Guild Wars 2

stof.9341:

What do we farm our ascended items in GW2 for?

So that you can farm the content that requires Ascended gear that will accompany the rollout of the next tier up from Ascended or that appears a month or so in advance of the announcement of the new tier.

Raine.1394:

So, the context is VP and I’m only talking about VP, just as Mike was when he said:

“How is introducing VP respecting the player? Because it’s fun to be challenged and rewarded. Because it’s fun to have the character you play grow and evolve over time. Because ArenaNet (sort of) held a hard line against all VP with GW1 — no VP ever, year after year — and it wasn’t that fun. It was stagnant.”

Sounds like someone never actually played the game, which is sad.

Spiral Architect.6540:

JDGumby.7685:

Obvious answer: Tiering traits and skills (BOO!) didn’t narrow the amount of possible builds enough for ArenaNet’s tastes. Limiting the stat combinations on Ascended items funnels players into yet fewer viable builds, thus reducing balancing headaches just a wee bit more.

That, or perhaps sheer incompetence.

Well, yeah, but I was trying to give the devs the benefit of the doubt. :P

Vayne.8563:

And I’m pretty sure that every competitor knows that the bulk of people who visit forums are there because they are dissatisfied, but it doesn’t show the opinion of the masses, over all.

Then they need to get someone with a grasp of basic statistics on their side. Even with the self-selection of forum posters to account for, it’d be relatively easy to determine how well represented those concerns are among the general population.

Pray For Kosmos.5849:

i miss the personal story stuff. i don’t feel like a hero anymore. the living story is complete horsekitten. game definitely feels less epic.

You felt like a hero during the Personal Story? Given that the first half of the PS is mostly so personal that it has absolutely no worldly significance (exception: that one Sylvari line where you encounter Trehearne gives context for later events, “Act with Wisdom”; in many other cases it’s also more about the NPCs they saddle you with than you), and that the second half is all about you being Trehearne’s flunky, I’m very surprised anyone feels like a hero, even in the slightest.

Lokki.1092:

Why are there 144 different stat combinations for Exotic trinkets and only 13 for Ascended?

Obvious answer: Tiering traits and skills (BOO!) didn’t narrow the amount of possible builds enough for ArenaNet’s tastes. Limiting the stat combinations on Ascended items funnels players into yet fewer viable builds, thus reducing balancing headaches just a wee bit more.

IndigoSundown.5419:

We can speculate all we want regarding how much control Mike O’Brien has, but we do not know all the details of ANet’s relationship with NCSoft, nor should we.

Er, we do know exactly what the relationship is: ArenaNet is 100% owned by NCSoft. You talk about one, you’re talking about the other. There is no difference.

ilr.9675:

Colin’s place often seems sadly relegated to a Happy Glad Hands figure-head for their Marketing purposes. I don’t think it’s fair to attack him just b/c he’s the one who’s brave enough (and usually charismatic enough too) to stand in front of an Angry mob and tell them that the conditions on the ground have changed.

Except he’s not. He’s been saying that conditions on the ground have always been that way.

Tachenon.5270:

Fur provides naturally what clothing provides artificially: protection against the elements. If you have fur, you don’t need clothing, except perhaps in extremes of climate.

And for pockets. Incredibly useful things, pockets.

IndigoSundown.5419:

There’s been a huge amount of uproar and “discussion” centered around gear. It started with the, “Nothing to work for, no endgame, no progression” posts last fall

…which (coincidentally, I’m sure – NOT!) mostly started AFTER Ascended was announced. Most of the complaints about lack of endgame before then boiled down to the “endgame” being the exact same stuff you’d been doing since level 30 (when the dungeons start to open).

Vayne.8563:

Maybe everyone from your server is guesting to my server. If you think no one is playing, try one of Scarlet’s zone invasions, or look at the temple events in Orr. I haven’t seen so many people in Orr in ages.

That is one of the huge problems in the game: Far too many people are either hanging out in a hub or in a zerg.

When you can encounter only a half-dozen people when spending an hour in what should be prime time (roughly 7:30-8:30pm Eastern last night for me, for example) in a formerly crowded zone (Plains of Ashford on Borlis; back in November, last time I played with any regularity, was very crowded with players of all races and level ranges for most of the day.), it’s a sign that ArenaNet really needs to do something to spread the population out instead of continually trying to concentrate the population as they’ve been doing…

Nikaido.3457:

The funny thing is that they can’t fix the harm they’ve done to the game even if they wanted to now. Because there would be a huge, incredible whining fest if they changed the weapon acquisition from all the players who already grinded theirs and would be kitten ed if other players could get it without that grind or gold sink. It’s a change they’ve made that they can never fix.

That’s the entire point: Shove out the change you want that you know will be unpopular, then say “Sorry, too late, we can’t change back without hurting people”, then ignore any further complaints or criticism on the subject from then on. It’s a very common tactic.

Zoid.2568:

JDGumby.7685:

The content wasn’t really much tougher in beta, if at all. It’s mostly perception based upon unfamiliarity at the time.

It was much tougher in beta, at least in the first cbt but got nerfed in second and third and at release it got nerfed again. A lot of dungeons have gotten nerfed as well.

Well, the content’s the same difficulty (if not more, actually, in some places thanks to nerfed character skills) as it was in the beta weekends. Can’t speak for the closed betas, of course.

The content wasn’t really much tougher in beta, if at all. It’s mostly perception based upon unfamiliarity at the time.

Siphaed.9235:

Puru.4217:

Do not fret, in the next release we will be sent underwater for 5s after getting hit by one of Tequila’s attacks.

The problem I’ve seen with that one is that it treats the water much like other games do: You stay under too long and you drown (well, it’s supposedly poisoned water by TeQuatl himself, but still…).

If that’s the case, I have absolutely no trouble believing that it’ll be a “do once to honestly say you’ve experienced it, then NEVER AGAIN” event for most people.

Just realized the nerf’s going to hurt anyone who wants to level cooking… Buying enough necessary ingredients with karma was a HUGE drain (to the point where I couldn’t really afford anything else) while I was doing it before I stopped playing in November. If I were starting now, I’d probably end up not bothering with cooking at all.

(well, played a bit of my Human Rogue last night, running around a nearly empty Plains of Ashford during prime time because she dies incredibly easy in the level 58-appropriate zones; and even then she couldn’t take out the Separatist roadblock & catapults herself, something my Charr Ranger had no trouble with at around level 10, as I recall)

Zindrix.1750:

Spiral Architect.6540:

IndigoSundown.5419:

There was a recent consolidation of threads about Ascended into a 20 page thread that I can no longer find.

You can’t find that thread because, after 20 pages of comments (and not a single response from anyone at ANet) it was deleted. That thread is gone, completely ignored.

Figures that they’re starting to censoring their forums. Oh well.

They’ve always censored the forums. It’s just a lot easier to notice when ArenaNet has made changes unpopular enough to cause an outcry.

Since there’s no thread subscription like with proper forum software, most of the time when they delete, most people just assume the conversation died and got bumped off the first page – and for most people, anything not on the first page might as well not exist… (this goes for any forum, not just here, and is the main reason why people end up posting the same topics and questions that have already come up a thousand times before, no matter how recently; not including contenious issues like Ascended items, of course)

Monks don’t exist in Guild Wars 2.

Warrior is, like in most games, probably the simplest for new players to pick up and start learning the game.

Xovian.8572:

It really comes down to two schools of thought"
1>An MMO by definition can never be defined as it constantly changes, for good or ill. GW2 is no exception.
2> Once the Dev’s have spoken that’s how it should always be, and if it is changed, it means they have lied.

Only when they try and bull us with “We always meant it to be this way” when they go against their previous public statements.

Basharic.1654:

The thing that always tickles me is ArenaNet really did choose the hard road here. What do you think is easier to design?

Building a boss who only ever has to directly deal with tanks from 2-4 class types. Because, unless you have a back-up tank in your party, tank death usually means a wipe.

OR

Building a boss who can present a challenge to a team of 5 players made up of any flavor of 8 professions. All of which are capable of at least briefly tanking it’s damage or avoiding it completely. AND picking up defeated pleayers.

They chose the easy road: gave bosses craptons of health, virtual immunity to control, and made them AOE hit hard enough on regular attacks to kill anyone in two missed dodges (maybe three if you’re a Warrior that concentrated on Toughness & Vitality over all else). Add in the occasional gimmick (such as having to separate Ralena and Vassar) so that people can claim that you need strategy and that’s it.

Vayne.8563:

Exotics were just too easy to get….based on what they had originally intended.

Based on what they now say they originally intended, not actually on what they originally intended (as evidenced by their pre-Ascended and pre-launch public statements).

Onkelbubu.3108:

Removing the trinity did one thing: seperating this game from all other MMOs and make it a special one.

“Special” in the way that lets you ride on a “special” schoolbus and be put in “special” classes, maybe.

Wethospu.6437:

I have a role. I am the hero. When everything goes wrong I will be there to finish it up.

You obviously haven’t been paying attention to the storylines. You are nothing but a flunky, easily replaceable. Especially at the end where they could’ve just gotten some random guard off the streets of Divinity’s Reach to man a cannon…

Seriously, most of the time you’re just there to run errands for Trehearne and a whiny clique straight out of a high school soap opera (Divinity’s Edge).

Tom Gore.4035:

I still have to take my hat off when looking at the gem store. They still don’t sell power or even measurable shortcuts. It’s still mainly cosmetics and convenience, just as it should be

Except it’s not. The so-called “convenience” items give economic power, at the very least.

Revive Orbs, as an example (not worth the effort to go down the entire list and detail how every item increases your power – even if it’s not direct stat power), mean you don’t have to abandon events, lowering your XP, karma, and gold rewards or incur transit costs from normal revival (which can easily wipe out the gold you would gain from an event, especially tougher ones where you might die several times). And, of course, for less populated events or dungeons, being able to get up instantly without another player having to become vulnerable can prevent a wipe, benefitting everyone involved.

The day they introduce clear shortcuts to BiS gear or blatantly start selling it, I’m out, for good.

Crafting Boosters save you a crapton of gold buying the materials needed to reach 500, a clear shortcut to Ascended (ie, Best in Slot) gear. Guess you’re out for good. Have fun with whatever game you’re going to next.

Korsbaek.9803:

if we look at wow and its trinaty its a tank pulling some mobs and if he needs a smoke he just rolls one as he tanks. healer is able to do the same to a bigger degree

Um, yeah, no. Not even slightly. Tanks and Healers in most MMORPGs that have them have to concentrate 100% on the job at hand. The slightest mistake by either can cause a wipe just as easily as DPSes not watching where they’re stepping.

Serophous.9085:

JDGumby.7685:

Serophous.9085:

Ya know, after looking at the list, it could actually take 2-3 days to get an ascended weapon.

…if you already have most of the list stocked up. If you’re starting from scratch, you are going to take a LOT longer.

Nah. Im just gonna buy the stuff on the tp, get my stars for the bars, then craft one tonight.

Having enough cash stored up to buy most of the list rather than having the materials stocked is, frankly, the same thing. Either way, you will get it a LOT faster than if you were starting from scratch.

Serophous.9085:

Ya know, after looking at the list, it could actually take 2-3 days to get an ascended weapon.

…if you already have most of the list stocked up. If you’re starting from scratch, you are going to take a LOT longer.

There’s a slider in the options. Not very useful, however, and it’ll remain very sluggish no matter how much you adjust the slider.

Curo.2483:

I’ll admit I didn’t read the post, however if a good title does its job, I do have something to say:

Ascended is not a new direction in the game. In the PAX interview, Colin said that they always intended for people to put in effort to work towards max gear,

…contrary to all of their pre-Ascended public statements on the matter, of course.

ArenaNet has a nasty habit, when it comes to GW2, of saying “We always meant for it to be that way, people just misinterpreted what we said before” whenever they make changes they know will be, or turn out to be, massively unpopular.

Vayne.8563:

There were free transfers when the game launched. People would transfer to another server to spy on their WvW rivals.

Huh. I never heard of even a single verified case of that – just a bunch of the usual troll suspects on the forum saying “Yep, that’s what I’d do” whenever it was brought up.

knives.6345:

Greed!?!

More like balance. Server hopping should be a no-no in WvWvW.

It’s not just charging for server transfers (especially when using the pretext of WvWvW balance, which is complete bull when you could limit to X transfers in time period Y and/or have a WvWvW blackout or make them compete as part of the old world ‘til the next reset to prevent hopping between worlds on a whim) I object to, but the use of, as I pointed out, gem values that you cannot purchase, forcing you to spend more than you actually need to in order to get what you had wanted. It’s a very common, and EXTREMELY scummy, practice in any MMO’s cash shop (or other online store, such as Microsoft’s XBox store until very recently) that makes you buy points before you can buy the item/service/whatever.

Pray For Kosmos.5849:

im guessing the publisher/other stake holders in the business wanted to see this and forced anet to do so.

ArenaNet IS the publisher, being a part of NCSoft (“ArenaNet” is just a brand and a label for one of their divisions that exists mainly for accounting and tax purposes) and having no independance.

Onkelbubu.3108:

TooBz.3065:

Yes, because it’s much much worse than we expected. Plus some of us basically begged for them not to do it.

Expected? Majority of people dont expect anything, they dont even know what they want ingame, but they always complain when they dont like it.
This is some serious BS.

Yeah! How dare people complain when they find out about something and don’t like it? (my apologies to those whose Sarcasm Detectors just exploded)

Erasculio.2914:

MikaHR.1978:

But NCSoft does. And they dont want to disapoint their eastern audience.

I’m not sure it’s NCSoft’s fault.

It is, actually. “ArenaNet” is just a label for one of their in-house studios for accounting and taxation purposes. ArenaNet has no independance of any sort.

HiddenNick.7206:

You’re approach is incorrect. They didn’t cut all karma income numbers. They just balanced it. Daily and monthly rewards was so ridiculously large that all other karma rewards stopped to be appealing (d+m = 5000*30 + 50000 = 250000 = 661 event rewards).

Instead of balancing it properly (reducing Achievement Karma and raising Event Karma to compensate), however, they went the route of drastic cuts, both by cutting achievement karma and by giving no karma for failed events.

If getting people to do more events for their karma was the goal, removing karma from failed events was probably the worst thing they could have done as it will, once enough people start noticing it, drive people away from events that normally fail. Hard enough to get enough people to succeed at many bigger events as it is due to the transit and repair gold sinks. It might even have the effect of encouraging even more zerging, which is already a huge problem, because there are a crapton of events that regularly fail if only one or two people are there for them.

Greed. Pure and simple.

ESPECIALLY since it’s 1800 ($22.50)/1000 ($12.50)/500 ($6.25), forcing you to buy amounts of gems that they don’t actually sell (they only sell in batches of 800 ($10.00), 1600 ($20.00), 2800 ($35.00), 4000 ($50.00), and 8000 ($100.00) and only actually involves changing one or two values (home World and, sometimes, the World you’re guesting on) in the player’s profile and, assuming character data’s actually kept on the Worlds’ servers and not just on the central server used for logins and such, performing a data copy to the new World – tasks which would be trivial to automate (give me access to the code and I could do it in under 10 minutes, I bet).

Asko.4120:

I’m also behind the failed event karma removal, as it incentivizes completing events.

Actually, it incentivizes avoiding events that have a large chance of failure, and there are a lot of those. Better to not try at all than to waste precious resources (gold, from repair and transit costs, and time) in trying and failing.

Jumping puzzles would be fine – if player movement wasn’t so sluggish, especially mouse turning (which feels about as slow as being in the menu of an Elder Scrolls game).

Happyfool.8951:

Fractals was introduced to satisfy players who wanted a more challenging content, as Anet put it. (citation needed)

Slapping an effect onto content that kills players who don’t have its specific antidote doesn’t make that content more challenging – just annoying, especially if you have to grind for said antidote.

showatt.9413:

Spvp has 3 developers.
Everyone else is working on pve content like SAB and living story.

You don’t really need all that many people dedicated to looking over the spreadsheet data and juggling the numbers (PvP balancing, what the thread is about), occasionally calling in someone to make adjustments to the maps.

You do need more than that to put out actual large-scale content (eg, Super Adventure Box).

Zoid.2568:

Ascended is what exotic was supposed to be at launch. There isn’t going to be anything beyond Ascended. Except Legendaries, which only is for the looks and not power/stats.

With GW2, ArenaNet’s had a nasty habit of claiming “We always meant it to be this way”. They cannot ever be believed in that respect, frankly.

It’s playable, but not smooth and with significant lag during medium-large events (say, 20 people) on my Athlon II X2 @ 3.1GHz (dual core), 4GB of the slowest DDR3 RAM they make (1333MHz or something), and 512MB Radeon HD 5670. Loading times are excessive on my standard 7200rpm hard drive (think it has 1MB on the L2 caches, but can’t remember for sure; if I hadn’t all but given up on the game after ~4 months, I’d’ve seriously considered getting an SSD just to take care of that).

So hard to decide whether it’s worse to die because of accidental double-taps or because your thumb was too slow to stretch over to the ‘v’ key? :/

Neriglissar.8730:

It’s a great idea, and A-net acted upon that, well half of it anyway.
They nerfed the amount of Karma you get from failing events, but didn’t buff the amount of Karma gained from succeeding events

Which, of course, now means that there’s no point in bothering to even try at the harder events that fail more often than they succeed (such as the reactor fire elemental event, which can easily bankrupt players because of repair costs, rez costs, and fast travel costs to get back to try again).

TehPwnerer.7215:

I do agree though, the time frame of these updates is just getting a bit out of hand at this rate. Everything is here and gone before you know it and there’s not enough time to get anything done at a reasonable pace.

The pace of new content isn’t the problem, of course. The problem is entirely that most of it is temporary. (not to mention that it almost invariably throws up big, mostly opaque panels in the quest tracker on your screen that you can’t dismiss, which is really, really irritating)

The Lost Witch.7601:

Many of these are already being used, but on the side, rather than as the main course. (With the exception of stealth, reflection and condition removal in some areas of the game.) Yet they can easily be the centrepiece of a players build. In a dungeon someone could take it upon himself to become “The boon remover”, which is ridiculous at the moment.

Dunno how it works in dungeons (I’ve avoided those like the plague), but in the regular game doing that cripples their participation score, making it difficult to get even bronze… As far as the game is concerned, unless something’s changed in the last few months, if you’re not directly affecting the enemy, you don’t matter.

Frankly, as long as the system remains such that players have to chip away slowly at each foe’s health bar (even basic foes who you’d gleefully wade through in other games to have a feeling of power) while being dodge-or-die on the player’s end (especially from tells that you can’t actually see amongst all the pyro), and without giving sufficient event credit for doing things other than directly damaging the foe, it will be fundamentally broken and not worth playing.

Caedmon.6798:

Mm i know what they did to atlantica ( one of the very Very few f2p’s i have actually enjoyed ). 15% is alot..but not so much that they are in control,they have a word but not the last word.I dont think it will change alot,if it does..then…well…i rather not say.

Actually, that 14.7% of shares they have makes them the largest single shareholder. That gives them far more influence (especially with the board of directors – and they’ll have a say next time board selections happen – and other decision-makers at the upper end of NCSoft’s heirarchy) than would be the case if there were others with equal or greater shares.

Pokemon’s a bad example. It’s still obscenely popular. Its key to keeping its popularity as the sequels rolled out? Keeping most everything the same, just adding new systems and sticking to mostly incremental change for existing systems.

cesmode.4257:

WoW’s gear grind/treadmill is a lot better than Guild War’s gear treadmill. It wont take 300 runs of a dungeon for one piece of top tier gear(ascended).

The only problem with WoW’s version of the gear treadmill (which is highly polished, in most respects) is the looting system it’s attached to. Bring in a proper everyone-gets-their-own-loot system (like City of Heroes or here) and it’d remove most of my objections. (however, the gear treadmill in GW is completely against the game’s spirit, and therefore unacceptable, much as it was for City of Heroes [which started its freefall])

DootmasterX.3025:

I urge you not to play SWTOR, you have no idea what you are in for with that game. I hope you like touching ‘X’ glowing panels and hearing NPCs monologue at you for hours.

You obviously haven’t played the Personal Story, have you? Gods, Trahearne just won’t shut up… Ugh.