Guild Wars 2

Wryscher.1432:

robot.9134:

cmerc.2081:

I wouldn’t say I’m having the best gaming time of my life by any means, but I do find it sad how many people can’t find all the good things that this game offers. I’m having a lot of fun still and expect to for a while yet.

I think people are more irritated at this point with anets communication skills.

Patch notes are vague. They were not prepared in general for all of the bugs, class balancing issues, bots, exploits etcetc.

Its a red flag and they should have prepd. They should have been multi tasking both bugs and class balance but im guessing they either dont have the priorities straight OR they dont have the staff(go figure they have an ad on the front page “NOW HIRING”).

Its worse than any average MMO launch….even when comparing to other failed mmo’s.

Ive actually felt it was better then any MMO launch i’ve played through. But everyones perceptions are different.

Agreed, I think it was a better launch than most that I’ve experienced.

I’m loving the game still… such a great world to explore.

Cool looking sword, Dysect, gz

I think people need to chill out. Other MMOs use daily lockouts to control how many dungeon tokens one can earn in a space of time, GW2 uses diminishing returns…. it’s more or less the same thing, only in GW2 you can actually “farm” more tokens per day as you’re not hard capped in way that a lockout works.

Get over it!

DKP.4196:

Hawken.7932:

DKP.4196:

Its not really 100percent gear. Many in Gw2 have forgotten the importance of consumables. Drinks and food really make a difference in the long run. The instance you use it, it may not feel any different.

Once you complete several dungeons with consumables, and if you look back at your previous dungeon runs, you will notice the difference. If you dont notice the difference, then you need to ramp up your playing style such as, changing traits so its more fitting for the dungeon in question etc.

Dude it’s like beating your head against a wall, trying to explain to people the many reasons why they’re finding it hard.

The wall will eventually break if enough heads bang on it.

I don’t know it’s a pretty THICK wall

DKP.4196:

Its not really 100percent gear. Many in Gw2 have forgotten the importance of consumables. Drinks and food really make a difference in the long run. The instance you use it, it may not feel any different.

Once you complete several dungeons with consumables, and if you look back at your previous dungeon runs, you will notice the difference. If you dont notice the difference, then you need to ramp up your playing style such as, changing traits so its more fitting for the dungeon in question etc.

Dude it’s like beating your head against a wall, trying to explain to people the many reasons why they’re finding it hard.

Funny, I’ve played just countless hours of this game since launch, and I haven’t seen a single toon teleporting around the map. Not one.

I’d agree, it would have to be balanced with existing supplies and not be the only source.

Actually some of your points give me another related idea — I suppose it could be a really cool way for the devs to balance the existing supply/demand of certain materials. For example, if Vanilla beans were just crazy expensive and in very low supply (like they are right now), then “far away merchants could hear about it” and they could spawn and start working their way towards Lion’s Arch, etc. helping to bring new supply into the mix.

Would be nice if the whole supply system for cooking mats was something a little more dynamic like this. Even taking it a step further and working it into mini events… raids on spice wagons by centaurs etc. Would make the world come alive in little ways. If you weren’t interested in cooking, you could still participate in those events and sell the proceeds on the TP.

Eivene.9127:

I just wanted to say I absolutely love these ideas!

Thanks

I want to add that despite the complaint, I also love the idle chatter around the world, it’s great. But the frequency needs to be about 1/10th of what it is now, in my opinion.

I quite like the cooking profession, I’ll say that first. I think it’s the most interesting profession simply because of the complexity of the discovery involved. It used to be a bit of chore back when you had to drag everything to your inventory, but now that’s fixed, it’s much better. That said, how we obtain our ingredients — or some of them at least — could use a bit more of the dynamic spirit that so much of the rest of the game has.

So first the positives:

- cool that you can “farm” some ingredients, and often in real farms in the world. That’s cool for so many reasons. It feels authentic, it’s cool that they take time to grow back, etc.

- also nice that you can buy certain ingredients from karma vendors.

- thirdly of course you can get some ingredients — like walnuts — from trees, and I think that also gives some realism and immersion to gathering which is great.

The negative(s):

- all of these things, perhaps barring the walnut drops from trees, feel very static, in an otherwise rich and dynamic mmo.

- some ingredients are rare in the wrong kind of way — meaning they are just mathematically rare to come by (I’m looking at YOU vanilla beans), and not rare in a fun kind of way.

An idea to address both of these things:

- like so many systems in the game, I see so much potential to build on what’s there. While karma vendors with ingredients for cooking is nice, I would love to see some of these put into motion… literally. Karma vendors often feel to me like traveling salesmen, which are out in the world, but often in static or predictable places. This is fine some of the time, as they are predictable and you just alt-tab over to your favorite website, find out exactly where everything is while you’re powerleveling your profession (as some people do), and get what you need.

I would love to see, as a variation to this:

- karma vendors (or just vendors) who traveled across zones with their pack mules mounded with stuff, carrying rare ingredients from far away lands. A Norn down from the snowy peaks, packed with goods he’s bringing down to sell at Lion’s Arch, for example. Maybe he would have a little problem you could solve first, which would unlock his store, whatever. Basically, put these guys in motion across the map. Give them a little back story. Maybe even give them a random pool of things to sell (seasonal!). Coming across stuff like this in the world just gives it more life. Maybe it’s a little detail, but I think it would be fun and add to immersion.

- also I love it when you talk to NPCs in a town and suddenly they become the start of an event (or at least give you those 1 of 3 dialog response choices). It’s great to have systems in place which encourage you to talk to NPCs, as it gives life to the location they’re in as well as giving lore-delivery opportunities. What I’d love to see is the same sort of thing — expand upon these “hidden” NPC to have some dialog choices open up shops, which sell a small (even limited) set of goods/ingredients. Give us even more reasons to talk to these people!

/disagree.

As has been pointed out endless amounts of times in multiple threads, the waypoint costs serve many purposes. Yes, they are a gold sink, but they are also a game mechanism to encourage people out into the world. People out in the world = more people (like me) who will participate in the goings-on in the world. The success and health of this world depend on people participating in dynamic events, and so if people are just randomly teleporting around, it will quickly become static.

This is just so obviously why there are waypoint costs, I seems kinda pointless to argue this one.

I think this conversation is a little off track — but I would agree with the original sentiment. I find that overall, I like the mid-level-range armor and weapons the most. The stuff in the 30-50 range looks great, but once we start getting into big crazy moon swords with inlaid lapis and such, you start to lose me.

I’d love to see some more realistic weapons at endgame, with more subtle but cool details. For example, my level 55 guardian has a nice rare sword… not too hugely fancy, but it has some great runed carving on it. I’d love to have something along those lines at endgame, but the runes having a subtle glow to them, maybe a few other details. Not everything needs to be a double-sized lightning ghost sword.

@raphaeldisanto – I’m not that interested in re-doing the story missions, but I really can’t understand your point of view on not including such a feature. Why would it possibly take away from the “casual friendly game” by including harder versions of the story missions? You don’t need to do them, it would just be there for people like RaZaC who would like a greater challenge?

Yeah whips are indeed there already and they’re pretty cool. I’ve thought many times that the Thief profession would benefit from this as an additional weapon, as that profession really lacks weapon variety (and I can’t think of any of the existing weapons being appropriate).

Yeah I’ve noticed Vanilla is a seriously high demand item now — I’m very lucky, as I just happened to load up on it right before they patched it out of karma vendors. I think now it’s like 1.5s each on the TP… lol.

DreamThief.9812:

“Seize the moment!”
“Never let a wrong ripen into evil..”
“Seize the moment!”

Haha… this! So much this. Seriously that ripen into evil line has internet meme written all over it.

I don’t know what’s happening with the trading post — if there are gold sellers who are spamming it with 1c above vendor price (as many have suggested) to keep the economy crippled, or if there are just an overwhelmingly large amount of people who are too stupid to realize they are losing money by selling things for 1c above vendor (as the TP takes a cut). Either way, I point at that as a large part of the problem.

I find crafting fun and useful myself, for filling in the gaps in my armor, but I admit that if I do the math of what I could buy along the way instead, it barely works out. The XP gain you get from crafting though, is pretty excellent, so in my book it’s worth it for that.

As with all systems in the game, I like the “system” itself with discovery, etc. and hope that it’s just a good foundation on which they will build. The single most interesting thing they could do, in my opinion, is add some more crafter-only gear sets which are soulbound on creation – at max level, so at least we could have some unique looks. Maybe there are such things already, but I haven’t heard of them?

Found one on the web. This is the standard international english keyboard which Apple sells:

http://communities.vmware.com/servlet/JiveServlet/download/1066344-14311/Apple%20Aluminium%20ISO%20International%20English.jpg

After doing a bit of research, this seems to be a common problem with Cider ports — that Cider doesn’t recognize certain keys. Hopefully someone at Anet can look at this at some point, because I imagine there must be some way of dealing with it?

It’s a pain for me in particular because sometimes I play at work (windows) and then at home (mac), and switching thatkittenweapon swap key to something else on both is a tough thing to find a good solution for.

My thief… leveled it up… was 10/10 until about level 40 and then kinda 7/10 in the end. I really LOVE the thief, but it needs more combat variation (I think just the variation that some more weapons would bring). Has great gameplay though.

My guardian is totally 10/10 at level 51.

My overall experience with the game is definitely a 9/10. There’s room to improve the game in some areas, but on the whole it’s an amazing mmo, imho.

I LOVE the dungeons, and don’t mind crafting — glad that both are hard for a change and not the mindless systems that other MMOs have.

I don’t know if they should be called too easy, though I haven’t done them all yet. I also really like them though, now that I’m getting used to the new mechanics. I also haven’t yet run into a situation which couldn’t be countered by some player thought. I’d l Ike to add to this thread – I think they’re very challenging and enjoyable.

@TwistedWarrior: well, I don’t appreciate you calling me a liar. That’s pretty hostile and it’s not necessary. As I said, I’m not trying to say “wow, I’m so much better than people here who are complaining…” I’m just saying that I quite enjoy them, and people who are having a hard time with them should just keep with it — there is a learning curve, they take some getting used to for sure. But now that I feel I’m past that learning curve, and obviously some of the people I’ve pugged with lately are also, they are quite fun.

@TwistedWarrior: that’s absolutely not true, about trolling anyway. I just now got out of CM explore and had a great time. I’m not trying to troll anyone and I don’t want to be condescending. I strongly disagree with people saying they are too hard. They ARE difficult, that’s for sure. Easy isn’t a word I’d use.

However, in that CM explore run, we had no total wipes, but there was a lot of downed time, but that’s part of the action. The more that I play the explore modes, the more I have come to admire the subtleties of the new group design that Arenanet has done. We were throwing up bubbles, Wall of Reflection, healing seeds, using our crowd control, focus firing on single targets, making use of combos, etc. all the tools at our disposal and it was a GREAT time. So intense and so challenging, but so fun. We cleared it in about 40 minutes, but we weren’t rushing.

About rewards, I don’t know. I think after vendoring all the blues and with picked up coins and the end reward, it wasn’t a huge money making operation, but I don’t really think of them that way anyway, so I was fine with it. I picked up one random rare that time, so that was good. All in all, a good time. (this was a PUG, by the way)

Deluxxe.9140:

my main problem with Dungeons is the design of the encounters. CM Story for example, has a couple REALLY tough fights along the way (the one with the drunk guy passed out is a wipefest and QQ inducing for pugs). But when you get to the last boss fight it’s a cakewalk. The boss fight should, IMO, be at least as tough as the hardest encounter along the way. It should also be somewhat entertaining. Standing there for 10 minutes firing arrows in to a guy and dodging every once in a while when you see a red circle is not really all that exciting to me.

I think that’s a fair opinion, though I personally like the challenge of trash fights just as much as boss fights. Trash is often a test of your support skills — crowd control, kiting, healing, ability to focus on one mob at a time as a group etc — while boss encounters are often more focusing on the boss mechanics which are unique (ie. don’t stand in the red circles, don’t attack during this phase, etc etc.). Both are important to a dungeon, imho.

kovaux.2371:

This thread is what happens when children are given contestant ribbons while growing up instead of shaming them and not making them work hard to achieve greatness

I know, lol, it’s seriously making me re-think my parenting strategy. I just can’t believe the amount of QQ. The dungeons are great fun.

Despite the fact that I’m personally against a standard LFG queue style tool — at least an automatic queue like in Rift or WoW — it would be a great area for Arenanet to innovate and come up with something new. Something which would maintain the values that they think are important while still making the process easier than asking in chat (aside from what’s there already).

Efaicia.3672:

Destroyed is subjective. LFG destroyed Rift for me as the developers had to specifically dumb down the dungeons to accomidate the lack of coorditation and random classes thrown together in their dungeon finder and so made my chosen role of support absolutely useless in the aspect of the game I favored most. I stopped my subscription shortly thereafter.

It did not however destroy the game for the aoe facemash zerg crowd as that is what the dungeons were turned into to accomidate the dungeon finder.

So I guess yet again, it is up to ArenaNet and what they want their game turned into.

You described the problem really well here. Since I made my post above I was trying to think of a good way of summarizing it, but you did perfectly. It’s pretty well what happened with WoW also.

Tetsuo.2593:

I know a MMO that got destroyed by LFG. SWTOR. One of the reasons it tanked so fast was the lack of LFG tool that kept server populations isolated from each other and forced players to spam general chat looking for groups. GW2 was supposed to be all about ‘no bs, no time sinks, just log and play’ and, for the most part, it is, except for this.

It’s easy now that the game is fresh and servers are full. Give it a few months, when the hype settles, and try to do a dungeon off the server peak hours, then tell me how bad a LFG tool really is for an online game.

Oh boy… Swtor. So many other problems with that game, it’s hard to chose one dissect. At endgame, the dungeons were pretty well all there was to do. Also there was no real “world” in swtor.. it was fragmented by design, unless you consider the lobby space station a world (I don’t), so looking for a group was a nightmare.

It’s not hard at all to find groups on my server in GW2, and I imagine when more people hit level cap it will be about the same, as people shift more focus onto dungeons.

Gray.9650:

Hawken.7932:

You get the helm, because story mode is just an introduction to the dungeon and the helm is the “free” piece you get for doing it. What do you expect to be rewarded with for story mode?

you only get the helm the first time, it has the same model as every other and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t scale.
also given the current state of story modes that are harder than some of the explorable routes of the dungeon, it’s hardly a worthy reward.

don’t forget you can’t run story modes alone, right now there is 0 incentive to do it twice. good luck finding a group in a month.

This is the thing with dungeons and the dungeon gear in general — scale, no. What they do is provide you with a rare skin, and you are free to keep that skin and transmute it onto whatever gear you want. This is why the rewards from the low level dungeons are still valid — because once you have the skin, it’s yours.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

there are currently no plans to implement a dungeon finder.

If you are having trouble finding groups for dungeons, you can use our LFG system. Open up your contacts menu in-game, and there should be an option in there for grouping. That way it’s not just people standing out in front of dungeons shouting LFG until someone invites them. This system does not stretch across servers, or to other maps.

Really happy to hear this. On the surface, it always feels like it will be beneficial to the MMO to be able to find dungeon groups via a menu, but in both WoW and Rift it has been a destructive thing.

Voxnor.1657:

Dan.8213:

About AC Story Mode

Just tried it for the 3rd time today with a group who took our time, re-grouped etc only died 4 times, twice on the last boss. Cost of 1 silver for total repairs and i made nearly 26s not including all weps/armor that i salvo’d.

The difficulty is EXCELLENT just the way it is!

I also take back what i said about the bosses, they are pretty good actually and i really enjoyed my play through so much better, the group (PuG) helped a lot.

I will say to the devs though, you could avoid a lot of bashing on here by adding an early dungeon say around lvl 15-20 with a nice learning curve/tutorial to dungeon runs. Could save a lot of players from frustration and the bashing you are receiving!

Really looking forward to the rest of the game now!!

So just checking – but you think its acceptable to die four times in the very first, story mode dungeon in the game? Presumably, this should be the easiest dungeon and easiest difficulty in the game, and your perfectly happy that on your third run-through, not your first, you ate dirt 4 times?

Sorry, but that is just not fun for everyone. Glad you enjoyed it though, more power to you.

Yes, and I concur, a few weeks after release, it is absolutely ok to die a few times on a dungeon. The next run will be less deaths, and eventually there will be none as people learn this radically new way of playing (versus the traditional trinity roles).

You get the helm, because story mode is just an introduction to the dungeon and the helm is the “free” piece you get for doing it. What do you expect to be rewarded with for story mode?

@Gray:
bad design
making stuff hard to see and slapping obscene amounts of hp on bosses/trash is not challenging. high hp trash is dull, I can hardly see someone go grinding down that champ and say “I’m having so much fun right now! I swung a sword! hey, I swung it again! squeeeee”

Here I believe (personally) is the source of the problem. The encounters are not badly designed, people are just trying to zerg them, from what I’ve exprienced in all of the bad groups so far, and I would guess often in glass-cannon type builds. You can’t really blame people for this, because there’s not much in the open PvE world which teaches people anything other than “zerg bosses”, and there are no dual-build options so that we can keep a high mitigation build ready for dungeons. This is tricky, because I love that they hold you to one build in the open world so that your decisions on builds mean something, but on the other hand it discourages people from making builds which fit the dungeon content. Anyway, trash is manageable in dungeons if you are smart and work as a team. Bosses.. well much the same. I don’t really see them as different from bosses I’ve encountered raiding in WoW, Rift, AoC, whatever.

bad reward system
I don’t have a problems with grinding for tokens or investing time to get something, as long as I have fun doing it. sure, fun is subjective, but where’s the flexibility from gw1 to work towards the armor I want with what I perceive as fun and still be able to progress? grinding exactly one dungeon for one set of armor is hardly a revolutionary concept (especially when most mmos already abandoned it).

So here I don’t really see you explaining why it’s a bad reward system, I see you again saying that you think the dungeons aren’t fun, and I guess that’s because you feel they are too hard. Subjectively, I find the dungeons great and fun, so I guess to me it doesn’t feel like a grind at all. These sets should take us 6 months to get, or long term goals anyway. I’m not stressing about doing the dungeon again and again and again, I consider it a sideline goal — as there are plenty of other things to do in the game, so bit by bit, I will get those dungeon sets without ever feeling the grind of it.

People wanted and craving to have those dungeon sets “right now” is the real problem, imho.

@barringer: maybe, but even that somewhat trivializes the armor sets into something you could pick up in a week, which just seems incredibly lame.

@Dan: honestly, I wouldn’t mind if they toned the Story mode dungeons down, if people seem to think they’re hard. It is the Explore modes I’m talking about above. I’d like to believe that would stop the whiners from demanding nerfs, but it seems there is a crowd which just wants to be handed the dungeon sets without doing the learning and progression.

I get the feeling that a lot of people here complaining about the dungeon difficulty have never really experienced a raid in other MMOs. These dungeons are nothing compared to doing first runs on raids in Rift or WoW. Try wiping on a raid boss for several months before you start crying about a few wipes in the first few weeks since this MMOs release.

Here’s the thing with dungeons and why the need to be hard for the long term health of this MMO. In fact I would say this is critical for its survival.

There are all kinds of people who play MMOs with a wide range of skill sets. There are people who only like to PvP, others who PvE exclusively, and then some people in between. Some people like to have everything handed to them, and others like to fight and wipe, night after night, until they get the shiny sword they lust after.
Arenanet has done a pretty amazing job of creating content for all of these different groups. Overall, I’m in awe of the content. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best that’s been released in years, in my opinion.

Dungeons, as they’ve said before, are the HARD PvE content, intended to keep the group of people who previously might have raided in other MMOs, happy with the game (and the post-level-cap endgame especially). Story mode is perhaps intended to draw people in who might otherwise not try them. Maybe the trash is a bit tough, maybe not. I don’t personally find it tough, but that’s subjective.

If these dungeons are nerfed down and the dungeon sets are given away like candy, then there is going to be one serious consequence for GW2 within the MMO community. Suddenly everyone will be steamrolling them, getting their free dungeon set, then the forum crying will commence about how there’s nothing to do, how GW2 indeed has no endgame, and how therefore it is doomed to failure.
Arenanet knows this well and they walk a tightrope right now, where if they nerf them, they risk losing a very vocal part of the population, and generally following the trend of recent MMOs which didn’t release with much endgame — a point about GW2 that is already bandied about on MMO review sites as the greatest flaw of the game.

The amount of QQ on these forums about the dungeons is probably the most depressing thing I’ve seen surrounding an MMO in quite a while. But anyway, good post, OP, we can only hope they don’t water them down into WoW (or Rift) style, “casual” hand holding, loot pinata romps.

It’s a shame people couldn’t just give it some time and learn that they’re dying constantly because they’re running their glass cannon, PvE leveling setups, and don’t yet properly understand the mechanics.

On the international keyboard for mac (english international, which is quite commonly used around the world I guess), the tilde key isn’t where it normally is, and there is a § key in it’s place in the normal spot below the ESC button.

So after many, many hours of playing the game, my brain is now hardwired to weapon swap with this key, as it is default. I thought no problem, I’ll just update the weapon swap key to be §, but unfortunately, GW2 will not even recognize this key — ie. I press to map to this key and nothing happens.

I’ve tried changing the keyboard input type to US International or US, or other countries for that matter, but the game simply doesn’t recognize it. Not a game breaker obviously, but an annoyance.

Silvaria.7635:

Kelkka.9086:

I took a chance and downloaded the beta (took about 14 hours[!] over my ISP connection) and can happily state that it works fine under 10.6.8 on a vintage 2007 iMac. This does not necessarily mean things will be hunky-dory on a MacBook, but the odds are good.

The only issue I have experienced is that the scroll button on the mouse has no effect (zooming the map, paging through pages in invetory, at al). As the scroll button’s functionality has alternative buttons in every case I’ve seen, that is a minor inconvenience at most.

(Incidentally, I am also running GW2 under Windows XP through Bootcamp on the same ancient iMac. No problems at all.)

Kelkka, I wonder if you’ve tried to play today? This is what greets me when I try to log in as of the patch this morning:

This was happening for me today on both windows and on the Mac side. Fixed now, afaik.

Hard to tell for sure, but I have been noticing a big increase in the number of times I get coins randomly dropping from mobs in the world, since yesterday. Anyone else notice this?

Caramel Ham.4891:

No. Its not the best mmo on the market. That title is still reserved for WoW. Before you bash me, no, i have not played WoW for many years now. But you cannot deny the level of content and polish WoW has.

That said, IF Anet can get their kittens together. Then this game definitely has the POTENTIAL to be the best MMO on the market.

I played wow for years, and while I would say it definitely has a huge amount of content (and despite the fact I’ve long since moved on from it, I can still respect it), it doesn’t necessarily represent the pinnacle of design. It’s a great game, let’s agree on that at least, and still has a place in my gaming heart.

I think GW2 improves upon a lot of the failings of wow, and so I think it’s fair a lot of people can subjectively say it’s the best on the market. Subjectively though, to each his own. To me, it has a much greater emphasis on exploration and grouping on the fly, is much more dynamic, etc. and so that defines a better game than what wow has to offer.

You could also argue that Rift is up there in the top three, as it has also taken a lot of design from wow and iterated on it, but it doesn’t bring all that much new to the table, aside from their own version of dynamic content.

Agreed. By far the best MMO released in years.

Bastion.2457:

Travel costs are high, to encourage you to be out in the world. No mounts, and events everywhere. Could the hint be any bigger that they want you running along the roads, heading through the cities, and not teleporting everywhere to make the world feel lifeless.

Look at WoW, the transport in that game is either Teleport, Teleport, or Port into a dungeon, or Teleport, or there is also Teleport, oh and Flying Mounts. You are either ethereal in transport, or flying high above it.

Guild Wars 2 has you running the roads and being part of the world, not skipping it to get some push button frenzy reward. If you want to teleport, you can pay the costs, if you want to walk, you reap the rewards along the way.

Exactly this.

LOL that reddit post just so perfectly describes the situation. Thanks for sharing.

re: http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/104j7o/you_are_all_destroying_the_mmo_genre_and_you_dont/

To better illustrate what I mean about the draw distance, here is an image from my client running in Windows:
http://i1148.photobucket.com/albums/o570/Hawkan_Grey/gw006_zpse00cb3f8.jpg

and here on the Mac client:
http://i1148.photobucket.com/albums/o570/Hawkan_Grey/gw006mac_zpsdfe17dc8.png

The draw distance on both is set to high, but on the mac side, I’m getting a lot less ground detail and trees in the distance.

Moonpuncher.7250:

My issue is that there’s just way too much difference between getting an exotic and getting a legendary. What’s in between? The second I hit 80 I got 5 pieces of exotic gear. I’ll have the rest of myself in exotics within the week. Are you saying I have zero incentive to look for gear now unless I want to embark on this thousand-hour abomination of a legendary?

I find it very hard to believe 1) Arenanet wants me to farm and grind and save up this ludicrous amount of gold/karma/mats just so i can get a COSMETIC upgrade, and 2) There’s no interim gear between exotic and legendary.

This is a big problem I think. If I’m getting close to satisfying requirements for a great item or achievement, I’ll consider that motivation. But as of now, I have no near-future carrot to chase. The reward doesn’t even come CLOSE to justifying the cost. Granted, I understand people’s opinions will vary from mine, I feel like there should be a few steps in between these two things that help me get better gear that I feel is actually obtainable.

I think really it is intended that exotic is the end of the gear quest. Basically you go for exotics, and there appears to be a great variation of awesome looking exotics to go for.

Legendaries aren’t intended for most people to aim for. They are there for OCD super-achievement seekers who want something VERY long term to strive for… which for most of us, they will be. Maybe because you’re thinking of them as the top tier they seem like a massive grind, but because exotics are really the top tier stat wise, we don’t need to worry about the grind for Legendaries.

I’ve found that leatherworking has been useful for filling the gaps in my rogue’s armor, and armorcraft/weaponsmith has been useful in the same way for my guardian. I’ve definitely had to pull over and farm a bit of the rare mats occasionally, but not so much that it has annoyed me. So I guess I don’t agree that it’s useless or broken.

However, I do think that a couple of your suggestions are good. I’m not sure on the rationale behind not allowing upgraded items to be sold — is it perhaps to prevent them from being broken down and sold at a profit? I’m too lazy to do the math right now, but that seems unlikely.

Don’t agree with the trade chat, only because it always devolves into some terrible spam filled dirge channel (my experience from AoC, WoW, and Rift anyway… I think the local chat in Lion’s Arch should be fine for that type of thing.

On the other hand, a COD option in mail would be nice.

Account.9832:

Part of the problem is that, if you want a piece of gear from one of the dungeon sets, you need to repeat that specific dungeon 10+ times. For the full set plus a couple of weapons, this can easily go into the hundreds.

This is just bad design.

My friends want me to do TA with them, but since I want the AC set for my character, I “have” to keep doing AC, otherwise I feel like I’m wasting my time in TA (the tokens I get from there don’t allow me to buy anything I want).

What kind of sense does this make? Is Arena Net deliberately trying to make the game feel grindy? Why not have a single kind of token that players can use to buy the armour with the look they like, while still allowing them some variety of choice in which dungeons they’re going to run?

By all means, add a small chance (ex., 1-2%) for the final boss in each dungeon to drop one piece of that dungeon’s set, but let people choose which dungeon to play based on what they enjoy or what their friends enjoy, don’t force them to repeat the same dungeon over and over and over again.

The current system is grindier than WoW.

Overall, I don’t really agree that it’s too grindy. People seem to be complaining far too much, and obsessing far too much about being able to achieve the sets in a short amount of time. BUT….

I like the suggestion about the 1-2% drop change of some of the sets from the end of the dungeon (in combination with the token system). I don’t think that would take away from the current system too much, and add a motivation to people who seem to be stressed out about the token math. It’s a small chance, but for people who prefer the lottery style for drops, I think it would be an improvement.

I really doubt that they’ll do it though, as THIS is the kind of grinding which seems to be directly against their philosophy.

I really want to thank Anet for giving us the option to run natively (I’ve run in Bootcamp so far), much appreciated! However, I’m curious if we can get some word on hires character and environment texture support? Currently on medium/high settings in bootcamp, I get about 35-40fps, which is fine for me. Maybe a bit slow in areas with a lot of local fog planes, but overall I’ve been quite happy with performance.

With the Mac beta, I’m getting comparable performance, but I miss the hires character and texture options… also I’ve noticed that draw distance on objects, even if I have LOD distance set to high, is much lower on the Mac client.

I guess I will keep to bootcamp for now, as the overall graphic presentation is much better, but I’ll keep an eye on the native client as it (hopefully) evolves. Again, kudos to the team for putting out this client.

@TurtleofPower: lack of Anet response makes me happy (as it perhaps means they won’t give in to the vocal minority QQing about every little inconvenience.
The travel costs are fine. If they made them free, it would make the game into a lobby game. It’s working (well) as designed… the cost is meant to encourage you to take part in the world by roaming, rather than zipping around instantly.

Sad Swordfish.9743:

Zhaneel.9208:

As a Guild Wars 1 fan, I’ve never been a proponent of the mentality a lot of traditional MMO players have. Endless content that is created as soon as the hardcore grinder demands it, simply isn’t possible to do unless you have a company with endless resources. And the only MMO company who has those kinds of resources is Blizzard.(arguably EA does as well, but with SWTOR in decline I don’t think they’re a great example to use)

Anet as fantastic of a company as you are, you are going to have a long, tiresome road ahead of you if you still intend to ‘revolutionize’ the MMO genre. Because here, especially for the players, change comes slowly, if at all. That’s why you will continue to see so many conflicting ideas about what a ‘good grind’ is.

That being said, I love what GW2 is for the most part, though they are still trying to work the kinks out, I’m am just as engrossed in the content as I ever hoped to be in the five years I’ve waited for this game to be released. I am currently at level 32 and the slower path has been the most rewarding one for me to take. For those of you who raced up to 80 and now are complaining about having so little to do at ‘end-game’ I have no sympathy for you. Content takes time to develop, and with most developers this means there will be a waiting period. So relax a bit, there will be more to do. Until then I suggest the following:

I bet many people with 100% map completion didn’t bother to talk to most of the NPC’s or take the time to explore all the fantastic little story and character details Anet wove into their game. They just looked for all the heart, vistas and point of interest objectives until their little yellow bar was maxed out. I spent several hours just exploring the main cities alone for all the little tidbits of info. they left nestled in there. And i still don’t feel like I’ve found everything there is to see in those locations.

Great post, man. Kudos for that. I’m in awe of well you captured my feelings.

I loved Star Wars Galaxies. So many of us did. When SOE created the dream team in 99-2000, to build this game, helmed by Ralph Koster, he got a lot of flack for one of his greatest design philosophies.

“Players make their own content” . Everquest was still the biggest thing, AC and DAOC were running well for the time.

His point was; no developer will ever be able to make meaningful content at the rate which hardcore players will not exhaust it and grow bored. Fighting over pvp objectives forever, or having a competitive capitalistic economy, which allows players to compete against each for control over and over, is creation of content. the trick is to make it meaningful and fun and not drawn out and repetitive.

It’s another reason why I look at GW2 with admiration.

Yeah nice post, Zhaneel. I agree with your point of view here.