Guild Wars 2

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

[…]

That is true, but you don’t factor in that a lack of development DE-side makes levelling alts much less attractive. Basically right now Queensdale is the same old kitten it was last October.
A solution could be to target a single zone and prop it up with temporary (i.e. Living Story) and permanent (i.e. dynamic events) content during the LS installation
You did it already kinda tried with Return to Southsun, but why that failed has other reasons than a general apathy for DEs, including the very zone itself (which isn’t the case with other Tyrian zones since they are at least visited)

If you want to generate long-term player interest: Add with every other LS arc or so some new actual permanent content like dungeons. Go on Youtube. Look at the GW2 videos. They (excluding PVP ones) are mostly dungeon/fractal running tips, strategizing, speedruns, let’s plays. This is passion. This is your most vocal and loyal clientele. Yet that was not catered for since last November. Without new dungeons, there will be fewer and fewer such videos.

Homitu.7216:

Finally, even when players do find this hidden content, unfortunately, you’re probably not going to hear about it. Once again, I empathize with you as a developer. You must want so badly to indulge in the satisfaction of hearing players rave about their discoveries – which, I assure you, do happen – but you can’t hear what is said in in-game chat, or over a VOIP, or in personal PMs like AIM, which is where the majority of these moments occur.

You’re putting only the best bits into the spotlight. Most which he meant was little DEs, not some sprawling mini-dungeons. You won’t “rave” on VOIP or write PMs about a little DE that you might not even know wasn’t there before.
That’s what he’s addressing. And I agree with him. Untargeted, sporadic inclusion of DEs is a waste of resources. It doesn’t generate anything, not publicity, not customer satisfaction, nothing.

And to answer the topic:
This update equally does nothing for me. If this is 90% of what we can expect the coming years I might as well uninstall right now.

It’s abundantly clear that the server numbers are too low, since currently the only way servers can compete on even terms is by matching them against the constantly same little selection.
But of course PVE pop numbers don’t match a greater server quantity, so maybe the tie between them does more harm than good.
I touched upon the same here briefly: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Can-we-have-balanced-matchups-now/first#post2382718

Kain Francois.4328:

More and more in modern video games, I see time-gated content and dailies.

In my opinion, this makes a game worse than grinding. The explanation of quite simple: It turns a game into a job, at which point it stops becoming fun.

Normal people work during the week, then go home on the weekends to binge on their favorite video games. In an entire week’s worth of work, they are able to make up for it in one day by working extra hard.

However, dailies prevent you from doing that. Instead, you are forced to log on every day, even when you’re not in the mood. (While some argue against being “forced”, the fact is it will take a very, very long time if you do not log in every day.)

This creates a false addiction, where players feel like their game is more of a hassle or job than a game.

This is a plague to modern gaming in general, and I’m especially concerned with the direction of Guild Wars 2.

Dailies are not a good thing!

For me it’s not a job. You know why? Because it’s freaking video game for me. I couldn’t care less about receiving some laurel gear a few weeks sooner or later.

Maybe re-evaluate your perspective on the whole thing if you’re trying to bring analogies like that.

D’aaaaawww what a qt thread

SSD and same issue.

Yes. Arenanet has over the past year more than conclusively established that this game is PVE country.

I’m honestly upset about this, and less about the few gold that I’m missing out, but the principle. This just adds insult to injury to any Evon voter. What did Anet honestly think would go through the head of anyone who voted for the loser at the sight of this? Are they completely oblivious? I know an open dialogue between devs and players is frowned upon over at Bellevue, but I’d still like a short statement from a redtag what the thought process was when they decided upon this.
I think at the very least they should send everyone who voted for the losing party (and maybe the winning one too, though it can be argued they already received the “spoils” of winning) a small or equivalent reimbursement (a la “Thank you for voting for me, although it didn’t work out this time around. Here a small gift as a show of appreciation”), so as to make it not a double punch into the stomach for supporting the losing candidate.

RoRo.8270:

Anet purposefully made most if not all racials for every race subpar cause they didn’t want players to pick a race based off certain spells.

And went completely overboard with that. They’re plain ol’ useless.
Not to mention that every single PVE content in this game can be completed with a randomly thrown together fun build, so even if they made racials 5 times as strong they still would be far from “needed”.

Well it currently looks like Evon is losing, so maybe it’s him instead who’ll attempt to assassinate Jennah and become queen of Kryta.

WHITE MANTLE.

Well I don’t find the definite “replacement” of the district a bad thing in itself, since now at least Anet can’t present us with some ghetto and then call it a day when it comes to Canthan representation in GW2, but instead has to (presumably) give us the real deal if they really want to include a Canthan environment. Since DR really was the only reasonable place on the main continent that could have been Canthan themed.
It’s like a guarantee for a return to the continent, if we’re being slightly optimistic.

I heard you guys on Vabbi are getting a WvW guild from T1/T2, is that true?

Craptrain.7203:

So then the point isn’t moot. If they’re willing to toss reality out the window on all those matters, why not on issues of armor restriction as well?

Because it isn’t about “realism” but about a stylistic choice to make mages look like cloth-wearing scholars or frontline soldiers like plate-/chainmail wearing knights, for obvious reasons.

Tyler Chapman.1832:

Your roster will disband once the match is over.

You really have become a confusing developer over the past couple years. Do you not see the advantages in a system where everyone gets grouped randomly, but they stay a team after winning? Maybe let them even get promoted to the team tourneys after they won, like original RA?
I can see why you chose a complete randomization after every match – only it doesn’t solve the most often requested matching type.
Do you not realize that every player who does not have a group of friends or a guild of exactly 5 or more very dedicated PvPers but seeks a dedicated, organized team experience (which is not served by solo queue in it’s current implementation) but does not want to compete against fully staffed, voice chat using guild teams on an obviously unequal footing still does not have a home in Guild Wars 2?
This basic game mode will be still missing more than a year after game release.
Most PvP modes in your previous game, GW1, supported that, even Random Arenas.

This is not how you create an E-Sport.

Is this your face perchance?
http://pixelbedlam.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Spy-Team-Fortress-2-Smoking-Smoke-Happy-kitten .jpg

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Queen’s Guantlet is 1v1 challenge against new bosses, not other players.

Solo queue is for 5v5 competitive PVP.

Can you tell us what steps you undertook to prevent syncing? This was a massive problem back in RA times.

I’m 95% positive it’s due to network considerations. GW2 is already badly optimized, and I guess to send every single condition tick, regen tick, retaliation proc etc. back to the chat would just increase load dramatically.

The best way to de-emphasize zerging is to spread the objectives out. Instead of adding wholly new maps, expand the current ones to at least four times the size.
This would increase opportunity cost for maintaining a singular 60 man zerg versus e.g. two 30 man or three 20 man zergs exponentially.

However, that would require a rework of the decade-old legacy network code they grandfathered over from GW1, so not likely to happen.

I’m all for removing PvP from WvW if we get PvP in PvE zones in exchange.

Credit where credit is due. I wish we got a PvP-affectionate update like this once per month or so.

Aberrant.6749:

Why would you be playing 100% glass cannon in WvW? Most thieves don’t even do this because they’ll still get wrecked.

Thief is fine. Learn to avoid bursts. Many other players do it, so can you. Playing a thief for a short while in sPvP may help you if you’re having problems with them.

Can we please move this to the thief QQ subsection so others don’t accidentally click on it? Thanks.

The class itself is fine, but the retarted PVE buffs like bloodlust sigils or food inflate their damage greatly while Anet is just cluelessly watching from the sidelines as player frustration mounts.
Also counts for warriors.

I’d agree with OP, but I think it’s reasonable as long as it requires enough WXP points. Right now we already have increased Supply capacity, but even the first tier costs 20 points, so very people are able to or want to chose that.
So that 10-40% uncertainty will likely rather translate to a 1-2% uncertainty.

Nikked.7365:

I’m very confused about what “increased supply pickup speed” is.

Exactly what it says on the tin – you physically pick up the supply faster. Which makes it a trait line very dedicatedly created for zerging.

Don’t lose your hope yet. As of the next update, particle effects are to be finally fixed after more than a year of being constantly and vocally requested. So I guess in one or two years this might get looked as well, you just need to have patience.

matjazmuhic.1649:

We should have more skills to change – for example swapable skills on weapon sets.

Why not simply add more weapon sets (or full but fixed secondary skillsets)? You’re not factoring in that they are balanced against each other. You can put a weak snare on a weapon if you put a high spike skill on it or vice versa, but obviously not both. Meaning an as-of-now strong weapon skill would never make the transition 1:1 if they changed it, and overall they would rather get weaker and more pigeonholed than the other way around. Worse, unlike in GW1 or most other MMO, you wouldn’t even have to factor in your mana expenses. You can go 100% burst glass cannon or 100% bunker with nothing holding you back. How about a 24/7 fearbot or cripplebot just annoying other players?

Gw1 had way more skills which imo brought more diversity, but Gw2 went for less skills and traits system.

Lay down the rose tinted glasses. Release GW and release GW2 actually have about the same number of skills. And a lot of skills from GW1 are now being served by traits or chain skills, meaning you have even more to put in your slots.

We just need an option to make it more visible. It frequently gets lost in the effects. It’s especially bad if you have smartcasting activated.
And yes, this is PvP.

OP, you misunderstand the concept of this forum. You have to sell your idea to ArenaNet. A well-conceptualized, insanely often requested idea with a strong tradition in the franchise alone won’t do.
Instead you should have put forward some suggestions how Anet could possibly exploit a GvG-like format to sell the most fluffy Gemstore toys, offer the most legally unregulated gambling, and attract the most casual players who only ever log in to do minigames and mindlessly grind achievements every two weeks.
Have no idea how to marry those two things? Well, then that probably means we will never get GvG and you should go away with your unwarranted elitism. This is strictly Casual City, don’t turn this into WoW clone #39423.

Heaven forbid a mechanic that forces us to adapt to the combat circumstances.
Retal is fine.

S/D will pretty much always beat D/D in sheer DPS in PVE, due to cleave and the reliably consistent damage output. A backstab is far from guaranteed and Heartseeker misses half the time due to foes dropping too fast.
The only exception to the rule are some higher-level fractals with strong but (comparatively) fewer trash mobs.

You’re all over the place dude.

Manijin.3428:

1) The name “Guild Wars” is a lore-based title from the world which played more importance in the 1st game. I recommend checking the wiki for its relevance.

Is the name “Arena Net” and the fact that the first game originally centered around Guild versus Guild competitive PvP due to lore too?

yesfourme.8906:

Yes and I almost always play with pugs. There is no difference in skill with anyone else in pve.

This is the WvW subforum.

If you meant for wvw, there is no difference either. All you do is follow the zerg brainlessly.

Believe that if it makes you comfortable.

Before you invest your votes, I’d like you to remind that all of the Living Story mini-dungeons we got so far had a strong robot/golem presence, in short a sci-fi theme, to them. Thaumanova will be just the same – more golems cat-eared or not, automated security systems, complicated control consoles, hi-fi speaker systems, power fluxes and of course a crapton of Inquest goons.
Yawn.
Unless they dramatically deviate from the angle everyone’s (yes, Mr/Ms Writer, your job is already done) expecting and actually don’t make the whole thing about an experiment on dragon magic gone horribly wrong, this is exactly what we’ll get.
Inquest as enemies and thus robots is already confirmed unfortunately, but for example, it would be a exponentially more interesting backstory if the power that was being harnessed there wasn’t dragon sourced, but somehow connected to the former, Aztec-themed inhabitants of the general location, that I can imagine have been expunged from the canon long ago, together with non-white Krytans and Canthans (before the outcry) due to too great cultural diversity. Or the Mursaat or the Forgotten or something entirely new.

This considered I favor the Fall of Abaddon. Why? Because this will be one of the few opportunities we’ll have in GW2 to revisit “pure” GW1 lore. No dragons, no nothing from the last 250 years. Just straight up an episode that would feel very much at home in the original GW trilogy. (Unless the newly hired writers adorn the backstory with their own fanon, as in that the events were somehow dragon related)

TRON.1085:

Please can we be able to loot after death in WvW?

It is one of the few things discouraging mindless zerging, where you jump in shouting YOLO, quickly tag everything, and then happily die.
So no, don’t agree I’m afraid.

Contiguous.1345:

Even less so for losing it while playing a game.

Is that the message you’d give to an amateur football team, where one player is being chronically obtuse and kicks the ball out of the field all the time?
Just because some commanders are jerks doesn’t mean you have to go into the other extreme. Online games with other people are not any less real than any other form of social activity.

I think it’s a deliberate choice by Anet to make Eles the most teeth-grindingly annoying class to kill.

VOLKON.1290:

Yeah… when those were announced, quite the uproar about these “useless” additions… Build Mastery and Defense Mastery iirc… now c’mon, admit it… you all have at least one point in each, don’t cha? You can admit it… hell, my first two points on a character go there now.

I literally can’t imagine who was stupid enough to call build mastery (and repair mastery) useless. Their only WvW experience must have been collecting vistas.

http://i.imgur.com/zIsyVTD.jpg
Tell me I’m a glass cannon, because I didn’t consider myself one with a toughness of 1132, but all I know is that warrior was alone and couldn’t have had many stacks of might, and what magical stacks of vulnerability could I have had accumulated from a whopping 15 second encounter against two foes (one of which didn’t live long)?

What will come next, 1-hit kill headshots? The only possible way you can mitigate the Killshot damage is to have to Warrior in focus and time your dodge, which is nicely possible but still doesn’t excuse the out-of-whack numbers. Have I mentioned yet that I’m not a glass cannon and run with a balanced build?
It seems like an I-WIN button brought to you by the “balance mastermind” behind latter GW1.

Blackmoon.6837:

2. With the reactor fractal, Anet has a chance to offer something so outlandish and new to the lore, it could even affect the gods. Ooooooo…

I can tell you exactly how it’d play out.
You go there, discover that some horrible accident happened an all test subjects escaped and that they used oh-so-mysterious dragon magic to power the reactor (such a twist!). Now we’ll have to cool the thing down and defeat some elemental boss – all in a setting that we already know.

The Abaddon Fractal would give us a glimpse of the original god himself, possibly the margonites, and the crystal sea when it was still an actual sea, which is something every GW vet would like.

synk.6907:

The intent was to lead up to the question at the end of my post — about any prospects of the losing choice still making an appearance in the game ever. I’m quite sure real-life constraints are playing a role in all of this, and yes I would agree that letting the players as a collective whole take part in directing development is kind of neat. I didn’t think I argued against any of that.

But, ultimately, what’s at stake is that we’ve more or less been told that one means of developing the lore further for the Guild Wars world/universe/canon will never get visited as a result. The winner will get developed, further Living Story content in the pipeline will be revealed to us, and Tyria will move on.

The split interests of the players — and seemingly the development team — shows, at least to me, that both ideas would get played and be welcome additions to the game. I worry that choices like this will continue to leave Tyrian lore un-expanded upon, and the cynic in me further worries that we’ll end up with more loose ends from new content as well.

edit: Parisalchuk makes a good point, as well — knowing a choice exists brings along some (unintended?) negative consequences for players, or at least for those whose choice loses. That, however, seems to me to be an unavoidable trade-off for even having the choice at all, though, unless the losing content has a chance to eventually see development.

You just discovered the pains of adulthood, chap.

Thanks to laurels, Ascended trinkets are basically welfare gear. I cannot fathom how someone can’t see that. You can get dailies with an hour playtime, especially WvW is fast. The only limit is a timegate to keep everyone roughly on the same level.
You have to be an extremely infrequent player that they take you long. If so you have basically no right to be expect to be equally geared as someone who invests as a reasonable amount of time in a non-competitive format.

And even then, you’re looking at a 9% advantage in stats. That is, once Asc armors and weps get released. Right now we have only trinkets. So all in all a player with full Ascended gear gets a meager 4% advantage over someone in full exos.

OP, we can conclude you’re blaming that you get beaten by random players on Ascended gear. That’s just silly.

Grandtomatoe.2045:

Why? Because people are leaving your game because it sucks being outnumbered all the time. If you want this game to last, buff the buff.

Stop blaming numbers.
If you trickle like headless chicken out of your spawn and into the enemy zerg you can’t exactly be surprised that they’ll farm you.
Believe me, an organized 10-man group with a skilled commander can dominate a map where a zerg twice or thrice their size lurks.

They have a comparatively large team but most of them are hired part-timers, interns and contractors, as per glassdoor.com, which probably means the involvement and passion for the game on average is significantly below many other game studios their size (even though I don’t doubt some individuals are very passionate about the game and it’s modes).

Zephyrus.9680:

edit: Confusion in the responses… I’m not saying zergs are unimportant, they obviously are. I’m saying on a 1-to-1 comparison, roamers do a lot more, at least with the current population levels of each.

Yeah but you forget diminishing returns. If you have 50 zerglings and 5 solo-capping, dolyak killing roamers, one roamer will be more valuable. But if you have 30 zerglings and 30 roamers, anyone who switches to being a zergling instantly becomes more valuable because 30 roamers won’t take a keep or stonemist or even a tower, or prevent an enemy zerg from doing that, while that 10-20 additional zergers might make the difference. And there’s a limited number of roamer-appropriate objectives.

Roamer’s value rapidly diminishes as the ratio between them and zergers reaches parity or majority, while that of a zergling actually increases.

Atherakhia.4086:

is it safe to assume the class will gain some real group value in the future?

You’re a bad player and that is okay – it’s the default state of any player.
But don’t pretend to have knowledge where you don’t, which you just proved.

OP, you fail to realize that the state of sPvP is so sad that they dedicated a PR person to communicate with the players.
Remember when the devs had a direct and informal dialogue about PvP in GW1, or like in any E-Sports game for that matter? That should be happening – if they had the manpower.

WvW is even worse off: it’s a minigame for Anet, and it’s understandable that they don’t want to pay another check for minigame PR. Doesn’t excuse still the really cryptic handling about what Anet’s goals exactly are with WvW.

Thank god you quit WvW over that, we need to weed out every whiner we can.

Almost nothing should be soulbound before equip. I do not understand the fetish ArenaNet has with that. The mistake is easily, quickly made and every day dozens of players get f—ed over it (because keeping with the GW tradition, there’s nowhere a meaningful tooltip to be found that it wouldn’t work).
I’d very much appreciate if they retroactively turned all currently unequiped Ascended items account bound, or atleast in the future.

PotatoCable.1425:

Make you laugh? Why would you laugh at the truth? It’s all you are, a blob!

I play on DL. You don’t. We nowhere near have blobs 24/7. End of story.

Without your high numbers, the players I’ve met have been aweful.

Every server says that of themselves, including us – we, the outnumbered underdog, but where every player counts for three enemies.

Scott McGough.6897:

All of the other fractals represent discrete sections of the past, recreated. We have the ancient past, more recent past, and mythic/lost to history past, but there are no futures in there.

Well if that ain’t a classic case of players making up a more interesting explanation than the writers.

Cosmic Sparklejunk.3514:

Strike up the cries of, “it doesn’t matter!” or “Actually the male term covers everyone!” that happen every time someone points out or questions the male as default phenomenon.

Right on cue.

You probably don’t care as much about Song Dynasty poetry as I do. Same applies in reverse to this matter.