Am I REALLY the only one who’s gotten stuck in an endless cycle of respawns just to be forced out of the area I was trying to hard to secure?
No, I’m with you. Another problem is that friendly NPCs seem to be way too weak, at least in areas with low population. Yesterday I got a message that a WP in Fireheart Rise had to be protected from the Flame Legion, which was previously held by allies. It took me about 20 seconds to get there, but by the time I arrived all friendly NPCs were already dead. I solo-cleared the area, but once I started reviving the allies, the next wave of enemies already spawned, making this impossible. The only one I managed to survive instantly died again.
That’s correct and basically what I wanted to say, in no way did I mean to defend the concept of grind and RNG. I just stumbled upon the word “best” since that sounds a bit snobbish and is hard to measure anyway. I wouldn’t want to make it impossible for somebody to get a legendary just because he’s bad at JPs, for example. That’s why there should always be multiple ways to achieve it.
Legendaries should not boil down to RNG or TP, that doesn’t guarantee that the very best players get them. There’s no reason that they can’t introduce a system that relies on skill….and the only proposed solution that would at least take steps to move us towards such a system is not in active development.
Legendaries are not for the best, but the most dedicated players. There should always be multiple ways to achieve them.
“A new player enters the designated area” is the same thing as a constant check. I’m not sure how to explain what I mean, but it’s not a one-time thing. A note on tigirius’ suggestion—it’s something we’ve been trying to do, but it’s not automatic and does require some hand-scripting so we haven’t done it everywhere yet. During the story steps, for example, we often have an enemy ignore combat while it appears, then aggro normally once it’s completed its animation. (Undead spawning in a cloud of putrescence, enemies leaping out of trees, etc.)
Doesn’t the infrastructure for such a check already exist, being used for dynamic event scaling?
At least increase the global respawn timer from its current value to 120-180s and add a 10s second aggro delay so it’s possible to move away from a respawning mob before it aggros. That will probably aleady make a huge difference. You can still keep the local respawn rate higher in areas where killing mobs is required to complete a quest, although there are other ways to complete it most of the time anyway.
Also review the placement of mobs, there are some areas where there’s no space to safely recover after fighting your way through (felt like that in the devourer area in the north of Iron March yesterday).
I often feel mob placement is optimized for melee players (say: warriors), while for example a mesmer that needs to kite and has an uncontrollable AoE like Illusionary Berserker as a primary source of DPS will have serious problems. Clones attacking the nearest (yellow) mob adds to the problem, especially with clones generated on dodge.
I don’t know about other classes, but I guess for example hunter pets or any other creatures may cause those problems too.
/e: I also remember the vista in the top right of Plains of Ashford to be quite annoying as there’s two veterans with AoE capabilities plus adds in one place and no room to kite iirc.
There was an earlier thread about this, the TL;DR version is:
- Respawn times are NOT 15s outisde of events, 95-120s is the typical range
- A lot of factors can make the respawn seem faster—if monsters in the same spawn group are being killed elsewhere they might respawn in your location (they don’t reappear in the same spot)
- Closed locations like caves can make you run over the same area repeatedly, causing you encounter respawns where you would normally (in an open area) have already moved on
- Orr in general is a known problem, and the base spawns are being toned down as I type this
In general, if you can provide a specific location where the respawn rate seems out of whack, I can look at it, but in almost every case I’ve looked at, the respawn times were well over a minute.
I explored The Infestation in Iron Marches yesterday (that giant devourer hive). Not only wasn’t there anything of interest (not even a nice champ or something), but also the respawn was quite annoying while exploring. And that’s nothing compared to how annoying other areas are. Feels like a waste of time, retrospectively. I thought we were supposed to explore, but you cannot even take some time to talk to NPCs (the ogre hunters in this case) without ending up in a complete respawn.
Iron March didn’t receive much love anyway, I stumbled across several broken events there (checking the forums, all of them have been reported already).
An example of a instant respawn I had recently was seconds after killing the ‘Champion Ogre Chieftain’ in Blazeridge Steppes just northeast of the Gastor Gullet point of interest…
That one’s annoying anyway, you have to tell people not to kite him every time or he’ll reset its health instantly as soon as he moves out of the camp.
Is that special to the US? I once read an article on how to design successful games for the US market as opposed to Europe, it took the educational system into consideration which seems to be more focused on rewards than punishment.
Time Warp is not the rule-them-all skill.
It is the ONLY WORTHY SKILL TO KEEP AT ALL TIME in PVE.
Can I cast moa morph on champion? NO
Mass Invis is just invisibility, and a bad version of thief refuge.
And almost only in group PvE, since it’s a great support skill but actually not as useful for the mesmer himself. And the cooldown is enormous.
Ankittenhe only one who finds it ridiculous that, without the forums, I wouldn’t even know about dungeons because they’re basically out of my way?
Whenever you get to a level which means you can enter a new dungeon you get an in-game mail about it which tells you about the dungeon and shows you where it is on the map. You say you’re in the high 30’s, in that case you will have had mail about Ascalonian Catacombs already.
It’s also hard to miss them while exploring the world or looking at the map, at least if you’re not blind and miss those giant gate symbols.
It is also the opinion of many players that Thieves and Elementalists are the two most overplayed and overpowered professions in the game. One is Medium armour, the other is Light.
So.
Yeah.
Heard that ANet, nobody mentioned mesmers. So stop nerfing us, thank you.
Yeah there are no taunts or any other form of aggro management. There are just certain things (like equipping a Shield) that you can do in order to try an manipulate the aggro system, but in the end you still have rely on hope that you will hold the aggro.
That is part of what makes this game actually fun. Got aggro? React to it. Not like in <well known other MMO> where it’s more like got aggro? “Ok, everybody wipe now, next attempt in five mins”.
maybe even enrage timers, no wp zerg rushing should be allowed in ANY dungeon.
Please no enrage timers. This is one of the lamest ways to enforce “difficulty” imaginable.
I also don’t see why other people care so much if some PUGs use zombie tactics to tackle content or not. Presumably you don’t do it, or need to. Why does it matter that other people do or not?
I also don’t like the principle of enrage or whatever you want to call it, but the possibility to zerg a boss doesn’t lead to skill improvements. People aren’t forced to actually communicate and learn. And next time they join a pug, they’ll be exactly as bad as the first time.
PS: while reviewing creatures – dump Risen Thrall.
Not sure why to some people it’s always about the reward, why can’t you just have fun? Who ruined your childhood so bad that you can’t play for entartainment anymore?
Lol nobody ruined my childhood but let’s be honest everything you do in game has a goal = profit, no matter how fun or not fun it may be. You’re not gonna do something just for sake of fun unless its your first time, after that you begin expecting some reward for your time investment and having fun while doing so. Otherwise, it becomes repetitive and less interesting. That’s why dungeons have 3 modes in the first place, and have guaranteed silver reward in the end/tokens.
You are mistaking work with video games. It is work that is goal oriented and has to result in profit. No such thing is even remotely required in my past time. The only goal I need is fun, the profit I get is relaxing after a stressful day. And while your childhood may be spoiled, which you mistake for dishonesty, I was one of the kids who used to play cops and robbers for fun, not because I could get extra pocket money out of it.
Fun does not equal profit. If you are so goal/profit oriented, go get a puppy job, go to the gym and make something of your life. There’s plenty of places for such attitudes, video games are not one of them (IMHO)
It is people like who you stop MMOs from evolving to a fun genre instead of a second job. I want MMOs to be an alternative life, a place to escape for an hour or two. I don’t want it to be more of the same.
everything you do in game has a goal = profit, no matter how fun or not fun it may be. You’re not gonna do something just for sake of fun unless its your first time, after that you begin expecting some reward for your time investment and having fun while doing so. Otherwise, it becomes repetitive and less interesting.
Umm… no. If that’s the opinion of the majority of players, it’s quite sad, but it explains a lot.
Before you derail the thread with another triple post I ask you to read again what i said. I didn’t write a whine post about how horrible the loot is, I just asked why people do dragons, despite bad loot, and got my answer – chance for precursor weapon/fun/coolness/music etc. I wanted to know what motivates people because all I can see in chat after defeating one of those dragons is complaining how horrible the loot is, how much it sucks, etc. So that got me in question why people do it- Fun is rewarding by itself but most people don’t play mmo-s just to skip around and have fun w/o reward even tho that can be amusing. And it’s not sad, it’s just how those types of games are played, and I find nothing wrong about it
I’m neither responsible for forum bugs, nor for the fact that you didn’t write what you may have wanted to write. After your op, you made an absolute statement which I quoted and which is just a sad view on gaming culture today.
everything you do in game has a goal = profit, no matter how fun or not fun it may be. You’re not gonna do something just for sake of fun unless its your first time, after that you begin expecting some reward for your time investment and having fun while doing so. Otherwise, it becomes repetitive and less interesting.
Umm… no. If that’s the opinion of the majority of players, it’s quite sad, but it explains a lot.
I believe in keeping PVE and PVP separated. I don’t like random bears or whatever in attacking me in WvWvW, and I don’t like other players attacking me while I’m digging up carrots.
Pull one, kill it, pull the next, kill it. Always stand on sharp geometry where mobs can’t spawn between pulls. Yea, its slower than just blitzing through everything, but it’s actually quite a bit of fun once you get into the rhythm of it.
Some of us need some space to kite. Not to mention minions/pets/illusions aggroing mobs.
Look the simple fact is WvW is NOT part of the world so therefore should not be part of the 100% map completion..
And the PROOF that it is not part of the world is if you press ’’M’’ on your keyboard you DO NOT see the WvW maps show up in the WORLD MAP.
Doesn’t matter much what you think about WvW and how you try to proof it, WvW is part of PvE, that’s what ANet thinks. End of story. And of course it’s a part of the world, otherwise we wouldn’t be fighting there.
I found a jump puzzle in Ashford, an area for 1-15 levels. It was fun at first then all of a sudden I was instantly killed. I tried again and instantly killed at another location. Then I did some research about this jump puzzle and found out it is listed as HARD.
I am thinking at first WOW!!! what a great idea, then it dawns on me that no one really gives a SH** about the puzzle at this level because it is all about end game. I haven’t seen one person even come near it in 3 hours.
Why would you make something like this? I mean the risk (time) vs reward is not worth it, so in other words…you developers wasted “X” amount of time programming. I bet out of 100 players only 10 have completed in the last month if that. I had enough of this silliness…guess I will do what everyone else does just lv to 80 and forget about all the silly stuff in the lower levels that mean absolutly nothing in terms of the game besides a title.
If you don’t like it, don’t do it? I actually like that JP because it’s not easy mode (mistakes have consequences). Many traps will kill you in one hit, if not the condition damage probably will. It doesn’t depend on level but on skill, you have to avoid the damage. If you want to make this easier, bring a friend who can revive you.
I’ve spent a lot more because of gem purchases, but the game’s quality fully rectifies that. If people have spent several hundred hours on this game and still think that the money wasn’t well invested, they should ask themselves why they actually played that much, obviously without having any fun at all. Masochistic predisposition?
Does time warp have a five player limit? If so, is it activated randomly for people within the field with each one second pulse or do you reliably get a full ten second increase?
Yes it does leave it open to manipulation, but unlike your auction example, there is the potential for other sellers to enter the process, thereby disrupting the plans of the person(s) attempting to push up the price. Admittedly, some of the high-value markets in the game won’t have a large number of potential sellers, but it’s still a possible risk faced by people employing such a strategy.
I guess this is important here – somebody may just jump in and actually sell that item to the person trying to push, it really is a risk.
@ Minos: buying and relisting materials on the TP actually removes wealth from the economy due to the 15% tax on every completed transaction.
Since those costs are calculated in and passed on to the buyer, wealth is actually only removed from those already at the lower end, moving wealth upwards.
PvE and PvP enemies are so different that it’s straight out impossible to balance both without splitting skills. There’s just one problem: WvW, with both PvE and PvP elements.
It’s pretty unrealistic to claim you didn’t know you were exploiting as you did it repeatedly. There’s not a single situation I could imagine where you exploit unintentional multiple times. Claiming you’ll be suspended from the game for making critical posts in the forums is straight out ridiculous, not to mention a ban. People are going way over the top here. Being less consequent on ANet’s side would be a carte blanche for exploiters, severely damaging the economy.
Announcing eyploits publicly so that anybody willing to exploit can start in real? Are you serious?
Well, the bad guys already know about it, let the innocents know so they do not “stumble” upon it thinking it a gift. And as I stated, ANY attempts at reproducing will result in a ban without review. Why NOT so serious?
People will try, regardless of any warnings. And they will complain afterwards. Going that way would cause a real mess. Most people don’t know about exploits, I usually only know about them because of threads like this one, and it should stay that way.
Is it against the rules to buy materials on the Trading Post, crafting runes with them and then selling them in bulk? The whole snowflake incident has made me very concerned about it.
The fact that it’s just 200 of the 2 million accounts doesn’t soothe me, in fact, I find it strange that such a statement is used to justify this at all. Unlike the karma trader incident, this may not have been as apparent to people, especially considering the fact that the return chance was high but not 100% guarantueed.
So the least you can do to ease my worries is to answer my question.
They clearly stated that those 200 people used the exploit extensively, hundreds and thousands of times. Those guys knew what they were doing or they wouldn’t have done it at all. So the action taken was well deserved.
So the name was clearly against the policy, but ANet was so kind to let it pass after a second review. The user is grateful and satisfied for a reason. I won’t even bother to read the second thread.
http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ34.pdf
Titles of works, names or pseudonyms of individuals cannot be copyrighted, but Anet included that part in naming policy for some reason.
They can include whatever they want in their policy. If they don’t like bananas and say that in the policy, you shouldn’t call yourself Banana Joe. If people don’t conform to their rules, it’s not ANet’s fault. This has nothing to do with actual laws. They’re probably doing this just to be on the safe side. But as you can see, they reviewed the case and it ended well. Problem solved.
I understand all of the technical aspects of this problem. The thing I don’t understand is how ANet managed to create a game mode like WvW without doing some simple math. You don’t even have to be in WvW, just stand around at a bank or trading post. Even without an actual stress test with hundreds of real players they should have come to the conclusion that there’s no way this could possibly work out. Somebody already mentioned that other games likes WoW are not directly comparable, but just considering the feeling: I’m playing an MMO, right? It doesn’t feel like one if you’re standing around and just see random players popping out of nowhere from time to time. I couldn’t achieve decent FPS in WoW with my rig back then, but at least I didn’t feel alone at the Ironforge AH – because I actually saw other players that didn’t (dis)appear randomly.
Players were suspended without any investigation from ANet team just because some other player reported them for inappropriate name even if they have done nothing wrong and their character names were fully legit. And this is what this topic is about. So those linked threads are in direct relation to the topic on hand.
I just did it, most of the time I fell off pretty much at the beginning where you have the disappearing snowflakes and have to pass two red bars, I just fell between them :p
I guess it’s relatively easy though, I’m really not good at such things and it took me 20 tries maybe. One time I actually yelled at my screen as I died the moment I jumped into the exit If you can’t make it through, you might want to increase mouse sensitivity / camera rotation speed and turn off some detail for increased FPS. I really liked this JP as it was a slight challenge but really not too hard at all. Also you can skip some platforms to gain some time. You can actually just jump through and don’t need any special timing. They really shouldn’t make such things easier, please don’t remove anything from the game that’s even remotely a challenge. The only thing that may be reconsidered is where you have to jump up the stairway of dissolving packets, the randomness seemed a bit unfair if you were unlucky. Not too much of a problem though.
PS: one thing you could do is not to make random paths but let the player choose which one to do and if he does a harder path, give him a better reward. Everybody could complete the JP that way.
Class balancing changes that also went into PvE instead of being limited to PvP only. WvW being treated as PvE makes those decisions a little rough I guess. Imo PvP should finally be treated completely separate in this regard. But that’s not what this thread is actually about, and I didn’t mean to criticize PvP in general of course, maybe I’ll join that minority myself at some point. I already learned that you have to be very careful how you express something, some people are instantly raging if they feel criticized (not you of course). Just wanted to say: if you do something that could also have a negative impact,please make it optional. Basically just backing up Evan here.
I just stumbled across this while reading the dev forum. Whatever you do, please make it optional. I don’t do PvP and I never had any problems with this and making a hard change may negatively affect a majority of players while a minority profits from it, as you already said. Us PvE players already suffered a lot from PvP changes that heavily affected our playstyle, sadly. I don’t say don’t add an option, I don’t want to see anybody suffering even if it’s a minority of course, but it’s good to see there’s actually put some thought into such a decision.
The suboptimal event scaling also doesn’t help much. It’s actually a lot easier to handle a few strong enemies than a lot of weak ones as their damage and cc sums up quickly, especially when you’re playing a class that doesn’t have a lot of AoE capabilities.
Books are white(almost all of them), magazines are white( almost all of them). HELL paper is white(…. almost all of them). WTF you saying? Since you were a kid you read on white stuff, why you complain now??
This made no sense^
There is a difference between pages/books when comparing them to an electronic device (Monitor) that outputs light thus further intensifying the white background.
It really does get annoying after while especially with LED monitors.
They should allow a darker background.
Also don’t say turn down the screen brightness, why do all that every time you visit one website like this forum? Most forums have a darker color tone for this reason alone.
Then your monitor simply isn’t properly calibrated or there’s no other light in your room which is very bad for the eyes anyway.
Also, just because you mainly hang out in gaming forums, this doesn’t mean it’s true for everyone. I actually like the white background because my boss doesn’t notice when I’m in the forums at work :p Most professional sites are also white.
I don’t mind if they add themes, but don’t always assume your personal preferences are the optimum for everybody. And as others aleady stated, it’s easy to change the style with browser extensions.
I think the ultimate and final solution that pleases everyone, is to have a special portal in Fractals (or wherever) that can transport you to the past / parallel universes / other dimensions / etc
Using this portal, ANet has a lot of freedom to make DLC mini-story scenarios, flesh out Tyria’s history a bit more by allowing us to experience historical scenes, and of course, allow us to replay one-time events.
So yeah, moving forward, if they implement such a system, they can have epic one-time events, but still allow everyone to participate (and everyone to replay it if they like it.)
Don’t speak for everyone here, this wouldn’t please me – most events, especially the world changing ones, should take place in the world we usually play in, and not in some kind of portal-connected multiverse.
I never considered it “hard” to level. It’s actually easy because you hardly die as a mesmer. On the other hand it’s quite inefficient when compared to other classes. Working on a mob or group of mobs and then seeing a warrior faceroll in feels quite unsatisfying. I’m not sure if “mesmers are strong in PvP” is a good argument to make them inefficient (I don’t say weak here) in PvE.
Dunno if he read it (he probably receives trillions), but I sent Jonathan a PM about my disappointment concerning the amount of (nonexisting) bugfixes yesterday, including the world completion star and clones attacking the nearest target. And also about the portal change. He probably notices this thread anyway. I just don’t get why things that appear to be so easily fixable aren’t simply fixed. I thought we created the buglist primarily so they know what’s broken and can fix it, not so we can create our builds working around all the bugs…
Wait, did they change it so 20 players can use it back and forth or so that it actually has 20 uses, so a single player porting 20 times uses it up too? If you put it down in a zerg and 20 people port before you do – bad luck for you? That would be plain stupid.
I didn’t mean the class, Iruwen. I’d just rather have new december content and a handful of bugs which honestly rarely if ever even annoy me, than nothing changing about the game but a few more bugfixes.
This is true of course, but this isn’t an issue at all because there are different teams working on content, balancing and bugfixing (bugfixing is actually done by different teams, depending on what has to be fixed as ANet stated). And while the content team really delivers, I mainly criticize the bugfixing. I can live with the balancing issues, it’s just sad that PvP isn’t treated completely separate from WvW/PvE.
I’m not really mad – but very disappointed.
I also don’t like that randomness, it’s still inferior and exactly the opposite of reliability. So we’re still stuck with a full set of runes of the centaur and mantra of recovery and/or a focus.
Chance can be annoying.
If you can’t make it through, you might want to increase mouse sensitivity / camera rotation speed and turn off some detail for increased FPS. I really liked this JP as it was a slight challenge but really not too hard at all. Also you can skip some platforms to gain some time. You can actually just jump through and don’t need any special timing. They really shouldn’t make such things easier, please don’t remove anything from the game that’s even remotely a challenge. The only thing that may be reconsidered is where you have to jump up the stairway of dissolving packets, the randomness seemed a bit unfair if you were unlucky. Not too much of a problem though.