Guild Wars 2

Teofa Tsavo.9863:

Those guys figure out uses for things nobody else dreams of, and find workarounds and “unintended uses” for things that Devs never dream of.

That´s pretty much the hallmark of all public test servers, the other hallmark is that devs rarely listen to the complaints and mainly use them as a beta stress test.

Anybody knows if changing maps helps?

Beast Sos.1457:

First off Bolt needs a massive upgrade! its been the same since the start of the game except footsteps, which r tiny, and the sound effects.

Sounds like an upgrade to me.
Sword is a very versatile weapon on the guardian, if you know how to use it and with the right offhand.
I really don´t get your problem with the FX, looks quite cool to me and after loosing this ultra annoying nonstop sizzling it´s even become usable. What the heck do you want? The heavens to split up and angelic quires whenever you swing it?
Or just a smaller version of Dawn?

Abso-kitten-lutely nothing.
Came from the horses mouth itself. Pretty much everything else is more important than this ATM.

Araziel.7201:

.. spider camp. People were camping it Everquest style. It was awesome

LMAO!
I usually had to solo the kitten thing as everybody else zerged on to the stupid ENT!

I wonder what other tricks she does now.

For a moment I wondered “A Monsanto thread in GW2? IBTL!”

This is indeed some hilarious griefage.
Just make the kitten things destroyable, so for a change we can deal with the problem ourselves.

Hop aboard the Trahearne Hate Train!

CHOOOchoooo

Yep.
And quite frankly they´d be barking mad if they wouldn´t concentrate their complete resources outside of the LS Teams on pretty much the only real PvE endgame they have.

How about you click&watch the actual interview instead of reading that stupid IGN article?

And due to my logic and reason I can very well deduce that ATM all hands are tied to polishing the game(YAY!).
Maybe you haven´t noticed the innocent little statement in Colin´s latest blog or simply don´t understand the meaning.

EVERY Dungeon will be rebalanced, re-polished or even outright deleted and rebuilt from scratch.
This is basically half of the PvE content of this game that is being totally redone!

They took 3+ years to launch this game and now are redesigning roughly a quarter of it.
That is your expansion right there.

crestpiemangler.7631:

One such example is the escort in snowden drifts where you’re supposed to bring the quaggan ambassador to the kodan. The problem with that event is that you are faced with a mob that will kill you, in pairs, in sets of >= 3 (the jellyfish)…. in addition to that, you have extremely fast respawn times and additional aggro from neutral mobs (they aggro even if you don’t hit them).

OMG, I actually soloed this.
With my on level Ranger or Guardian, it must´ve been sometime right after game launch so I´m fuzzy on the details.
What an incredibly frustrating half hour or so. Now whenever I come near that place I just hit the afterburners. Screw the Quaggans.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

Not every story step is “Destroy every enemy on the map”.

But .. but .. death is good!!
;)

I get routinely suppressed in Queensdale, simply on posting waypoints near Champs.
This filter is just useless.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Please no mounts….. I don’t want them things in this game. I really don’t.

Haah!
No worries there. It´ll be yet another useless inventory cluttering(when actually used) minipet.
Or it could be a free token for one of these RNG gated weapon skins .. naah.
That would be too cool.

C h e e z u s !

I´ve been playing this for a year already?

My mind is boggled.
O_o

Lutinz.6915:

Colin Johansson has said that they have a large dev crew working on longer term projects for the game but they arent ready to talk about what is being worked on yet. How they release this content, either as super large LS updates or paid expansions, hasnt been decided on yet.

Ah no.
Colin just recently said they aren´t working on an expansion at all and completely concentrating on Living Story.

Those “large dev teams” you insinuate are likely to work on expansion are instead most definitely retooling just about all the Dungeons we have in game.

They actually are doing this already, but with 4 teams each on its own month-long development cycle and staggering their releases by 2 weeks.

Living Story is the expansion.

Official Dev Word.

Traveller.7496:

Cool story. I might care if Rox would recognize my character in-game after all I’ve done to help her.

That´s a known bug, they might fix it maybe next month.

DravenAU.5789:

I have yet to complete the entire “Personal Story” for the first time yet, so I don’t know how it pans out.
But, I was under the impression that Queen Jennah was supposed to be for the people.

You don´t get the whole Queen Jennah/Logan storyline from the personal story.
Just an introduction and the rest is found in the Story modes of the Dungeons.
And the in-game storyline actually continues the novel Destinies Edge, which I have stopped reading somewhere in the middle.

Xkyline.5267:

…along with 4 other similar genocidal dragons besides me…and the humans decide it’s the perfect kittening time to get drunk and throw huge consecutive parties.Oh c’mon…

Hah!
Wouldn´t it be awesome if instead of the current obvious showdown with that Scarlet biotch, that thinks she´s the hottest and ebilest thing since rotten sliced bread, ALL the Dragon Lieutenants show up.
Smashing DR into a Pizza of Dragon corruption. Slices of rotting undead, crystal corrupted and icebrood.

I think that would be actually cool.
Anet likes to delete stuff, why not throw away the artwork of your best city.
Their artists don´t seem to mind getting their stuff deleted all the time.

How to continue the story?

Simple, Zhaitan didn´t die!

Or at least not the way normal creatures and Dragons die.

I admit, it´s not a very innovative plot device.
Tolkien did it with Sauron, whoever wrote the Bible did it with Jesus, Lucas did it with Obi-Wan and lately Rowling did it with frikken Voldemort!
I´ll leave it to the payed staff to properly continue this thing.

As for the time-gating of Orr and the adjacent Risen influenced maps, I fear that´s inevitable and in fact needed.
Technically it could be just as simple as automatically dumping everyone with an unfinished PStory on an overflow with the current maps.

It gets trickier with the actual Temple fights and the rest of the events.
I heard that the Orr maps have 1500 events. About the majority of the events in this game.
That´s a lot of stuff that needs rewriting.
Which is ironical as I think not 25% of the player base has ever seen a major number of these events.

But I heard ANet has currently 4 teams working on other important stuff.
Oh well, maybe next year.

I really hope the current outcry is being noticed and hopefully understood as the warning of how utterly FED UP we are with this constant busywork and temporary content.

Yes, it´s supposed to be the last “sensible” temporary content launch as it´s yet another Festival.
But quite frankly, I´m getting up fed with these constant parties too.

Aren´t we like fighting for like survival or something?

Einlanzer.1627:

Am I also the first to talk about the cognitive dissonance stemming from the fact that the PS and Zhaitan fight and launch dungeons/DEs are all permanent while everything else is ‘living’?  It’s internally inconsistent which is almost worse than just not having access to certain content.   I just don’t feel their LS idea is good for the game and they need to give it up. Hopefully they’ll have their act together more for year 2.

Yeah, so much this!

The whole game world is stuck in this weird schizophrenic timeloop between the Personal Story, the Story Dungeon tale about Destinies Edge´s “revival” and Zhaitan´s Death.
I actually have no idea where to even place all these (albeit cool) short stories or the living stories in general.

If Anet is serious about their “Living World”, then they simply have to split the Orr and the adjacent Risen influenced maps into pre and post Zhaitan´s Death.

That would of course mean a splintering of the server populace, but that´s not that big a deal anyway IMHO.
Technically it sure isn´t, as the current pre Zhaitan Death maps could just become overflow maps that everybody gets gated onto when their char´s PStory isn´t finished.

kokiman.2364:

HawkMeister.4758:

Nope, you can´t just load up the Toilet with all karma-greens.

Oh yes you can and the stuff that comes out can be sold.

Funny, I keep slotting my 3 soulbound accessories/rings/amulets and the 4th always gets greyed out.
?

rfdarko.4639:

Tokens were never the problem with dungeon farming – it was the gold end reward and loadstones. There is no easy way to convert tokens into gold,

Aha, so when did this stop working?
If it actually doesn´t anymore, then I´m a donkey and everbody can “Hah Hah” me.

I´m also not here to win the popular vote or insult people. I just candidly call them as I see ´em.

Actually I get your argument, I´m pretty much in the same boat.
But the CoF1 runners have ruined it, that´s just how I see it.

Hear hear!

andthenhewaslike thiis and thaat and amongst andlike big words or sumthin´
OMG liek sooo ooold!

;)

Nope, you can´t just load up the Toilet with all karma-greens.

Sorin.4310:

HawkMeister.4758:

So now you can´t run these Dungeons like a production line anymore.

I like how your entire post is about zerking your way through these runs, and yet my
guild doesn’t do zerker runs. Nice presumptions. Also, this change does nothing to zerker runs. Trying thinking next time.

And exploiting? I don’t think that word means what you think it means. They changed the dungeon rewards from account based to character base months ago.

Didn´t necessarily mean you personally, I have no idea how you or your guild play.

But it´s a pretty safe bet you(personally) and most other hardcore dungeon runners (& especially the CoF1’ers) aren´t running the 5th alt through the same Dungeon with out a teeny bit of exploiting or even just some innocent speed running, don´t you think?
BTW speed running to me is basically on the same level as your garden variety game-play exploit.

About Zerker runs, try reading next time.
I already explained they will come back once the grinder crowd has figured out the easiest 4-5 Dungeons and memorized them well enough to survive just on DPS and dodging.

As for the char.based rewards. I stopped second guessing ANet´s motives ages ago. Pretty sure they just make it up as they go along.

Yeah, the same for me.
The kitten greens from the Pavilion are bad luck, I tell you!!

Pretty much from the start I did the Toilet Achievement Daily with greens.
Had my share of bad streaks, but nothing this spectacularly bad.

Great short story, adorable characterizations!

When you guys finally figure out how to properly present your living story in-game, I hope these nice shorts become part of the game proper and not just the website.

Even just a tab in an expanded story category of our hero screen would be preferable to the current disjointed mess of hard to find wiki entries and website pages.

Sorin.4310:

HawkMeister.4758:

I actually applaud this.
Nobody is keeping you from running your alts, just do it the next day.

Yes. Please keep telling me how I should have to play the game. You know, the old way didn’t effect you in anyway nor does the new way (or if it does – you just don’t care).

Of course the old way affected me, as you guys with the gazillion alts constantly exploiting these dungeons are the same guys crying for “Zerker ONLY!” in LFG.
Thus influencing everybody to “suit up”, making your oh so efficient “gameplay” the norm.

So now you can´t run these Dungeons like a production line anymore.

But instead of waking up from the grind-stupor, you´re actually complaining that you may have to take a slight break from this moronic quasi-robotic gaming style.

Well, you´re going to start rethinking your exploity playstyle and drop the Zerker gear for a while. Maybe even start playing with the dreaded casuals, until you´ve found the many exploits in the other dungeons of course.

But enjoy them while they last, because it´s on the record that this is just the start of ANet´s long overdue Dungeons revamp.

Scoobaniec.9561:

What Evon has to do with rng? …

Seriously?

Or are we still RPing?
Hard to tell ATM.

Wallace MacBix.2089:

Also to throw dueling into PvE would cause a wide range of problems, an unscaled lvl 1 in his starter gear vs. a true lvl 80 in exotics/ascended comes to mind.

Not really, it could just switch the characters to their normal PvP settings.
And we already have a precedent with the Zephyr Sanctum Race.
Everybody was thrown automatically into their PvP gear on entering from the open world.

Spectating on the fights from the PvE open world would be impossible though.

skullmount.1758:

They were account bound, and then they had to go change it for some stupid reason to soulbound.

The stupid reason is that ANet´s stupid system keeps constantly sending these mails to newly created characters.
And instead of just switching it of, because of character deleters/creaters farming them we all get kitteneffed.

Aeolus.3615:

To sum it up isnt “Livin story” yet or if ever will be, just storyline updates i wish gw2 LS were more like Fighting Fantasy books from Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone.

LOL

Love it!
Those were in fact superior as they gave you choices that actually changed the end of the books!
Which of course isn´t feasible in a Theme-Park MMO as it shatters the player base.

Yes Emmet, you accurately described what happens in a Sandbox game like EvE Online or the as of yet theoretical(thus let´s better be cautious) EQNext.

And consequently what is a truly living world compared to a Theme-Park that just gets constantly patched.
At tremendous cost I must add.
Those teams don´t work for nothing and time will tell if this is actually sustainable.

Again I must mention WvWvW.
It should´ve been the actual Living World in GW2 with as much “Sandbox” as this aging engine can possibly handle.
So that a manageable team only has to provide the RULES to play by and maybe tweak the “Playground” from time to time.

Even Blizzard with their deep coffers cannot dare hope to create PvE content that can measure up to the emergent game-play hundred-thousands of players would freely provide.
They know this all to well and have solved this scary fact by gating their finite content through a cascade of mandatory repeatable hoops players have to jump though.

ANet thinks they can do this by giving us new temporary rides every 2 weeks.

Beautiful Synopsis!
Please read, ANet!

This living story is just taking too d*mn long!
This time again, we get a 15 minute “live action movie” that actually got interesting then..
BAM!
To be continued in 2 weeks…

Seriously?
I´m reading web comics that routinely provide 10 times the content in this time frame.

Oh this is handy!
Every thread should have it.

---

Please check all that apply.

You are:

[ ] Married
[ ] Have Girlfriend
[ ] Employed
[ ] Have Pets
[ ] Have Children
[x] Are an Adult
[x] Have a Life
[ ] Have no Manual Dexterity

You Think Living World is too:

[ ] Hard
[x] Time Consuming
[x] Temporary FLUFF
[x] Full of Jumping Puzzles

You are Currently Threatening to:

[ ] Quit
[ ] Uninstall
[x] Feed Colins’ Dog Zhaitaffy so he farts up his place
[x] Never really do the above
[x] Tell the Internet That You are Upset

---

Thank you!

DONE!
That was easy.

EDIT: update

Why do it at all?
It´s just another “cute” thing cluttering up the bank.

Yeah, I understand very well where you´re coming from.
I think I would´ve been the same if I had spent so much time in the game.

Till now I still haven´t seen all Dungeons and don´t feel so burned out yet on the “normal” content.

This living story crap is everything but content to me. More like a marketing gag to keep the grinders happy or lure back the casuals.
That are gone in a flash anyway.
The moments of story that are the actual interesting parts of what can be defined as content are of course not repeatable and much to brief even for the two week wait.

Time for a break I guess.

Yeah well, everybody has his problems with immersion.

For example I find it supremely ridiculous to watch tiny Asurans fighting with a Greatsword more than twice their size. Especially considering some of the “wilder” GS designs.
So personally I just ignore them.

So you either deal with the whole Asura issue and view them as Aliens form “inner Space” or something, or frankly speaking .. get lost.
Because this game has much bigger problems to complain about than your inflexibility in interpreting the lore.

And we better not even start talking about the quasi fascist Charr childrearing by “the state” or the blatant misandry shown in the “Charr-feminist uprising” and the “evil patriarchy” threat of the Son´s of Svanir.

Elbegast.6970:

This isn’t the Guild Wars that I knew and loved.

Thank god!
This odd dichotomy between magic and techno-magic/sharp sticks and boom-sticks is one of the main selling points of this game

If you can´t stomach this (or that Evon lost :P ) then you should go back to GW1 or another of the myriad medieval high-fantasy games.

All hail to the 50-foot tall see-through woman!

K, your ideas are nice and a cute way of polishing up a tur.. what can´t be polished.

Bottom line is, after 9 months we have 5 dead cities. Lots of deleted content, thus totally wasted Dev-work and when something finally comes along to revive a city it´s just more temporary stuff (Moto/Pavilion).

TehPwnerer.7215:

Your solution won’t work either,

I see you don´t want to argue the point but just “win” an internet argument and defend beloved ANet.
Suit yourself, I´m tired of this game.
Especially when I´m supposed to argue with someone who doesn´t even understand my point.

Anet´s “Living World” is a poor marketing obfuscation for constant Asia-like grindy “new” theme-park content.

The only successful living world I know of is EVE Online.
Mind you for their western market, not so much the Chinese offshoot. There´s a reason for that.

Mentality.

IMHO Anet is making the great error of transplanting gameplay primarily successful in the Asian market to the Western audience.
Pretty sure this will eventually fail, spectacularly so when a true alternative comes along.

On paper Everquest Next seems to me 10x as alive as what Anet could manage with double the teams they have now.

Sad part is that their WvW could´ve been that “promised” living world.
But it too is slowly failing with a silent fart, no matter how many “horizontal-vertical” progressions they are making people grind for, in a couple of tiny frozen maps with endless back and forth Zergs.

And a yearly event is temporary by definition!

So after a month there will be a big bird dome over a hole doing nothing where earlier there was just a hole doing nothing.
So there still will be kittencrap to do in DR.

This is better, how?

mtpelion.4562:

Brother Grimm.5176:

HawkMeister.4758:

Who the hell salvages their blues&greens?
Blues get vendor´ed and greens toilet´ed, thought everybody does that.

Don’t need gold….need mats (that can get me gold whenever I want). Also, runes salvabed can often sell on TP for much more gold than vendoring the item. You may have a point about greens in the toilet (can these generate a rare?), but I’ve never been a big flusher.

There is always a 20% chance that the output from the forge will be upgraded in rarity. That means that on average, every 20 greens you drop in the forge will net you 1 rare (yellow).

Yes this.

My overflowing bags on a couple of my alts are mostly due to rares out of the “Mystic Toilet Dailies” that I hoarded greens for.
A couple of which I have now recycled with my spare BL Kits to build that nice celestial armor set “for free”.
But I may have had an extremely lucky streak(on average 8 greens=1 rare) these past months, as yesterday I threw about 20-30 greens in the toilet and got nuttin.

As for the economy.
May I remind the esteemed players that ANet´s “F2P” model depends on selling Gems for real money.
Gems that can also be bought with our virtual Gold ..
(which pretty much is as real as our so-called real monies, but that´s another topic)
.. so that directly ties in-game inflation with ANet´s profit.

TehPwnerer.7215:

Basically leave it up to the people who exploit to ruin it for everyone.

How about, leave it to ANet to make everyone suffer for their shoddy, shortsighted programming?

Obviously it´s too hard for them to send a mail to every character on an account only once then mark the account as “DONE”.

It seems that “exploit” of people deleting characters and rolling new ones comes as a stunning new surprise to ANet..
EVERY
KITTEN
TIME !!1!!1!evellen!

NO.

Yesterday I ported to from LA to Gates of Arah event and only payed something like 1.5 silver.
Planning to do LOTS of porting this month.

Ellen, we love you.
Can´t wait for Thaumanova!

I actually applaud this.
Nobody is keeping you from running your alts, just do it the next day.

Complaining about this is seriously shortsighted, because you locusts gobble up these dungeons in record time then complain after a week; “There´s nothing to do !”

Well, now it takes a couple of days longer to grind for that dungeon set.