Guild Wars 2

perilisk.1874:

I imagine you’ll be surprised next episode when you learn that the cavern actually leads to Tixx’s secret workshop (built on top of a bloodstone) where he steals Sylvari lifeforce to power his toys, which is the Wintersday plot this year.

Then, just as we’re about to give up on ever finding the egg, as the final memory was completely unrelated, Caithe comes back and tells us that she took it back to Glint’s lair, since we were blabbing to everyone about it and thus too stupid to be trusted with carrying it.

She’ll tell us that she got Taimi to build a mobile waypoint, and tell us to plant it and send mail (and 3s) to her when we get where the egg needs to be, so she can just WP in with the egg without it getting jacked en route.

i loled.

I think the deeper question is why is Caithe attracted to Faolain? Nothing that came out of Faolain’s mouth that entire episode was redeeming in any way, shape, or form. It was all either lies, harm, wrong, violent, or speculation on a conversation that was none of her business. Caithe has awful taste in romance and treats her “friends” even worse.

It reminded me of how bad the Padme/Anakin romance was in the prequels. What did Padme see in Anakin? None of his actions or words had anything attractive in them. There is a reason people find the prequels deplorable: Jar jar and the relationship between Padme and Anakin lacked anything of worth.

I am having this issue as well. Haven’t played a single match.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/PvP-Queue-Unable-to-gain-access-error

^ This is happening to me. Be happy you can even play at the moment.

I am having the same error code. I haven’t been able to queue once today.

I just finished the new story and it was great! I really liked playing as Caithe. The skill set was fun, I liked the boss fights and the storytelling was cool in the parts with the Firstborn.

The story with all the episodes as a whole though is all over the place. The Pact shows up to the Silverwastes to battle Mordy. We head to Glint’s Lair. Caithe inexplicably steals the egg. We get to see her 20+ years ago. It went from trying to stop a dragon, to going to the lair of another dragon to stopping(finding, helping?)Caithe who is supposed to be a hero(?).

I think this kind of storytelling would have worked without all the few month long breaks, but because these stories are spread out over the course of such a long season it would be better to have one tale woven throughout a season to focus it. As it stands now, you have left cliffhangers for 3 separate stories over the course of quite a few months and it feels like it lacks impact for lack of a better term. You guys teased Rytlock stuff before the start of the second half of season 2 and we haven’t seen anything of that thread yet. The Caithe stuff is up in the air and the Mordremoth storyline kinda stopped altogether because we are on a wild goose chase for Caithe.

The other thing I would suggest is having each update be self contained with a teaser for what is coming 2 weeks after. Going from cliffhanger to cliffhanger and jumping threads mid-story makes it all feel really disjointed.

I really do have fun doing this content though. They are engaging, but disjointed. If you can’t have a season run from start to finish without breaks though, I would suggest just telling a single story. It’s too haphazard otherwise. Do we have another break now til the beginning of next year? If so, that just adds to the jumbled nature of the release cadence. Thanks for your time.

It really makes no sense. There is a thread in the BLTC section started by John Smith from ArenaNet titled, “RNG as a Concept” and the feedback in it is predominately negative towards RNG. Primarily, the rewards being too RNG focused. A lot of times, we as players are also forced into spending gold on top of collecting things in order to get new items introduced into the game. I am not against gold sinks. The game needs them and ArenaNet needs to flush gold out of the economy since it is directly tied to how they make a living, but stop putting RNG in our rewards and int he cash shop. If I wanted to waste my money on lottery tickets, I would go to the liquor store. Stop preying on the gambling proclivities of idiots and start putting stuff in the gem shop we can buy outright instead of treating our money with disrespect.

I don’t gamble because the odds always favor the house. I don’t do it to try and get real world money in return so why would I do it with real or fake money for fake items in a game? It’s asinine.

You mean you don’t want to spend lots of gold or real money on what would most likely be crafting boosters/xp boosters for your account of all max level crafters and level 80s?

Yeah, me either.

Bernie.8674:

Xenon.4537:

Why on earth would they need to add a subscription to start working on an expansion? They didn’t have to add a sub to GW1 to make Eye of the North. There are dozens of other games that have expansions without a subscription. The expansions have their own price tag. That price tag is what compensates the company for development.

The GW1 business model didn’t work out as anticipated. The original plan was to rapidly churn out content every three months or so and attach a price to it. Instead of paying $15 a month for subs, we would ideally have been paying $45 every three months for an expansion. There were several problems with this:

1. Content wasn’t coming very quickly. After a few months went by they realized this and released Sorrow’s Furnace as it was free of charge. Factions came out 9 months after Prophecies. The expansion took three times longer than anticipated to create. As a result, only a third of the projected revenue was generated.
2. The skill system made expansions extremely difficult to balance. The sheer quanitity of skills was only the tip of the iceberg. The fact that players could pick two classes at a time increased the complexity of balancing new skills exponentially.
3. The meaning of “expansion” changed for MMOs, creating expectations that GW1 was simply not equipped to meet under their original business model: new playable races, for example. Consider that the addition of a new race requires two new versions of every skin and/or model that already exists in the game. This also dramatically increases the time it takes to add new skins and models. Content was already taking three times longer than anticipated to generate. How much longer does it take with multiple races???

Consider that Eye of the North had significantly less content than Factions. There were no new classes, and many of the skills that we got were not class-specific. EotN had about half the skills that Factions had, and there were no new missions in EotN (although to be fair they introduced dungeons). I think that at this point they realized that in order to accomodate the most heavily requested features (namely, playable races) they were going to have to start from scratch. That’s how we got to where we are today.

However, the problems haven’t gone away completely. Consider how many skins and models they’re going to have to generate in order to add a Tengu race, for example. Consider how much future work that’s going to generate too. Adding a new race means that every new piece of armor is going to require two more models and/ or skins going forward. There are six armor slots, so adding another race means an additional 12 models and/or skins every time.

TL;DR – A MMO expansion carries certain expectations that still can’t be met under this game’s business model, including (but not limited to) new races, additional skills, new areas, and additional features. Creating an expansion is not as simple as waving hands and making declarations.

Factions was a standalone game like Nightfall and Prophecies whereas EotN was an expansion. Hence there being less content in it that in Factions.

The amount of evades should be equal to the amount of CC. I just did the math and we need more evades.

Mo Mo.1947:

Just a quick point about GW1 content release speed: Guild Wars 1 was a much simpler and smaller game. Building and upkeeping an MMO is a beastly task.

If you look at my point though, my criticism was about how ArenaNet hyped up GW2 as being “more” than GW1. Our expectations for GW2 because of GW1 set a really high bar, but ArenaNet still preyed on that with their teasers for GW2. Take PvP for example: GW1 had HA, GvG, FA, JQ, AB, RA, TA(later removed), and Hero Battles and that sealed deck format. GW2 only has Conquest after 2 and a half years. That’s a far cry from the hype they generated.

If I had been told that GW2 would only have 3 new maps to explore after 2 and a half years into this game’s life cycle I wouldn’t have believed it. This to me is exactly why we aren’t being told about anything anymore. They have a real issue of overselling what it is that they have to present to customers. By keeping silent, they aren’t overselling anything at all and in that regard, it’s kinda refreshing. The issue with that though is ArenaNet asking us to place faith in them that “Stuff” is indeed coming out at some point soon-ish after so many missteps is not IMO the way to handle it.

Just lay out a couple bullet point facts and leave out the hype.

Interracial would be Canthans and Krytans, but both would still be human. You are thinking of different species mating and that can’t happen. Why do I say that? Because there isn’t a single example of it happening in any of the games and there is no lore for it. If it had ever happened it would have been detailed.

Roe.3679:

Isn’t there some sort of fractal currency? I could see if it gave that fractal currency, that, over time, could be used on skins. But I don’t think it should be one skin per completion, though.

There isn’t and that is precisely the issue with having a Fractal Weapon Track. It’d have to be RNG base and the MF for PvP boxes would have to be exempt from this track to have it act like Fractals do. Some of us(me included) have done hundreds of Fractals and still haven’t gotten the weapons we want, but have gotten a bunch of one skin. That used to be OK before the wardrobe change. Now that the wardrobe is here though, multiple of the same weapon is pointless because once we unlock a skin we have it for every toon. The Fractal weapons are living in the past and have been since the first feature patch this year and ArenaNet has completely left it unaddressed. I understand why PvP players want access to the Fractal weapons, but there are tons of issues with doing it the right way and ArenaNet has a total refusal to address it. Heck, they even said that there were going to be Fractal weapon boxes at one point and then they abandoned it and refuse to go into why. It’s immensely frustrating that the drop system for Fractal weapons is still living in 2013 and we are almost done with 2014 which is a very different game.

I’ve been reading the thread but haven’t commented in a few days. I am really torn on all of this. Part of me feels like the silence is begging for a “new” playerbase. When you couple the silence with the NGE it kinda makes sense. There has also been no push to fix the things that were implemented in the feature patch for veterans such as the collections still being broken. Gaile acted like those had never even been brought up before and we were getting mixed messages about them for quite a while. Some of us thought they were broken, others thought they weren’t in the game and ArenaNet didn’t even know they weren’t working despite many people posting they were bugged shortly after they were released. The point being, so many things seemed geared towards a newish playerbase or a more casually focused playerbase.

The other part of me thinks something may be coming down the pipe that a lot of us are after: A meaty content dump. I think a lot of things that were never talked about with the playerbase had to do with this: The China dev cycle, content got dropped, iteration, the Living World, The personal story system was not well received, and ArenaNet went back to the drawing board. It pushed back extensive content for a long time. Heck, even the PvP stuff that is coming on Tuesday is over a year overdue. Many of us harped on this ages ago. ArenaNet seems slower now than with GW1. It’s too bad. I expected a content cycle that was on par or better than GW1 with all of the hype that was pushed to us prior to this game coming out. Everything said was aimed to get us more excited about GW2 than what we got with GW1.

So part of me still wants to be patient, but the other part of me feels like we got this amazing base game that just stagnated because the people in charge didn’t have a clear direction they wanted to take the game. Heck, even if they do have a clear direction they want to take it, it got derailed, sidetracked, whatever you want to call it, it’s so much slower than the cadence of GW1 and that is disappointing when all of the hype from ArenaNet pointed to GW2 being better, faster, stronger than GW1 and that simply isn’t the reality of things.

This thread and many others like it are just the culmination of this community’s disappointment. Rethink your silence ArenaNet. If something big is coming, give us a “Star Wars Episode VII” 88 second trailer to get us on board with the game again.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

this is a good proposal for a new game mode.

say

“Commander Conquest” game mode

The Commander could have access to an airship with no less than 200 able bodied soldiers at the ready to repel off of said airship and lay waste to an opponent at a moment’s notice?

Ario.8964:

I think the rng based track is what we have all agreed on if it ever gets implemented.

I get that. There is also another issue though. The PvP reward tracks use Magic Find for the chests. They would have to separately code the Fractal Track Boxes to not use MF because players that get the reward at the end of the Fractal don’t get to use their MF. The whole thing is actually really unreasonable because there are so many variables. I think my above post is still the most reasonable way to handle it. Allow players in Fractals the ability to get the weapons with a token currency. Then they could implement a Fractal Reward Track sans RNG and it would be fair.

Here, I will post my response from another thread just like this: “Here’s the issue with this. Fractal skins are RNG in Fractals. There is no “set” way to get the one you want. It’s all chance. If they implement a Fractal Reward Track it isn’t fair to people that play Fractals. See the issue? This isn’t like the dungeon tracks because in dungeons you have the ability to earn a currency that you then spend to earn a piece of armor or weapon. There is no equivalent for that in Fractals.
The only way I would be on board with this is if they gave Fractal players tokens with which to buy Fractal weapons of their choice. If that doesn’t happen then this should 100% not happen. PvP players should not have the ability to earn a skin of their choosing while Fractal players have to rely on RNG not only to get a weapon, but to get the one they want.” https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Fractal-Reward-Track/page/3#post4579422

Nothing good can come from a Fractal Reward Track unless it’s totally RNG at the end and 99% of the time you don’t get a Fractal skin. Then it would be fine with me.

if you want anything done about it you should post this in the bug forums and /bug it in game.

I post links with constructive criticism and it gets moved to Linksville. A link posted with praise stays in general chat. So frustrating.

I really enjoy reading Flameseeker. I enjoyed it when Rubi wrote it, I enjoyed it when Elisabeth wrote it, and I enjoy Anatoli’s work as well. I have been effusive at times in my praise of ArenaNet and I have also been super critical. Those of us that are reasonable, Vayne, are really wondering, “Show us what you are working on so we can decide if we want to go with you.”

There are a lot of us that are huge fans of this game, but have been supremely disappointed at the direction of the game over the last year or two. The core game(the game at release)is my jam. What we have gotten over the last two seasons for the most part is not. I want more of what we got at release: A new, big, sprawling open world. If what they are working on in the background is a better way to deliver what they have been doing over the course of the last two seasons then that isn’t what I am looking for and I don’t want to wait 6 months to a year to find out that isn’t what I am after. Does that make sense?

I have completed 2 of the dungeon collections(Arah and SE) and the reward is one ascended trinket for collecting at least 1 of every piece of armor and all the weapons. The future reward for it is equally unimpressive: I get the option to spend more money on the same trinket. Really? Allowing me to buy more of this item is a reward? A lot of the so called rewards in this game are baffling.

Take Pavilion 2.0 for example: Collect a bunch of tokens and then combine that with gold to get a skin. They don’t jsut let me trade in tokens for the skin, I have to spend gold on top of it and I am supposed to feel rewarded? No thanks. Most stuff should be like Liadri and the Dwayna Collection. Not only do you get a title, but you get a reward.

I am not gonna chase the Exotic Hunter Collection track because there isn’t an actual reward. ArenaNet thinks giving us something as a karma sink(Karmic Converter) as a reward for collecting/spending hundreds of gold on exotics is good for players? It’s not good for players. It’s good for ArenaNet so they can treat our rewards as ways to flush more currency out of their game. It’s terrible for players.

Nah. It’s lazy design. It’s basically upping stats by 10% across the board for the game and calling it content. Good progression is new mechanics, new skills, new approaches to boss design, new weapons for classes, new classes, new dungeons, new Fractals, Raids, etc.

Progression to me isn’t power arbitrarily going up and just slapping the moniker of “progression” on it. Progression is the designers moving the game forward in new and exciting ways that haven’t been tried before. I also feel like gear grind is an old-hat design thing that was done when people were playing MMOs and they all had subscriptions. It was a way to lock someone into paying that monthly fee by time-gating it. I was fairly ticked when they time-gated crafting Ascended weapons and armor except as a money sink.

You guys should add Golem Chess to The Mists. Crafting stations should be available too. Anything that makes waiting for a queue to pop in a map we can’t leave more bearable, the better off The Mists will be for it.

Demus.4571:

Justin ODell.9517:

KkIenJuju.9406:

If i understood this right: you que up with a spesific class( eg. Warrior) but then you see that your team needs a bunker guardian to win. So you relog to your guardian, but you get minus points for leaving the match, even if this desition may have won you the game?

Correct.

This just seems like a very bad way to make profession-specific MMR work. I’m not claiming to have a solution, but disallowing people to swap before the game begins encourages enemy teams to stack bunkers and use multiple specs like turret engis, as this is extremely hard to beat without the proper class counters. The fact of the matter is that composition plays a huge roll in success in PvP, and some comps inherently counter others. Most people aren’t queueing with the expectation that they will face a team of 5 celestial/bunker specs or multiple turret engis, so they don’t build a team to beat that. In the event that it does happen, however, people shouldn’t be punished for swapping their comp to something that will be more effective in that situation (think power necro, etc). Also, the profession consideration in matchmaking piece is great but it does nothing to stop 5 man premades from running these specs, and unfortunately I’ve seen that happen more than I would like.

I would agree with you if people swapped for solo queue now. They don’t though. I haven’t played in months until today. I was on my Ele and had two other eles. One of the eles commented that there were three engies on the other team. Neither of the other 2 eles swapped. The engies remained. People don’t swap a lot to get a balanced comp. The way the queueing system is supposed to work going forward is that we won’t have that issue of having 3 of one class and two of another. If it works as advertised we won’t have to deal with that. You will be the only guard, ranger, thief or whatever on your team and if you have 2 of a comp, who cares? You can talk about who is gonna swap to a different build.

Build diversity in how ArenaNet designs skills is another matter. If we aren’t going to be getting new skills or classes in the future then we should have access to more builds so that it alleviates the issues associated with this. Build Templates are a must as a QoL thing. Like, build templates should be a priority for the next QoL patch. It will make these worries that people have about switching professions before the fight starts moot because you can just roll a comp that works for your team on the profession you queued with totally viable.

I don’t agree with not getting an outline of the general direction of the game. I really don’t. It’s hard to “take it on good faith” when my good faith was squandered after I purchased the game on good faith in the manifesto.

“Hey, get on this boat.”

“Where are we headed?”

— nothing but silence in response —

It’s not my aim to be rude. It’s just how I feel I am being treated. It’d be nice to get a little respect for the money I put into the game by being told whether or not the content that is coming on “my good faith” is content that is actually aimed at me as a player.

People are missing the big picture here and dissecting minutiae. The best part of this whole thing is queueing and not getting 3 of the same class. This will reduce afk’ers. Why? Because there are a lot of people that pop in the match right as it’s starting and never move. You can’t do that now. If you want to play, you have to be present or you will incur dishonor and that is the way it should be. We should all be stoked that we can play as professions we normally wouldn’t and it doesn’t affect us as much.

Instead we are focusing on the random disconnects? Really? If you disconnect that much even with the old system why are you playing pvp? Even if all the disconnects are ArenaNet’s fault(which they aren’t) why would you subject yourself to that when there are tons of games out there that don’t have that issue. There is a ton of whining going on in here over stuff none of us have seen yet. Wait to see how the whole thing is going to work before you judge it.

Character swapping after entry if the limited number of same professions works as advertised shouldn’t happen. MMR should be based on the character that you enter the match and queue with and you should be locked into the profession you enter with.

If the profession diversity is working properly then there won’t be too many matches with the same professions in them for people solo queue’ing. The issue is moot at that point.

A lot of people seem to be looking at how this new system is going to work with how it works now and people need to wait and see how it’s going to work before snapping to a judgment on it. EDIT** You still will be able to change your build prior to the match starting anyways. If you know your class then this isn’t an issue as much. With the projected odds of winning formula your score gets weighted. I really think you guys will like this new system. I really do.

In GW1 it was an issue because of getting multiple Monks in a Random Arena Match. A tankier support comp isn’t as much of an issue because you can still easily win with that type of setup if your placement and rotations are decent.

I for one think this new setup will promote better play overall even if the community as a whole isn’t up to the task. Like I have said before, I haven’t played PvP regularly since April, but this new system is definitely going to bring me back. I don’t know if I will be playing regularly again until we get a new format, but I will definitely give this new system a fair shake before making a decision.

Chaith.8256:

Firelysm.4967:

Chaith.8256:

Keep playing the game and when you reach the next level of mastery these balance problems will fix themselves, from your perspective. Trust.

2 months is more than enough to see that game is far from balanced.
Let’s just say i was playing GW1 for 3+ years in pvp, and i know when things aren’t in shape.

I don’t have to waste more time to notice how unbalanced game is, some people need years to see that, some of us live for PvP, and know when things are not in shape. If this works for you, fine, but be realistic that this game needs separated balancing, else we will never get a PvP on professional level as GW1 was.

Kk. But the reason why professional PvP levels in GW2 haven’t compared to GW1 were for reasons different than relative profession balance.

And yes, you need more than 2 months to escape the hell that is low skill-cap builds and cheese that acts as an unstoppable barrier for new players. Once you truly learn your matchups and make intelligent rotations, and you still blame profession balance, I will eat these words.

I think what the OP is getting at is that there needs to be skill splits. Skill splits would actually promote some really great creativity in PvE skill design without messing with the balance in PvP. They already do it in little ways. All I know is when they decided that skill splitting would happen in GW1, it benefited all formats.

This looks really great and I hope it cuts down on the amount of 4v5’s. Also I hope it cuts down the number of people that were always so willing to make 4v5’s a reality in this game. I’d rather the behavior stop, but if they can’t stop their behavior of leaving, then I hope they just leave. No one likes having to play through a 4v5 on any side.

Thanks for all the hard work all!

GOSU.9574:

I am not finding where this info comes from, can I get a link?

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/go-with-the-flow/

This is really good. I have been asking for this for ages. Stoked!

Etien.4601:

Erebus.3897:

Etien.4601:

Yo dawg? Tickets? You want moar RNG! No!

I freaking hate with burning passion his game’s RNG…. but knowing ANet…..ya neva kno

Currently there is a discussion about improving loot drops and rewards in the BLTC section in the forums, from John Smith himself. You guys might want to check it out and add suggestions.

I have posted in there quite a few times. The lottery tickets in the ToT bags reminded me of the Fractal Skin RNG. RNG’ing a lottery ticket out of a bag to RNG a chance to win a skin is very similar.

I am really tired of the double RNG for Fractal Skins. I have to have good luck to get a Fractal drop and then on top of it have to have good RNG to get the skin I am after. It’s a terrible and wholly frustrating “reward” system in a game that for the most part doesn’t do this kind of stuff. Can we please put in a way to “purchase” the skins?

Even if the only thing that happens is we get a “Fractal Weapon Box” like the Ascended Boxes but for Fractal Weapon Skins, where we could pick a skin we wanted, I would be fine with that. At least then it would just be one-time RNG. There is nothing more frustrating than getting a repeat skin because with the wardrobe(made AFTER the fractal skin system was implemented) we have access to the weapons on our whole account so having another is absolutely redundant and shows how outdated the system is for this particular reward. Please reconsider how these weapons are given out. Thanks.

Justin ODell.9517:

Iason Evan.3806:

I still have a concern about multiple same professions on an account having different MMR. If all I have to do to game the system on a Warrior is just roll a different Warrior, then that is an issue for sure.

No, it’s profession specific, but not character specific. Your warrior rating will be the same no matter what warrior you’re on.

Yes! Justin, I remember talking about this stuff last year and it is so reassuring to be getting these changes. Thanks so much for all the hard work. It makes it worth the wait!

Calypso.2578:

Am I reading this wrong? Why would we want to disable swapping to another class/character? I really don’t want to be a mesmer on a team with 3 thieves and another mesmer.

If you read yesterday’s blog post you will see why. They are making it so that doesn’t happen with multiples of the same profession like that. The profession specific MMR will help greatly too. I understand the concern though. I do. No one wants to get stuck on a team with classes that are all the same.

I still have a concern about multiple same professions on an account having different MMR. If all I have to do to game the system on a Warrior is just roll a different Warrior, then that is an issue for sure.

Justin ODell.9517:

Iason Evan.3806:

What I mean is, I enter the match on my garbage Thief. We are waiting for the match to begin. I then swap to my really good Ranger. How is that handled?

You’ll receive dishonor if you leave a match and take a full loss on the leaderboard.

Sweet! Thanks so much for the replies!

tichorum.2415:

Justin ODell.9517:

Iason Evan.3806:

What’s to keep people from queue-ing as a profession they don’t regularly play so that they enter the match at a lower rank and then swapping to a profession they do play a lot?

Leaving the PvP lobby will remove you from the queue.

Justin, the way you word this confuses me. The word “queue” makes me think that once we are in the game we are still in a queue. Do we have to accept something to make the game start when we are put into the match?

So say I am on my engineer, accept the queue, and the game starts. If I leave the game to go play thief, I will not be able to return and will be treated as a leaver, correct?

This is what I am hoping. I would hate to see people have the ability to use a class they don’t play all that often and and then switch professions to something they are ranked highly with.

Another question as well: Is this per character or per profession? Let’s say I have an Elementalist ranked in the top 100 named “Joannie Loves Chachi”. If I make a new Elementalist namded “Chachi Loves Joannie” will that Ele be ranked the same as the highly ranked Elementalist or are the rankings separate?

Justin ODell.9517:

Iason Evan.3806:

What’s to keep people from queue-ing as a profession they don’t regularly play so that they enter the match at a lower rank and then swapping to a profession they do play a lot?

Leaving the PvP lobby will remove you from the queue.

What I mean is, I enter the match on my garbage Thief. We are waiting for the match to begin. I then swap to my really good Ranger. How is that handled?

Thanks for the awesome replies though!

I really like a lot of the changes discussed in the blogs over the last two days. I haven’t played PvP at all sans a few matches here and there since April. I do have a few questions though.

1.) What’s to keep people from queue-ing as a profession they don’t regularly play so that they enter the match at a lower rank and then swapping to a profession they do play a lot? It would have been nice to see that covered in the blog but I didn’t see it. If you are locked in to the profession that you queue up with, then I am all about this change as it doesn’t make you feel like you need to limit what profession you play based on how good you are with it.

2.) Quoted from Justin’s blog:
“Ratings

At the heart of matchmaking is your Glicko2 matchmaking rating (MMR). This rating helps us match you with other players near the same skill level. Now, in addition to your core rating, we will also keep track of ratings for each profession you play.
By using more than one rating, we hope to encourage you to experiment with other professions you may not play regularly. Are you a really good mesmer? We’ll match you with other great players. Are you an engineer newbie? We’ll find you easier matches while you learn the ropes!
Rank

While we firmly believe that a player’s rank doesn’t necessarily match that player’s skill level, it is a pretty good indicator of experience. With that premise in mind, we will now prefer to place you with others near your rank."

Does the system take into account your MMR as a bigger percentage and then your rank? Because the different professions are listed under the rating portion of the blog I am also wondering if your different professions will have different ranks. Is that the case?

I would love to see that be how it is handled and I would also love to see a leaderboard with “Best overall” that showed players who were really good on numerous professions. It would be a great way to differentiate players and have them be identified as really good on a profession or two or really well-rounded because they are solid on a lot of different professions.

Thanks for any info you can provide in regards to my questions! Super excited that this could end up being where I spend a ton of time again!

Underdark.3726:

what was misleading about that teaser? Did it had any date on it or anything that made you think Rytlock would be on the last patch?

When all of the other teasers were in context with the content we got? Yeah, I feel totally confident in my question being justified. Why give a rude answer when my question is a perfectly reasonable question to pose. Why the Rytlock teaser when it had zero context to the update we got?

lordkrall.7241:

Why assume that all teasers released (when not released on the official teaser time a week before release) have to do with the very next episode?

The Rytlock one might simply have been there to show us that we will get back to him at one point and that he will not just disappear (people were claiming that Rytlock fell into the hole because the voice actor had moved on for example (false)).

I only came to that assumption after seeing the Caithe teaser that totally makes sense with the caption. Also, if you look at this one, which was also totally in context to last week’s teaser, my question is totally relevant. I am not asking the question to be rude. The other teasers were relevant to the content we were given in the update while the Rytlock one wasn’t.

After thinking about the patch this week, it would be really nice to know why we got the Rytlock Teaser image. Also, does that mean that the Caithe teaser image is just as irrelevant?

idk, my first clue was, “Don’t listen to the morons that worship a dead dragon that is totally not a deity.”

Here’s the issue with this. Fractal skins are RNG in Fractals. There is no “set” way to get the one you want. It’s all chance. If they implement a Fractal Reward Track it isn’t fair to people that play Fractals. See the issue? This isn’t like the dungeon tracks because in dungeons you have the ability to earn a currency that you then spend to earn a piece of armor or weapon. There is no equivalent for that in Fractals.

The only way I would be on board with this is if they gave Fractal players tokens with which to buy Fractal weapons of their choice. If that doesn’t happen then this should 100% not happen. PvP players should not have the ability to earn a skin of their choosing while Fractal players have to rely on RNG not only to get a weapon, but to get the one they want.

I think consistency is an issue from patch to patch for the episodes. I don’t really want to talk about the quality of the content. I have talked about that before and the quality has really gone up this season. The pacing and amount of content each week varies wildly though. I feel like for this week to hit the same amount of story beats as two weeks ago, it would have been wise to include the conversation with the Pale Tree this update as opposed to later.

A hopelessly optimistic friend of mine posited that this update was meager because you are all working on an expansion. The point being, that even the unabashed fan boys conceded that this update was thin when compared to last patch.

Was it wrong of me to be disappointed that we didn’t get a big new chunk of map to go along with this update?

It’s not as if I didn’t like the content that was released this patch. I did. It’s that people overseeing it could have rationed it out a little better. Two weeks ago was a feast, and this was a snack for lack of a better analogy.

EDIT: Title should have said LW S2

I really like the build-up of the story here. It feels really well built. It’s suitably tense. The fights are great. The dialog is awesome and the cutscenes are really well done. I can see an issue though. My prognostications may be off, but if I am correct, please take my thoughts into consideration.

I really liked the LA fight with Scarlet. That was a great open world action piece. The issue? It was temporary. Scarlet’s dead. She ain’t coming back and either is that content. I understand why it happened though. She died and the battle was over with her because of how the story was written. Are we headed for a similar fight at the end of this season that will be around for 2 weeks to a month? I think it would be a mistake if that’s the case. Content like that needs to remain permanent and because of that the story needs to be designed so that the content can remain in the game. Example: Tequatl and The Wurm. People do those fights over and over and they are rewarded for that. With the Lion’s Arch fight, we get this big map-wide fight and then it ends and that content is gone. Silverwastes has added a nice map-wide struggle and that’s great, but if you guys are building us towards a big crescendo ending I would advise that the big fight should stay in the game as permanent content. This game can’t get enough new, permanent content added to it at this stage in its lifespan. It needs rewards that match those of Teq and the Wurm as well as achievements. I don’t want to play a year’s worth of LW content only to get a fight that is only around for 2 weeks to a month and then get nothing for another few months. Heck, LA hasn’t even been cleaned up yet and now I don’t want it to be because I want all hands to be focusing on new maps, not another redesign of LA.

I hope you guys take this into account. Thanks.

Totally disagree Jake. Evon Gnashblade is running the Pact now. Not only should conscripted Commanders of the Pact not get the items for free, they should pay for them with gems. After all, gems are a currency the Pact can’t pay you in and that makes it all the more sweet for Evon.

Infamous Darkness.3284:

Its called the five stages of “Grief” for a reason, and you can grief over nearly everything

You can “grieve” over anything. Griefing over anything at all is only found on forums, youtube, and reddit. :P

A heads up. I went into the new instance to rescue all my friends. I found all of them and it said to head to the middle of the maze. There is a wrench there for Rox to destroy the vines like all the other places, except she wouldn’t destroy the vines there. I logged out and back in and it reset my progress. Hopefully you all can get it sorted soon.

Mine bugged out after I got all my friends. It said to go to the middle of the instance and there was a wrench there but Rox never broke through the vines. I logged out and back in and it reset the instance. I’m taking a break and coming back.

I would love to get a few old people faces for all the races(sans Sylvari for obvious reasons). The Norn have 1 or two for the dudes. I like those, but humans and Charr and Asura really don’t have a lot of options when it comes to modifying a character for age and it’s a bummer. I don’t really have much to add other than it will help diversify the population a ton. As it stands now, characters for the most part look to be between the ages of 16-25. It’s super yawn inducing.