able to get around 10-20 t6 mats/day. At this rate, a couple of months would be enough to get all the mats you need. By that time you’d also have enough obsidian, skill points/spirit shards, karma and enough gold to buy things like 100 icy runestones. However, since you’re hoarding it all, you don’t build up enough cash to be able to buy a precursor. That would require more focussed farming where you DO sell everything and make about 15 ish gold in the short time you play. This would add a couple more months to the process. Meaning that for Joe Casual, a legendary might take months, up to even a year. And this is a casual that would know how to be efficient. Most aren’t even that. Now you can work on your Precursor similarly to how you work on all the gifts that require mats. Slow and steady, never needing to make big purchases. In the end you might spend the same or more than just buying it but some people are better off paying for it in relatively small amounts rather than a large amount in one go. Most people don’t buy a house in one go either. You pay more for your house if you take a bank loan and pay interest every month than if your were to buy the house all in one go (not sure if this is how it goes in america but in europe this is how it works). Nobody thinks this is weird at all since no one would be able to buy a house if bank loans didn’t exist. And right now, almost no casuals have legendaries because they cannot pay for the precursor in one go. That’s why precursor crafting was introduced.

All this talk about banks and loans in order to purchase a house, as well as getting lectured about economics is supremely depressing. I know how the real world works. Games are supposed to be a place to set that aside; a place where we get to dream and achieve and have fun.

Honestly, if making a precursor is analogous to taking out a loan from a bank, there’s something deeply wrong with the system. There’s nothing fun about having a mortgage.

I don’t think anyone expected ANET to mail them a precursor for purchasing HoT, but I do think people expected the “legendary journey” to be fun. At the very least, more than just an endless grocery list.

sephiroth.4217:

buy some black lion skins for 80g, wait till event is over and sell for 160g. Rinse and repeat.

Improvised skins are an absolute steal right now, at around 50g. Gallant followed a similar pattern.

Test.8734:

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

I was surprised to see a ‘Road Ahead’ News Blog.

Yeah, I remember the Looking Ahead of 2013. The one with many interesting quotes:

• “We’ll begin regularly adding new skills and traits to the game for each profession to expand your characters and builds!”

• “you will see a specific way to build precursor items on your way to a legendary”

• “you’ll also see new legendary weapons and new types of legendary gear in 2013”

• “We’ll expand all crafting professions to allow them to reach a new milestone: 500 points!”

So I would suggest taking anything ArenaNet says in other “Road Ahead” posts with a grain of salt. Or, more accurately, a sea’s worth of grains of salt.

Good luck

Come on. As everyone knows, the only thing we are allowed to take as a promise is that SAB will surely return, because they said so. Reminding them of things they said in the past that didn’t happen is unfair, because people shouldn’t be accountable for things they say. /s

Why can’t you do HoT stuff? Your signature says your main profession is a revenant.

Vetkin.6041:

So no one has a definite answer for this?

I thought the answer was quoted above: You can’t get experience from the mushrooms anymore, so it can’t be used to farm experience. I have no idea, but that seems pretty straightforward to me.

You guys, this thread was begun before this was implemented. Dates are on the top right of each post. SMH.

Shh. They’re trying really hard to pretend like underwater combat isn’t a Thing. Look over there! WINGS! GLIDERS! Shinies!

There hasn’t been a hat for Halloween at all, unless there was one the first year. I missed that one.

EDIT: As I said, I missed year 1, but I did forget about the mask of the night from year 2. My apologies.

It seems like this might be the alternative to the gear/level cap treadmill. It’s not that your stats on your equipment/level are outdated, it’s that your guild no longer has access to benefits you already unlocked for it. I wonder if that’s the plan, moving forward: New xpac=new guild hall to capture and build from the ground up.

Pure speculation, but given that ANET has no qualms about resetting progression, it’s certainly not outside the realm of possibility.

For those of you who don’t understand the Walmart comparison: Big guilds (walmart) are able to spread out the costs among their members much more easily and are also likely to have their boosts/shinies built up more quickly than medium-small (mom & pop stores) guilds will. If you’ve ever heard a guild recruitment message, you can’t possibly say guilds aren’t competing for anything. The guild hall issue just widens the gap between what the smaller guilds have to offer.

It may not bother you as a guild member (since you can just rep in a larger guild), but it’s pretty obvious to me why a guild leader would be stressed about it.

There actually is a way to handle it better, and it’s something they tried to implement in other events: Scaling. An event detects how many people are present and scales accordingly. Have you been in the labyrinth lately? If you roam the map, all the mobs are level 80. If you’re with a zerg, the doors spawn more foes and/or higher level foes.

Blaine Tog.8304:

I suspect we would be more ok with Night Fury if ANet had added a few mid-tier scavenger hunt items as well as the super-ultra-hihh-end item. Players want things to work towards, but they also want to teach for things that aren’t unfathomably far out of reach.

Yeah. I don’t understand why it’s so hard to find something between “so common everyone has a full stack of the skins by the end of the event” and “so rare that the item’s opportunity cost is akin to a precursor.” They used to be able to do this. The living world had a lot of mid-level rewards, at one time. The jade weapon set? Those tickets used to drop in the open world. The various backpieces. Other rewards that were purchased with festival currencies. Even last year, with the ghost dog issue, there was the mini cat that was obtainable.

DarcShriek.5829:

Celtic Lady.3729:

DarcShriek.5829:

Celtic Lady.3729:

DarcShriek.5829:

It’s time for small guilds to stop being so elitist and invite more players to join them.

It shouldn’t have to be explained to anyone that small guilds are not small guilds due to an elitist attitude. But whatever.

Yeah, a lot of them are. If you only open membership to you and a small group of friends, that’s a clear signal that you don’t think anyone else is good enough to play with you..

No, it isn’t. I don’t belong to a small guild because I think I’m better than anyone else or play better than anyone else and nor do my friends feel that way. This makes as much sense as saying everyone that doesn’t do or does do a particular activity only has one reason for doing so.

I play tennis because I belong to a country club. I don’t eat doughnuts because I’m not a cop. I go to the movies so I can have popcorn. I live in Hawaii because I surf.

Newsflash: There is more than one reason for why people do the things they do or don’t do. Most of them not exactly because they think they’re better than anyone else.

Yet you refuse to invite others to your guild. Plus you refuse to join a larger guild. Your refusal to join others is somewhat anti social and elitist, despite your pleas to the contrary.

You talk like having standards is somehow not a good thing. If you’re going to argue that anything other than allowing anyone who can fog a mirror into a guild is elitist, then kitten, yes, I’m totally willing to take on that mantle. I am an elitist because I don’t want to spend my free time with people I don’t care about, or even actively dislike.

Porterhouse.6304:

Now I haven’t done a lot of dungeons, but I am curious.

What was the gold reward like before, and what is it like now?

…I will say that John Smith was absolutely clear about the fact that it wasn’t an issue of the gold; he did outright state that it was to encourage people to move away from running dungeons.

Assuming one, such as myself, does not have Heart of Thorns – where does he want us to move to?

ANET would like both of us to purchase Heart of Thorns.

ETA: I went looking, and it appears that gold and experience rewards were reduced by between 50-66% in dungeons, though it varies depending on the dungeon. It also sounds like the dungeon tokens were reduced, as well.

Kichwas.7152:

Cbomb.4310:

Kichwas.7152:

Where is there a link … to the statement that the Dungeon team was disbanded?

The statement was actually years ago at this point. Its such common knowledge its not something you really need to cite anymore.

Except I am now asking for a cite, because in this game that is only about 2 and a half years old, not “years”, I missed that one. I was not around for the second half of season 1 of living story through to most of season 2…

I recall them actually amping up the dungeon team midway through season 1 of Living Story – the molten dungeon and the karka dungeon and the aetherblade dungeon for example.

So I’d love to see where they actually said this.

Just because you presume something is known, does not excuse making a grand statement without backing it up.

Well, I’d love for ANET to have a centralized news archive, so I guess we’re both going to be disappointed. Truthfully, I don’t care if you believe the dungeon team was disbanded or not. It really doesn’t matter to me, because I remember it, and I don’t seem to be the only one.

The molten dungeon and the rest that you mentioned are not at all the same as the dungeon content that’s being discussed in this thread. Those were one-shot minidungeons that had one (often very short) path, and usually did not require a full party. They did not have an associated set of armor/weapons/currency/vendor. They did not adhere to the way dungeons are structured in GW2.

I am assuming that the ruin mentioned in the first post is a trophy required for precursor crafting, and Allisa has completely missed the point of this thread.

So, ANET implemented a way to bypass RNG for precursors, but the collection still involves RNG? While you have my sincere sympathy at how frustrating that must be, I must admit that it seems like par for the course. Because why would anyone at ANET consider that adding RNG to this process is hilariously misguided? It defeats the whole alleged purpose.

Here’s what I think happened with dungeons: I don’t think the team was disbanded due to gold creation or anything like that. I think that they were extremely disappointed with the response to the Aetherpath addition to Twilight Arbor and decided that it wasn’t worth the time/effort/money to build dungeons. But I have to say that Aetherpath is one of the best designs I’ve seen in guild wars, as far as dungeons/bosses go, but it simply isn’t rewarding enough for the amount of time it takes.

One major flaw ANET has is with their reward system, and dungeons showed this flaw early. All dungeons and their paths were not created equal, and yet they all gave the same rewards. Interesting design is great, but it’s not enough. If I’m getting the same things in Aetherpath as I can get in a 10-minute CoF run, the choice is simple.

I think a lot of us work with limited time to play the game, so managing that time for both fun and reward is pretty important to a lot of players. But I think all ANET saw was that Aetherpath didn’t have great numbers, and had loads of complaints.

Personally, I find it a bit disturbing that, instead of using solid design and incentives in Heart of Thorns, they’ve chosen to remove rewards in older content. But I don’t find it surprising.

They’ve made statements. Just because you’re not happy with those statements doesn’t make them any less real. I’m no ANET apologist. But it’s obvious they’re working on the issue, and your inquiry about a refund was answered.

I’d like to point out a key section for you, though: “If you registered the code, all features, including game access, will be disabled.” Heart of Thorns is the new standard edition of the game, so be quite sure you don’t want to access the game through that account again if you do take them up on the offer.

I’d just like to add that not all the crash issues are OOM issues. I’m crashing in main Tyria and not getting the OOM message. I don’t even own HoT.

Kichwas.7152:

Guhracie.3419:

I am not addressing any of the rest of your points, but I will say that John Smith was absolutely clear about the fact that it wasn’t an issue of the gold; he did outright state that it was to encourage people to move away from running dungeons.

Where is there a link to this?

And to the statement that the Dungeon team was disbanded?

The interview with John Smith is posted on Dulfy. The dungeon team was disbanded years ago, and given how slipshod ANET is about keeping track of their own news, I’m really not inclined to go digging for it. It might’ve been on reddit, twitter, in a thread on this very forum totally unrelated to dungeons, or a blog post. I have no idea.

I can get to character select, but still can’t log in.

CindyKa.6137:

@ rich, Yes I agree with that and understand. However this problem has been consistent for 4 days. I could see that being the issue if it was a hit and miss thing. Yet its been the same every single time. It’s the same way on any map. One account gets a great deal of bonus for kills the other account doing the same things gets zero bonus for kills. Ive tested this all of Tyria and its the same thing.

Would also like to say if what you say is what is happening then the one account that gains a ton of bonus would eventually fall into the zero bonus group. However one account never fails to get bonus after bonus on kills when the other account never gets any bonus at all on anything.

Are your accounts on different servers? WvW gives bonuses to PvE content. It should be visible hovering over the WvW icon at the top left.

The last news was that they’ve been focusing on HoT and have not been working on SAB, but they promise it will totally get worked on eventually.

Why is it that we’re on the third year of Halloween and there are still no broadly useful sinks for the fangs, nougats and skulls? You guys know how to make sinks: they were spectacular in the Labyrinthine Cliffs, so I know you can do it.

You need to have necromancers and mesmers for boon strips, and anything for personal condi clear, in addition to the points listed above.

Cbomb.4310:

They didnt even nerf the gold rewards properly. Should have upped item drops from the mobs/champs people skip, scaled the gold rewards based on length of dungeon, added more tokens, ANYTHING.

If all they were concerned about was the ‘gold’, there are far better ways to do this. That John Smith guy destroyed most of the repeatable content in this game. I fear for the longevity of this game once the newness of HoT wears off. Which is sad because dungeons/fractals being as old as they are were already wearing thin on so many people.

The fractal update is just as much a lie as the last one.
‘Hey guys, this is the fractal ldrbrd update, but we forgot to put in the ldrbrds’
now
‘Hey guys, this is the fractal reward update, but we forgot to put in the rewards’
really?
….actually update the fractal rewards like you promised or give us back our dungeon rewards. This one is worse because you charged us tons of money for it.

I am not addressing any of the rest of your points, but I will say that John Smith was absolutely clear about the fact that it wasn’t an issue of the gold; he did outright state that it was to encourage people to move away from running dungeons.

I’m not expressing any of my personal opinions about that move, or about fractal rewards, or about the game in general, here. Just saying that they were quite clear about the primary reason for making this particular change.

ANET’s economist, John Smith, said that it was to de-incentivize dungeons. In other words, it was to make people not want to play dungeon content. Their dungeon team was disbanded long ago, and now they want people to focus on HoT content. I agree that it’s sad, by the way.

I am now unable to even access the character screen. I cannot login at all.

AphoticEssance.7592:

Every time I start make progress in HoT something else gets broke. My main character is still stuck on the first mission. Almost a week and two tickets later but still no fixes… Why?

All I wanted to do was to play with my friends on day one and experience the game along side them. Sadly when progress is blocked, it becomes impossible to keep up. By the time I get to play the content, everybody I know will be bored and the maps will be empty.

I have friends on my list that have over 50 mastery and I am stuck at 9 because of all the bugs…Next time I am just going to wait it out.

This has been by far the worst xpac experience I ever had by far.

This must be the only xpac experience you’ve ever had if you’re upset about bugs in the first two weeks.

You’re kind of late to this discussion. ANET has already addressed the issue of hero points for elite specs- there’s a blog post about it, even.

The biggest complaint small guilds have is that previous functionality they had prior to the xpac is now not attainable, and the amount of effort they’d be willing to put in to obtain some of those features is now outmatched by number of members. Maybe you try MMO’ing the way you want to MMO, and let other people enjoy the game the way they want to, and not lecture them on what makes the game more or less fun, which is purely subjective.

Thanks for updating us on this issue after working hours! (no sarcasm)

BrooksP.4318:

It seems like most of this is based around guild halls, this is also another reason why Anet should expand on personal housing. Let small guilds congregate around personal housing and have guild halls be a end goal or for medium/large guilds.

Though not sure what people expect when they make a 1-3 person guild, if they make it simple or possible for a small guild to achieve something, it just means a large guild will be done with it in no time. It also disincentivises guilds if something is achievable solo or by a small group.

People expected to be able to access the things that were accessible prior to the xpac. This would be a valid statement if these things had not been made available for three years, but 2-person guilds were able to function (at a lesser level than big guilds, but still function) within the system ANET built. I don’t see how you can’t see why people have an issue with such a sweeping change to their functionality.

Labjax, you win all my internets today. Thanks for the smile.

I don’t understand what “rorted” means. Also, giving you a title for your two-day achievement would be a huge slap in the face to players who spent a year or more getting to level 100 in fractals and then got reset down to level 30 when ANET first had the idea of implementing a leaderboard (which is still not in the game). Those people really got swept under the rug. I don’t think you’re going to get acknowledgement (nor do I think you should) because you’re feeling rorted.

What you’re describing is true and, currently, there’s no other information. However, if they do see this as being a major issue (which, personally, I think it IS a major issue to take something that was previously available and gate it behind a paywall), it’s possible that we’ll see changes to the way guilds are handled as they iterate the design.

I’m watching with interest in the upcoming changes. I’m still waiting to see how everything shakes out, and for some professional reviews, but the level of communication this week, and the speed of the responses to the feedback has been positive, in my opinion. Good on you, ANET. I may end up in the jungle, yet.

I don’t think the guild hall can be claimed by only one person.

I’d buy up all the improvised weapon skins while they’re super cheap. Then I’d buy up as many Halloween skins as I could.

EDIT: Also, Zudet is absolutely right about the behavior of bones, at least post-Halloween 2 years running, they have worked exactly as he/she states. Cheap during Halloween, then a few months out, back up to normal.

Well, honestly, dungeons are kind of outdated (and fairly unrewarding- they’ve been nerfed and abandoned by ANET) content at this point. If you have friends you run dungeons with, you’ll be fine doing your own thing. If you’re talking about doing raids, nobody can say, just yet, since there aren’t any. If you’re talking about doing increasing levels of fractals, you should be fine until you hit around Fractal level 50 or so. But weapon swapping is kind of a useful skill, and I think you’ll end up naturally wanting to swap when your skills are still all on cooldown, especially since Engi kits can do so many awesome things.

echoeagle.5439:

Guhracie.3419:

Note: There are some armor sets for sale on the gemstore, and they function completely differently than outfits. If you’re asking about those, then they replace the look of a part of your armor, and when you remove that piece of armor, you have to change your new piece to look like it again. Those changes cost transmutation charges.

Which ones are these ones?

They won’t have “outfit” in the name, and they’ll be divided into light, medium, and heavy armor weight. Outfits have no armor type.

Outfits do not come in parts. You equip the outfit look over the top of your armor, so no matter what you change your armor to, the outfit stays. You have a limited ability to dye them. (the whole outfit has up to 4 dye slots total.)

Note: There are some armor sets for sale on the gemstore, and they function completely differently than outfits. If you’re asking about those, then they replace the look of a part of your armor, and when you remove that piece of armor, you have to change your new piece to look like it again. Those changes cost transmutation charges.

They were reduced specifically to de-incentivize dungeons, according to an interview with John Smith.

maniamsmart.7981:

Or at least some of you.

If content is too short and easy, people complain.

If content is too long and hard, people complain.

And yes I am referring to the elite specializations, the mastery system, etc.

Please make up your mind on what you want.

Golly! It’s almost as if a massively multiplayer game…. has multiple people, with different opinions playing it! That couldn’t possibly be the answer, right?

Rose Solane.1027:

McViolin.8547:

Care to give us examples of you caring about the community because all I can remember of your company is the feeling of being spitted on. (F2P and the royal guard outfit, gutting core content/rewards like needing masteries for full fractals rewards, Halloween XP bugged yet just won’t fix it. etc,) I’d also disagree with your interpretation of the OP and feel you are just using that as an excuse to keep negativity of this game to a bare minimum. But you are pretty much the face of Anet’s PR team and just doing what you are payed for, so I can somewhat understand. I would also love to be able to refute any counter arguments, if it weren’t for the fact that I have to wait an hour between each post as punishment.

If you are disappointed you should give your opinion (maybe a little less salty) but it would be nice if you look at things in perspective. Halloween XP bugged yet just won’t fix it. Halloween event released 22 hours ago, at midnight for the developers. Together with the new expansion. You should give them at least a little bit of time to solve bugs. There is no reason to believe the Halloween XP bug will not be solved.

You should check out the dev tracker. Ms. Gray has a post in the main GW discussion area wherein she states that it will not be possible to get it fixed.

I hadn’t seen that addition! Lovely!

Yeah, it’s madness to open all your Christmas presents on Christmas, when you can instead savor the gift-wrapped boxes all the way through July. Why open them at all?

Vayne.8563:

MyriadStars.5679:

Straylight.7529:

MyriadStars.5679:

This is something that I wouldn’t agree. Each wow xpac that I bought (starting from burning crusade) had many new dungeons at launch. Having many new maps to level up your characters will make character progression less boring. You can hop to a different map to level up your character if you are bored of the current map.

The 4 HoT maps offer far more content than the 6 maps (only 5 if you play one faction) of WoW’s latest expansion. WoW’s maps offer very little replayability.

MyriadStars.5679:

The launch price of each xpac is also $10 less than the vanilla. It certainly takes more work to create a new continent than to create 4 new maps.

If you are strictly talking about creating geographic landscape (without monsters, quests, voiceacting etc…) then you can bet your kitten that it took Arenanet more time to create 4 HoT maps than the couple of flat 2D-maps WoW-expacs offer since over a decade.

MyriadStars.5679:

With 4 maps in HOT, you are locked into them and do things repeatedly to progress horizontally, which is more boring. Yes, people do go back to level 60 maps such as Dry top and silverwaste, but it’s really boring for many, so for people who think that SW grind is boring, the four new maps probably won’t be very interesting.

The 4 HoT maps offer far more content than the 6 maps of WoW’s latest expansion. WoW’s maps offer very little replayability. Also I’d rather be “locked” into actual maps with replayability instead of the couple of dungeons you’re locked in when playing WoW. Also whether horizontal progression is more or less boring than vertical progression is a matter of personal opinion. Arenanet went for horizontal progression and had great success with it.

I didn’t get the latest wow xpac, but still your approach is flawed. Among the 5 xpacs of wow, you chose one that you think has the least amount of content and compare it to the only xpac of GW2. This is hardly a fair comparison.

You also ignored other stuff in a typical wow xpac, such as new dungeons. You also ignored the amount of work/time that Blizzard spent on closed beta testing for each xpac.

But you have to compare the whole package. You’re also paying a monthly fee for WoW with relatively little updates between expansions. So your’e not really paying $60 for a WoW expansion you’re actually funding it with $60 plus a couple of hundred dollars Let’s be real. The sub fees goes into making the expansion too. They absolutely don’t need that money just to run the game.

You keep saying that WoW had very few updates between expansions. This is unequivocally false.

In addition to adding features, recipes, and class balance things, and in addition to the usual monthlyish and seasonal festivals they ran, they regularly added small and large group content (dungeons and raids, each with varying levels of difficulty), open world content and new quest hubs.

You might argue about how much those updates appealed to you. You might argue that you find GW2 updates to be much more fulfilling to your style of play. You might argue that you don’t care about the things WoW added/balanced/etc. But stop repeating this myth, because that’s all it is. No matter how many times you try to say it, that won’t make it true.

I came to GW2 after playing WoW for 7 years. In my opinion, GW2 is far superior to WoW in many, many ways. I don’t need to lie about WoW to express that. It has plenty of other flaws.

Straylight.7529:

mrstealth.6701:

Straylight.7529:

MyriadStars.5679:

Beta testing also matters. Do you want a finished product or work in progress?

No MMO is ever finished. An MMO is always a work in progress.

There is a big difference between the ever-changing/evolving nature of MMOs and releasing a game with major features missing, incomplete, or broken.

Which major features are you refering to? And please don’t say raids. We know they’re coming shortly after release.

Anything that’s supposedly coming “shortly after release” can be mentioned, regardless of if you like it or not. Additionally, fractal leaderboards and legendaries, off the top of my head.

I’m really glad I’ve decided not to purchase, and I won’t be chased off by people who say that I shouldn’t be posting unless I own Heart of Thorns. I’m going to wait and see how the reviews shake out and for the price to fall before I even consider getting it. But given that the Halloween event is the first thing in a long time that’s really had me excited to play, I may not even do that.

Also, all of you who staunchly defend this xpac as being in-line with any other xpac out there… how do you know? You’ve played some beta events. Nothing I’ve heard about the beta suggested it was larger or more content-rich than any full expansion ever released.

I’m so sorry your cancer came back, but glad to hear you’re ready to fight! There’s nothing silly about this sentiment. Find strength where you can. It’s beautiful.

Yeah, I’m with Brooks. I’d be very shocked if it happened before the launch, or even in the near future. Still, it’s only a few days to wait and see, I suppose.

Oh, and your English is fine. It’s better than my…. well, name any language other than English.