Guild Wars 2

I keep getting a login server error suggesting that my internet connection is the problem, but I can log into all of my other games without any trouble.

Lucky Thirteen X.4210:

Ok, since my last post got an infraction, let me add a more meaningful post. Why I quoted the other user was to agree that the game cannot seek to thrive by making itselfr look like or a clone of another game. It should instead focus on what makes it unique, WvW & PvE, and focus on that instead of gear grinding and one time events for l33t gear that a good portion of the player base does not like.

Better? :-D

Much, and I agree with you 100%.

Oh, and…so has Penny Arcade, long before Guild Wars 2 ever came out.

Jezath.7395:

Im from the UK myself also I agree the laws in the UK are Strict regarding this area. Mostly its strict in the area of the sale of insurance and finance.

My suggestion there was just one of many different examples i could have used to emphasize my point and should by no means be taken as gospel.

I appreciate you pointing that out to me though.

No worries. These are dark times for this game, so we gotta watch each other’s backs, and hopefully come out of this thing Monday afternoon with a breath of fresh air.

Jezath.7395:

I agree with the general principles that you have set forth in your post.

I also agree that anet have gotten some things wrong.

I do not however agree that this is the begining of a loot grind. I think that this was planned for all along and wasent mentioned in there original advertising for whatever reason. we dont know the reason so it can only be surmised. It may have been to get more sales, but it also may have been because it just wasent ready and they dident wanna reveal it until they were sure they would be able to complete it and deliver it in a mostly finished state.

The fac6t is we just dont know, in these cases I prefer to go on history, i mean its all we have to go by isent it? If i look at the history anet has been an honest and dedicated company towards its players.

It may be, it may not be. My wife and I have decided to at least make our voices heard so that we’re not among the silent who oppose a loot grind in this game, should there be one. A silent customer is an enabling customer. If not, then it’s water under the bridge. I reckon we’ll know one way or the other on Monday.

Do take care in suggesting what I emphasized in your quote, however. Should any empirical evidence exist to suggest sales manipulation, then that’s enough to put Anet in hurt status, especially in the UK, whose fraud laws are much more rigid than they are in the states.

Jezath.7395:

I think that reaching the top is the start of a game not the end. For instanmce once you have reached this pinaacle you can then help others reach it.

That’s exactly what Guild Wars 1 used to be. You’re rewarded for defending the hill you reached by bringing your friends along for the ride and taking them on a constant-content thrill ride through three continents of gameplay. Expansion of high end content was GW1’s selling point and catalyst for its successes.

This is not what we’re getting in Guild Wars 2 so far. Gear progression 3 months into game is bad and hasty design; even WoW didn’t do that, and they’re still chugging along as the biggest Gorilla in the cage. Anet touted lore this and lore that, and can’t even get that straight. I guess Mursaat are no longer the only ones who inflict “Agony,” even though Guild Wars lore once expressly said otherwise. Now this “increment” from Exotic to Ascended may seem minor to some, but the big picture is the precedent it sets, and the blatant disregard for the manifesto that inspired so many to pre-order/purchase this game in the first place.

Of course there’s always gotta be a prize. You gotta give a man his toaster, but you don’t make him compete for a shinier toaster a month later. Give him a blender to chase, next time. He’s always wanted his own Corvette.

My point: stop making us chase carrots, and give us a veritable garden. Add a greater variety of armor appearances, and new weapon archtypes to go along with content (flails, whips, 1h hammers, katana, halberds, crossbows, throwing knives/blades, etc.).

As you expand the world, let us stretch our legs with vehicles or mounts, and make that the next shiny to chase.

Making us chase a whole new set of armor every quarter is just going to turn this game into another hackneyed hamster wheel that reminds everyone there’s another hamster wheel where 8 million of their friends are already playing…

Groovy.6749:

Ascended gear/agony is part of the lore.

Except you infused your armor in GW1 to resist the Agonizing Touch/Spectral Agony of the Mursaat. Where are the Mursaat in GW2?

…oh…that’s right…they’re mere statues on the Vizier’s tower. Until they have some epic reason to bring back the Mursaat, the Ascended Gear release is a joke, and it is actually a violation of their lore to just invent a bunch of crap that suddenly uses their power. So there’s another stupid argument to create further division between the Guild Wars die hards and those who’ve never played a Guild Wars game before.

But it doesn’t actually change anything.

It’s still an excuse by Anet to push out gear progression to placate the glory hounds out there who are dissatisfied that their gear grind is done. Simple is that. Sure, the game has a stat cap, alright; you’ll just be converting gems into gold to achieve it. It’s not the play to win game we were promised, because trading gems in the Black Lion trading post is “playing the market.”

I see what you did there, Nexon. This game is starting to get too much like theirs for my liking.

Do not want.

Boomstin.3460:

Silentstorm.7531:

Stat capped games only work for RTS based games. You cannot keep a audience with no way for them to progress. It works the same way in life is everyone capped at 100 dollars? No ofcourse not people need things to strive for. And reality check thats atleast 75% of the gaming population they want power and the means to earn it. If you really think a game is going to be successful with horizontal progression your in denial.

Make me cry a little every time i read about ‘gear progress’ . You are not actually progressing in power , youre just trying to get to the same point where you were before the new more powerful tier was introduced.

As soon as Guild Wars 2 becomes “that game,” it’ll be like all the rest. Just like WOW. Just like SWTOR.

And in this three-abreast column of MMOG racing, the growth of player ambivalence will hasten, and the cross-examination of competition will continue to doom games that try to emulate World of Warcraft, instead of being something unique to quench the thirst of a player grown tired of the hackneyed hamster wheel they’re reduced to every time they send Blizzard a monthly check.

Stat caps worked fine in Guild Wars 1. No reason they can’t here, as well. Just give the player persistent content in which to immerse themselves wholly. Give that content meaning. The endgame should be a battle to keep what you have, and ensure other players safely reach your level, not ever-chasing the carrot that the basement-dweller in front of you will always get first, and subsequently hound over all the “noobs” who need to “L2P.”

Buzzcrave.6197:

Veltoss.9135:

My god people.. they added one tier of gear as a one-time gameplay improvement, why the kitten is everyone acting like this is the apocolypse?

It may be one gear now, but when all the QQers get those Ascended, they will complain more. What will Anet do then? Add another tier of item. This is how gear-treadmill happens. kitten like this happened alot of time on others mmo, and Im afraid it will happen on GW2 as well.

And in this three-abreast column of MMOG racing, the growth of player ambivalence will hasten, and the cross-examination of competition will continue to doom games that try to emulate World of Warcraft, instead of being something unique to quench the thirst of a player grown tired of the hackneyed hamster wheel they’re reduced to every time they send Blizzard a monthly check.

Terrbo.2563:

SNIP

The problem is NEVER the customer. ANET got all the types of feedback about the patch, before and after it came out. The customer’s reaction to the business’ action is typical. I mean, how dare them try and defend their $60 and time spent in the game prior to the patch.

Careful, some people think that’s being “selfish!”

It should never have been about whose investment is worth more than whose, or whether or not someone is entitled to this that, or blah blah whatever.

It’s principle. Principle. Period. Accountability. Like you said: It goes through CORE and QA. When feedback rebukes the meat of the content but you push it anyway, it’s because someone already greased your palms:

1. Your shareholders
2. The 2 million customers who bought your “Lateral progression” that was actually a treadmill

In the end, minor changes or not, the principle is that they favor the glory hog player with a cozy job living in the basement on mom’s payroll who will buy 800 gems a week until his pores are bursting day-old pizza, not Jack and Jill Smith with two kids and bills to pay, despite the manifesto that told them otherwise.

bman.1683:

Perhaps the new content was intended to be released at a much later date. But it was just pushed ahead of schedule and released at the wrong time, causing it to have exploded like it has now.

…and had it been done in such a way, so that existing launch players can finish the main course already on their plate, this probably wouldn’t have been an issue. A small, annual increment in gear is manageable for most players; to completely clone the vertical progression of a subscription-based competitor, however, is a recipe for failure. To do so when your entire PR campaign was based solely upon the opposite is a death sentence in of itself.

I think the message is getting lost in the player-to-player mudslinging and community fragmentation I’m seeing across the message boards. An impassioned community in a furor over a presumed “Bait and Switch” scheme has been reduced to a polarization between the affronted and the “Anet Apologists” who claim the former are unjustified in their ire.

ArenaNet currently trends a tenuous line between unethical and illegal, depending on who observes the complaints of the customers. Perceived in the wrong light, and bad press from these days may yet cause irreparable harm to the future of GW2.

As said many many times before: They released this too early. They should have released gear Infusion much in the same way they did with GW1: As part of the story, giving it a tangible reason to exist, rather than being just another carrot you’ll never reach while running on a treadmill.

plasmacutter.2709:

Please re-adjust the difficulty of FotM dungeons not to require a new gear tier, and expand upon the concept to add more paths (and reward sets) to existing explorable mode dungeons with tiered difficulty (but NOT tiered gear).

As it stands now, the gear requirement, the fact that it can only be obtained through one aspect of game-play, and the gating of this game-play are fragmenting the community and killing off world-zone play. It is feeding the type of elitism that is reviled by the vast majority of the communities in other MMOs, and introducing fundamental imbalance to pvp.

Gone is the promised reward for helping your lowbie friends. Now you are rewarded for anti-social behavior, such as eschewing your fellow players requests for help to stay in fractals, excluding people who don’t have enough agony resistance or high enough level who look for fractal groups.

Soon you will see people who reach the end of this progression come back out of fractals to farm gold for the next “item batch release” in dynamic events, and they, with superior stats from a new vertical tier ANet promised for ages would never happen, will prevent others who don’t like fractals from properly tagging mobs.

I never thought i’d see this game end up in “Gearscore Land”, but it seems that’s the border we’re crossing right now, and in so doing violating every promise made to this community, and you CAN stop it without harming the playability and re-playability of the content!

Before Anet even attempts to address this, the players can make a difference by ceasing to be ate up about “gear” when they group up in Lion’s Arch for a dungeon. This is GUILD WARS 2, not WORLD of WARCRAFT.

Iruwen.3164:

dirtyoldgoat.5496:

I have not done the fractal dungeon (or most dungeons), i am in no hurry to do it (or most dungeons), and this gear they released is only good for that dungeon.

What exactly am i missing? Where is this unwanted but necessary grind i hear people talking about?

Someone point out as i don’t see it (but perhaps because i am not looking for it).

If i don’t want to grind that gear out i don’t have too.

Is this a mistaken assumption? I dont understand the rage. . . and i LIKE gear progression….. but is this even that?

The game was meant to be based on skill, not gear. If they removed all bonus stats from WvW and made them PvE only, like it already is with PvP, most of us were fine. Some people would still be angry because they don’t want the second best gear in the game, but that’s a personal problem I wouldn’t agree with.

If some among the WOW community could get a grip and realize this, they’d be amazed to see just how good people can be in mere Mastercraft gear, instead of demanding everyone “link” their gear prior to a paltry 5-man dungeon.

xtorma.1283:

gwawer.9805:

1. Trolls. Wanting to see how big of threads they can create and how much attention they can get.

2. Kids and teenagers getting their first taste of the excitement that comes with protesting a large company. At this point they are selfishly victimizing Anet for their own entertainment.

3. People who gain pleasure from making demands from Anet, because in real life, these people have nobody they can demand from. They may be poor, meek, and bullied in real life, and they are venting through the forums taking their anger out on Anet.

And then there are people who are afraid others may have a point, and do everything they can to try and counter it. You can spot them by thier propensity to label people with contrary views, usually in a manner that paints them in the worse light possible.

The worst thing that has happened is fear. Fear from the side that are against the changes, because they are afraid the changes will continue, and fear from the side that like the changes, because they are afraid that they may end up in a barren game.

This is exactly what I am seeing every day here. Such “propensity” seems to originate from the plethora of Anet apologists that infest these forums with their talk of “your investment is no better than anyone else’s,” and such nonsense, as if some of us didn’t already know that.

What they fail to realize is the principle of the matter. We’re quick to judge our own government or Wall Street when they allegedly “steal” from us, but it seems that if you get your nose stuck up a company’s butt far enough, you stop holding them accountable for selling you a Pinto when you were titled a Mustang, because “playing nice” keeps an infraction-free status on the message boards.

Good for them; it doesn’t justify bait and switch.

To further elaborate on what I said in my previous post: I’d be far less upset at this ordeal if this game had been out a year and it was time for such an advancement in gear (because sooner or later it has to happen—just not three months into it). This move by Anet, their decision or otherwise, was premature. Period.

I get from where the OP is coming, but I don’t necessarily agree with them.

Sinisterpink, you’re but a rock in a river, hoping to change its course, but are met with futility. Over time, the river will weather you to what fate decides; you’ll be smoothed into a shiny stone in the riverbed of Guild Wars 2, or you will be washed back out into the sea of today’s variety of MMOGs from which to choose.

Your heart’s in the right place, but Guild Wars 2 has become a sort of melting pot for the eclectic brands of gamer MMOGs breed. Any opposition to the status quo is destined to be met with resistance. Any attempt to inject common sense into a message board will be interjected by basement dwellers who lack any. Any attempt to suggest that the ire of paying customers isn’t justified when a cheeseburger is served without cheese is asinine and just plain wrong.

That’s what’s at stake here.

Guild Wars 2 drove prospective gamers to store shelves and pre-order counters on the premise of a manifesto that stated GW2’s player progression was horizontal, not vertical; there would be no treadmill. Recent developments show otherwise. I could—to a reasonable extent—understand if they made this decision under the scrutiny of a myriad of chiding critical reviews, but Guild Wars 2 was critically-acclaimed by many at launch—critics and players alike.

Just take a look around.

The game at launch was a mess from a UI and grouping bug standpoint, not gear, gameplay, balance, or progression. The implementation of Ascended/Infused gear was done completely wrong. In Guild Wars 1, such equipment was a part of the story, to protect the player from the havoc the Mursaat would wreck with Spectral Agony. I don’t see any Mursaat in GW2, yet, much less any REAL reason for this armor to exist. We had enough of a treadmill with Legendary Gear; we didn’t need another grind.

I can remember when Abyss Dye cost a little over 5 Gold in September/Early October. Last night, the cheapest I found was 13 Gold, 99 Silver! REALLY? For a cosmetic item? Anet swung wide of the mark on that “fix,” one of many that would follow. Call it human nature or developer fatigue; regardless of your excuse, Anet is showing a lack of coordination in both their efforts to fix the game’s issues, and their means to communicate their intentions to us.

We’re three months in; people are justified in their anger. People are justified in their pursuit of refunds. Were they not, Anet wouldn’t be granting them.

Being negative and angsty toward Anet (with reasons why) is one thing; going postal and affronting each other over a difference of opinion is something entirely else. There are only two options here:

1. Unite as a community and find which majority rules (Ascended RIGHT or WRONG).
2. Exercise the power of your wallet. Get your refund and go play something else.

Like many others who feel affronted by the premature addition of Ascended Gear: I had a manifesto telling me there’d be cheese on my cheeseburger, so that’s what I expect to have paid for.

I was having fun until the WoW crowd showed up demanding I link my gear every time I want to run a dungeon or instance. Now the narcissism of elitist gamers has run off the rest of my guild to other games, and the players who are left are either too casual or too hardcore of roleplayers to provide a meaningful team orientation.

I’m not sure if it’s occurred to some people yet, but in Guild Wars (1 or 2), your gear doesn’t have to be uber to win; the player does. When some of the basement-dwelling hardcore gamers learn to get over themselves—or return to WoW—some common sense might pervade the atmosphere of Lion’s Arch once again.

Well said, OP. I am normally the one to soapbox about things like this, but you said it all. Anet’s path “Forward” is seen from the perspective of Googly-eyed envy of Blizzard’s success. Well, if using the example of a stagnant game that’s changed very little in eight years is Anet’s idea of “moving forward,” then it’s high time to abandon ship for bluer seas.

Well said. My first impression of this game was “Wow, what a groundbreaking leap from Guild Wars 1,” until hints of vertical progression began to eschew Guild Wars’s famed horizontal progression. I find myself allured by the now-F2P SWTOR more every day over exactly what the OP laments.

Joey.3928:

Uh I see no difference with those quotes and what the game is today. Especially the last point. Guild Wars 2 is still very much like Guild Wars as far as gear goes.

I know this because I have a very very busy life. If this game was a gear grind I would NOT be playing it. Reason being I have played all other MMORPG’s that ARE gear grinds and I stopped playing all of those.

That is the truth.

This. The only “grind” I noticed is the grind for mats in making Legendary Weapons, and even that is painless when compared to more “mainstream” MMOGs.

Mine dropped with shadows off, but now I am achieving an average 35fps with settings maxed, versus the 20fps before. Now I am getting 20fps maxed with no shadows, and 35fps WITH, as if maxing the game optimizes the GTX560M in my Asus G74.

Odd?

Tarnished Coast has a Tarnished Noll.

This seems to be happening a lot in instances, so I’m encouraging people to /bug report it and write a ticket in the event it is blocking progress. It happened within a minute to both me and my wife’s accounts while doing her “Liberating Apatia” quest in Mount Maelstrom. It’s actually similar to the “9000” error that stymied SWTOR’s launch early on, both in occurrence and behavior of the disconnect.

rootbrooski.8124:

I just got logged out with the same message, so you aren’t alone. I have e-mail authorization active and haven’t received any e-mails, so I’m pretty certain this error is on ANet’s end.

Same here. I’ve checked my router logs and email authentication as well. Good to go here.

I am seeing “You are not in a guild” every time I chat in a guild in which I am representing. None of the advertised “workarounds” fix the problem for longer than maybe 30-60 minutes of play.

Wraith.6749:

Wait, what? What happened to the November 4th deadline?

Seriously, people like myself have jobs and would at least like to log in tonight after work to see the end of this event.

1 day ….and “sometime around” is stupid. I took 1 night off to attend REAL festivities based on the initial November 4th deadline and just happen to see this post.

I have friends and guildies affected by Sandy that didn’t get to play Phase 3 or 4 at all…and still won’t because of this. :-/

Chrollo.2173:

I just had a thought that helped me get over the fact that I don’t think I have time it will likely take to conquer the tower this year. Which is:

Don’t stress it. Try again next year. Think about it this way, right now the “Mad King” set is just renamed version of sets already in existence. Possibly when the event happens again next year that will have changed and it will be armor of a unique style.

The achievement will still be there to be acquired as well.

This.

I also consider this as well: There’s nothing in that event that will give me any great sense of accomplishment over completing the actual game and achieving my first level 80, completing every dungeon, and having 100% map discovery. Just examples.

Elly.2376:

Gee, someone doesn’t agree and they are accused of trolling, just love how the internet has progressed over the years. I’m not trolling you, but I just don’t agree with them extending the event is all. Sure no harm in asking, I’m just voicing my opinion. And I doubt the majority of their playerbase is in those states alone, this game is world wide.

And trust me I’m looking forward to finishing this event as much as you. I just feel if I miss out due to mother nature, then oh well, there is always next year.

That’s pretty jacked, honestly. If a natural disaster occurred in your area, I’d be all for them extending it all the same. It’s one thing when it affects a small demographic of people in which a small margin of players may be impacted. It’s something else when it affects a measurable fraction of a coastal playerbase…especially since this game depends on sales, not subs, to generate revenue.

If anything, a 5-day extension is a MINOR request.

Had this problem a week ago. I’d hoped they’d have spared the time to fix this with the Mad King patch, but I guess not. Been /bug reported several times by me and my guildies.

How to finish the Clock Tower?

1. Make it a solo instance.
2. Allow the camera to zoom to 1st person.

Done.