Guild Wars 2

I think Anet is just way too stubborn to fix it unfortunately.

The classes just need way more customization.

I’m looking forward to the new skills but I get the feeling it’s going to be a very very small addition, and after over a whole year after a release when the game really need more, I’m just doubtful. =[

This might be low priority but could there be a couple more mushroom hair styles? I would love some that’s even a bit bigger and exotic looking.

I will forever be in fear of being called “kitten head” though. =p

EvaGolden.1730:

Wasn’t there a Tengu named Talon in GW1? I believe there were! And Nighthawk… Maybe you should have kept that name for if/when Tengu will be a playable race! :p But if I were to judge it for a Tengu name, I’d certainly go for a 7.5-8/10!

I have 3 Sylvari, and I went for things that felt very Sylvari-like in my opinion:

Female Sylvari Ranger: Aineyn (P.S. It’s also my Main Character)
Female Sylvari Necromancer: Padheen
Male Sylvari Warrior: Luskybe

Aineyne : 10/10 Pretty graceful/elven/sylvari name, not sure how to pronounce unless it’s (Eye-Nayn) which rolls off the tongue.

Padheen : 8/10 I only like it because the dheen part sounds very celtic/hibernia ish to me which is fitting.

Luskybe : 7/10 Unique name, doesn’t make me think Sylvari though, the skybe part reminds me of mushrooms though so win for you.

My char : Sylvari Mesmer (with very skinny body and a faceless mushroom head and a mask) Sathr Mycen.

Sathr is old norse for Sadness, I generally always use names that are norse-ish cause I love them, and it definately feels like a good first name. Although Sylvari aren’t very norse the whole Yggdrasil “Tree of Life” thing is fitting.

Mycen has to do with mushrooms (Mycelium), and make the name flow pretty well. I was going to go for a name with Psilocybin intregrated but it’s just too obvious and generic.

In the end my name means “Sad Mushroom”. =p

Reinforcments.5713:

You know I recently aquired the Chaos Gun from all the “junk” i’ve been flushing down the mystic toilet and made a cool 250g……

and I don’t care.

That would be something to celebrate like 1 month or further back ago. Now because of all the zerging prices on everything have shot up so much that my gold doesn’t even go as far. I mean if I had that much scratch back then, i’d be rolling in gems which is the only thing worth buying. Now that gems are at an all time high and climbing. 21g for 400, I wouldn’t have enough to buy 20 keys for chest.

Thanks everyone. Thanks for taking my own personal best fortune ever and turning it into the mother of clusterkittens.

To be fair, back then you wouldn’t have been able to sell it for 250g either.

But I agree on the gem prices, they’re brutal now.

Only thing I found annoying was the flamethrower that instantly stacks like 20 seconds of burning on you.

Would be nice if it was an actual flamethrower that took 1-2 seconds to get off so it was avoidable lol, my only complaint.

It’s hard to see all the unique attacks they have though since we’re basically in the middle of a fireworks display.

Rainweaver.7302:

Khisanth.2948:

However to group the karkas with these is just wrong. The karkas have been an embodiment of nearly everything wrong with mobs in this game.

I’m grouping the veteran karkas in particular, not the crazed karka zergs from southsun events that can easily one-shot you despite how high your toughness is.

The veteran karkas can individually provide a very entertaining and challenging fight. They have a fast attack speed with acceptable damage. A few moments of burst damage where you have a decent amount of time to react (like in their roll attack) Situations where you have to choose between attacking or not (they buff themselves with retaliation quite often), situations where you have to choose between wasting endurance to remove the hatchlings from you or just ignore the hatchlings so you can save your endurance for more dangerous attacks. They are also very mobile, meaning you can’t just sit in front of them pressing buttoms. Finally, they have the two phases mechanism, where in the second phase they’re usually more mobile and aggressive, but takes extra damage and are more vulnerable to crowd control.

Both the veteran karkas and the twisted nightmares offer you a fight where quick decisions matters, without gimmick one-shot mechanics or extremely predictable, linear gameplay, that can easily be trivialized by huge DPS or dodge rolls.

Yeah, so much of these nice designs go to waste (even the amazing art design goes wasted) because of the zerging. Anet really needs to try and limit the amount of zergplay that happens so more of this is actually seen, and more strategy is required to fight them.

You can literally afk and auto attack everything, which is sad, and the particle spam covers up their models (which makes animation telegraphing fail), and hides the awesome design.

TBH they have so much awesome room in Orr that should be relooked at and improved.

The temple affecting the everyone is definately a good idea the only problem I can see is people guesting on servers that have the buff, so there would need to be some cooldown on guesting or something.

If each temple gave it’s own tiny buff and each one also gave magic find/gold/xp/karma boosts in small amounts that stacked with other temple buffs, you’d bet people would be doing them to get those running. =p

Hell they could even give it it’s own UI just like World v World with all the benefits and temple status, and maybe make it so people only get boosts from their server like WvW which could stop the guesting issue.

Orr was supposed to be like a PvE war like WvW anyway right? So go do it Anet.

I would love to see an xp boost for fighting stuff higher than you, and remove the artificial difficulty barrier on things higher level than you, so if something is too many levels higher than you it just gets a flat 100% dmg buff and 50% dmg reduction bullsh** like it does.

The stat differences would make it hard enough, it doesn’t need that much artificial inflation, or atleast soften it so it’s like 10% dmg buff and 5% dmg reduction per level.

Being able to go to zones higher than myself and fight harder mobs to get leveling over faster would be awesome, the pve is way too faceroll even as an Elementalist probably the hardest class to play.

darkace.8925:

Knote.2904:

darkace.8925:

It seems to me ArenaNet is approaching (or already at) a crossroads. They’re going to have to decide whether they want to make the game they originally wanted to make (the game many of us signed on to play) or pander to the “MOAR LOOT!” crowd. I honestly don’t see how they’re going to be able to do both. One glance at the new Achievements overlay they just added to our character select screen tells me they’ve already made up their mind.

They can and SHOULD do both.

Easy, make everything in the game lucrative, just like they did for champion loot.

Then everyone can do whatever they want and still get money. And if someone wants to put in the effort to get extra amounts then they can do the more challenging stuff.

It doesn’t work that way. If everything is lucrative, then nothing is lucrative. Inflation is funny like that.

That’s my point, then there won’t be 1 or 2 boring things that’s the only way to make money and everyone can just do activities they find fun and “progress” in the economy.

It’s part of the Fabulous Revolution, embrace it.

darkace.8925:

It seems to me ArenaNet is approaching (or already at) a crossroads. They’re going to have to decide whether they want to make the game they originally wanted to make (the game many of us signed on to play) or pander to the “MOAR LOOT!” crowd. I honestly don’t see how they’re going to be able to do both. One glance at the new Achievements overlay they just added to our character select screen tells me they’ve already made up their mind.

They can and SHOULD do both.

Easy, make everything in the game lucrative, just like they did for champion loot.

Then everyone can do whatever they want and still get money. And if someone wants to put in the effort to get extra amounts then they can do the more challenging stuff.

Auto Consume please.

They won’t have any business being pots once the boost removal happens anyway.

Looks like a pretty basic condition/confusion build to me. /shrug

Not sure why they’re bashing it.

silvermember.8941:

Achilles.2197:

Hotjoin is deathmatch most of the time

But who plays hotjoin competitively? Does anybody actually care about hotjoin?

Who plays conquest competitively? Does anyone actually care about conquest?

Arenanet shouldn’t determine that, the players should.

Anet should just put out a good game and whatever happens, happens, if deathmatch ends up being played casually and conquest is played more competitively then there you go, could be the other way around.

No reason not to have a deathmatch mode if people want to play it.

I think you got it backwards.

Anet is focusing too much on the upper right, when the other 3 corners are the playerbase that Anet needs to please and get on board so there’s even an audience/support for the Esports side of the game.

If you cater only to the upper right and give them love, give them a giant stadium and prize money to duke it out and say F—- you to the other 3 corners, your grand champions will be fighting in an empty stadium lol.

If she so smart why does she fail to follow up every time the zerg fails to stop her in a zone after 45 minutes?

This mesmer weapon has always felt so unfinished and uninspired, although the torment added to Counter was a nice touch, I still wish the weapon was given more standalone power, mainly it’s auto attack. It’s skill set is just full of “situational” attacks so in the end has nothing really reliable as a main hand weapon it feels more like an off hand weapon with a weird utility auto attack.

It’s just a painfully slow, very average power only direct hit that slowly generates clones that do absolutely nothing compared to other clones (even greatsword clones attack fast enough to proc bleeds).

Just some minor suggestions.

Ether Bolt/Ether Blast – Applies 1 Torment for 2-3 seconds. (If not confusion then roll with the new condition, it fits Mesmer very well). Gives Clones some usefulness if there no shatters to use.

Or

Ether Bolt/Ether Blast – Reduces the current cooldown on Cry of Frustration by 0.5-1 seconds. The specific shatter could use the help and specializes with Sceptre a bit then, gives the clones something useful to do on shatter downtime.

Confusing Images – Piercing aoe width increased by 50-100%. Then sceptre has atleast a bit more reliable aoe with this instead of hoping to perfectly line up mobs

Confusing Images – Condensed to 2-2.5 second channel instead of 3 second. The channel is just way too long in a lot of situations just to get the 5 stack rolling, but that’s just my opinion.

Counter Spell – No longer a slow projectile, instead just an instant direct targeted blind with a little bit of splash. The super slow projectile and cast animation of this just makes it so unreliable and clunky.

I thought of making Ether Blast a bouncing attack since I felt it would be really nice for a Mesmer weapon to have a power based bouncing auto, but piercing Confusing Images is decent enough aoe (if the width was buffed), and who knows maybe a future weapon like a “Chakram” could have a bouncing auto instead.

And I understand why Anet doesn’t want confusing spamming clones and auto’s since confusion should be something that’s applied intelligently in bursts so it actually functions as punishment instead of just another passive dmg condition like bleeds, which is also why I suggest making Confusing Images cast faster, confusion should be burstier.

Anyway those are just my thoughts, hopefully it’s considered. Feel free to grill me on my ideas if you don’t agree. =p

Ayrilana.1396:

Annoying and difficult can be the same thing. I can claim that GL has annoying mechanics but that doesn’t change the fact he is still difficult to solo until you learn how to do it.

A great example is the clocktower event during Halloween.

I eventually mastered it after 20 ish runs and could consistently beat it 90%+ of the time.

I could do that with this Liadri event if I chose to keep running it. (I’ve already beaten her 4 times… it’s not hard but continues to be a PITA because of unclear aoe’s)

Besides the bit of difficulty from the actual design of the fight (or jumping puzzle) the biggest hurdle and HUGE annoyance was the graphical issues and not being in control because you can’t see WTF is going on.

Remember when people complained like hell about having to do clocktower with a bunch of other characters on top of you blocking you from seeing where you’re jumping? Yeah, it’s the same issue, stop saying it’s fine because that’s what makes it difficult, that’s not fine and that shouldn’t be what determines something’s difficulty, the design of the fight itself should dictate that.

No matter what it is, the more threatening an attack is the clearer it needs to be, hard to see PITA mechanics that do piddly dmg is fine, but not for one shots, one shot mechanics need to be made 100% clear, not 80%, not 90%, 100%.

Refrigerator…

Glad someone likes em, I think they’re horrid lol.

Xae Isareth.1364:

The problem is, Legendary weapons aren’t supposed to be just skins, they supposed to be the best weapons of their type. So workaround like transmuting them really aren’t valid excuses to not make them account-bound.

Also, they shouldn’t even be tradable on the TP. They should be a sign that the wielder has gone through trials, went to the four corners of the world and found every secret Tyria has to offer, made a ton of cash (or farmed their kitten off) and gained the favour of every NPC out there, and thus is finally worthy of wielding a Legendary.

…..there’s nothing legendary about busting out your credit card and throwing money at the TP.

Um, no they’re not, they’re just skins.

Because they never a weapon tier beyond exotic.

The low TTK is already a problem even with conquest.

g e o.2589:

Knote.2904:

I don’t really understand why the mats are account bound but the item isn’t.

I agree that they should be account bound.

Would be awful getting a legendary for your “main” character and later finding out you end up playing a different one instead most of the time and that legendary is going to waste.

well you could use a couple of transmutation crystals to drag it over the characters but it will cost you much, is it still possible? And also redditor data mined that something like Un-soulbinding is coming to gem store that will make thing account bound but I think it will become soulbound on other char when you equip it.

Oooh that’s nice, something to look forward to.

This gift is friggin worthless…

WvW really? I don’t even touch that crap, where is my free legendary Anet.

:3

I don’t really understand why the mats are account bound but the item isn’t.

I agree that they should be account bound.

Would be awful getting a legendary for your “main” character and later finding out you end up playing a different one instead most of the time and that legendary is going to waste.

Doomfrost.5728:

Giant babies? Why not actual baby?

It’s hilarious hearing an adult voice coming from a character that looks like a pre-teen.

In all honesty though, there are some decent faces that you could work with getting them as battle hardened soldiers. My only gripe is that they didn’t offer any facial options like scars or wrinkles that you could apply on your character. I know ST:O has such options.

Also taking youth too far in character creation:

I’m dying.

Donut.6914:

danbuter.2314:

What are you complaining about? Now I want a set!

Not everyone is turned on by pixelated butts.

Or amalgamated butt cheeks with a chalk line drawn to indicate a butt crack.

God that gets me hot.

I wanted to badly to make my main characters either asura or charr but they both have SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO many issues it just isn’t worth it.

Asura camera issues where it feels like someone is constantly shoving my head down, I can’t stand that claustophobic feeling, and the fact that Anet still defends their pathetic FoV is an absolute joke.

Then there’s the weapon issues, why would I ever bother to waste my time getting good weapon skins or even armor skins? They’re microscopic, my staff is literally a twig and the size of a Norn’s dagger, wtf????

Charr armor issues are plenty, and I really wanted to make a caster charr as well, but I can’t stand everything on them being stretched mini skirts, and halloween masks for helmets, disgusting.

I’d be curious as to what sylvari hentai would look like.

Think Thief Clusterbombs.

Long range siege and Melee Range OPness.

I want all of it, and then some.

More areas of the game should be like that and it shouldn’t just be removed like the gauntlet farming, nerfed maybe since it sounded too good. They should’ve just balanced the risk vs reward and given it a healthy daily amount.

If you could make good profit doing ANYTHING in the game, the game would be 100000000000000000x better.

There’s nothing wrong with champ loot aside from stalling certain events to farm them endlessly which should be fixed.

Before champ loot it was just regular mob with aoe spam, it’s exactly the same thing, champ loot needed to happen because the risk vs reward for champs was ridiculously bad.

It’s just now they need to apply the same treatment to the rest of the areas in the game so it’s nice and even and champ/mob loot doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb.

It’s that simple. Don’t nerf anything, buff the rest of the game so it isn’t pointless in terms of rewards.

xephire.8324:

matjazmuhic.1649:

Guild wars 2: Play as you like… My kitten …

No its farm as you like.

Actually it’s not “farm as you like” which is sort of the problem.

Farm should be distributed throughout all parts of the game so you can “farm” somewhat equally and do w/e you want.

Omnitek.3876:

DEs were dead a month after release. Champ loot didn’t kill them.

1 month ago, I leveled a ele from 1-70 by doing hearts/quests. After queensdale, I saw less than 10 people in the world, total, for almost 2 weeks time.

At least I see people in zones now, even if they are just killing champs.

They took away every form of farming. People complained about empty zones. They add reasons to kill champion mobs, people complain. If they Nerf champ loot again, empty zones.

This.

Until events are made interesting or rewarding or (hopefully) both, don’t expect people to do them, why would they?

Oh look, I get to fight a wave of ordinary easy mobs that just spawned, and I get to do it 5 more times for a very underwhelming reward, I want to keep doing this!

Ezirium.8109:

Just let it fly through, it was like this when they added the guaranteed yellow from world bosses. That is all people did, events like the ones in orr that were worth doing were not completed because they were not worth it with the update and look what happened, it kind of sizzled out and then everything was being back to normal. This will be the same with champs, the common person will get bored and stop farming it and go back to what they enjoy, this is what happens in almost every game that a big event comes out.

Now imagine if everything was fairly equal in terms of rewards vs effort, so you were getting near top farm for doing anything you find enjoyable in game, weeeeeeee.

cheebuguh.2536:

Exploration. While leveling, I loved going through the zones and discovering new things. Sometimes I’d come across a jumping puzzle or mini-dungeon, which took me away from what I was doing and gave me a “side-quest.”

Other times I stumbled upon some dynamic event chains and followed it through to see the entire story and what happened.

This would be great if 99% of the events in the game weren’t exactly the same and became tedious after 30 minutes. =/

azurrei.5691:

People forget that this (along with the Dungeon reward changes) are the FIRST set of changes to the ENTIRE rewards system. It only seems imbalanced because nothing else has been changed yet – give it some time!

I really, really, really, really, really, really, really hope so.

I really want everything in the game to be rewarding. =D

The gauntlet could’ve had nothing bad happen, instead of this weird clockwork cheesy super villain thing.

Would’ve just been a friendly arena/competition type deal, which is what happened in the middle ages when wars weren’t happening, arenas and tournaments.

The Happening : It’s happening.

Olba.5376:

Azraeel.1238:

Erasculio.2914:

In one of the interviews before release, ArenaNet mentioned that killing random monsters would give significantly less experience than doing events. This, they said, was so that people wouldn’t just mindlessly grind monsters over and over, rather feel like playing (and finishing) events would be the best course of action for them.

Then, we got the Champion loot.

ArenaNet introduced the Champion loot in an update that made the champions spawned during the Jormag event to not give any drops, since people were already stalling event completition so they could kill champions there. Later, people exploited the Orr event, creating very heated arguments both in-game and here in the forum, about how the exploiters were going against the players who actually wanted to do the event. ArenaNet effectively nerfed how the Anchorage event works in order to stop most of the exploiting.

I have just tried to do a Fireheart Rise invasion. It failed, but the interesting thing is that the last 15 minutes were a heated discussion, as a large number of players stopped doing the event when the Aetherblades appeared, and began farming champions in order to get more loot. Considering how it’s easy to farm champions without progressing the event (search for an Aetherblade event about killing the captain, and avoid killing it while defeating the champions that spawn around him), this was basically one more example of farmers hurting event completition for those who were playing the game as intended.

As of now, ArenaNet has just released a new update, with the following update note:

Mark Katzbach

Updated the advanced event scaling system to slightly reduce the rate of champions created by events scaling up in difficulty.

Now, I’m sure everyone has realized what the true issue is. It’s not a matter of making less champions spawn (wasn’t the goal behind the champion loot to make more people play events, so more champions would spawn?). It’s not a matter of making a few champions to not drop loot, as done in the Jormag event.

ArenaNet has to remove the Champion loot boxes from the game, and give those rewards to events instead. They should follow the same thing they originally did with experience points, and make enemies in the world give little loot, with events giving far more loot than they currently do. Change champions, so all of them are either an event itself or only appear as part of an event, so we won’t have champions in the open world that no one wants to kill.

Really, this update has severely damaged the community, as people are fighting among themselves. ArenaNet is not going to ban the exploiters out of fear of losing too many players, but they should stop what is making the exploiters exploit in the first place, instead of changing events to have less champions.

That’s actually a great idea:
You get the bag loot from participating in events:
1- Exotic bag: Gold Participation.
2- Rare bag: Silver participation.
3- Green bag: Copper Participation.

I pretty sure people would start farming events instead of champs, but the difference is that events take time to finish and scale well with more people. Which is the right thing.

This would require that ANet fixes the crappy requirements for participation first.

You can get a Copper reward in most events if you get like 5 kills. Out of hundreds. You can get a Gold reward in most events if you participate for more than 30 seconds. Out of as long as 30+ minutes.

Yeah, the rewards shouldn’t be about competing with players, but cooperating.

Reward should be based 100% on how much of the event you were active/participating.

Like 65%-100% of the event you were active = gold
25%-64% = silver
1-24% copper

Something like that.

Also to avoid people just running the same event chains over and over again instead of nerfing events, just give it a decent cooldown (like 20-30 min or w/e) and make it so each chain you complete gives a bonus % to rewards you receive from other events in the zone, and double that bonus to event in other zones. You could exclude the giant events like temple from this so it only affects the smaller events. (This is to avoid the need of "I NEED TO GRIND MY % BONUS BEFORE TEMPLE STARTS nonsense)

Then you’d be encouraged to run different event chains throughout a zone, and eventually acquire enough of a bonus for events on other zones to switch zones and do events somewhere else of your choosing where it would be more profitable.

Shifu.4321:

I think it’s a limitation of the game engine. It’s probably easier to add detail and design larger weapons like GS and hammers than smaller ones like daggers. The staff is basically a long stick, and there’s really only so much variation you can do with it. The hammer, you’re designing the head, with the handle being the same. The GS is a wide and large weapon where you can customize nearly everything from the blade to the hilt.

What I’d like to see is more variations of the smaller weapons, like a flail for the mace or a katar for daggers, though I’m not sure if it would be any easier to implement.

Then again there’s thing’s like The Crossing, and even “kites” with little string dynamics, I think Anet is just being lazy.

That’s part of the problem of having temporary content. =p

Darnis.4056:

ESPORTS do not have to stop.

Game Balance Should NOT be dictated by Esports Events.
You either run a Lan with an Older version of the build or you make the Prozzzz Adapt.

Esports has to stop so Esports can begin.

Ooooh deep.

Has anyone been doing organized 8v8 deathmatches in arenas?

No one caps, just see who wins based on points from kills.

Zenith.7301:

Knote.2904:

I see 2 low dmg high survivability builds going at it and one complaining they can’t kill the other.

Yeah, s/d thief is SOOOOOOOOO low damage trolololol

Yeah man, did you see those epic crits that guy was pulling off in the video?

I see 2 low dmg high survivability builds going at it and one complaining they can’t kill the other.

Skill variety and customization from GW1.

Pvp modes from…. well every game other than conquest.

Wardrobe system from Rift. Other than town clothes.

But mostly the first one.

projectcedric.6951:

Knote.2904:

Optimal farming being only 5-10% ahead of everything else is still way better than optimal farming being 50-100% ahead of everything else in terms of rewards, so maybe it’s not perfect, it doesn’t need to be, it just needs to IMPROVE.

Number 1: Again it goes to the fundamental concepts of optimization and “farming”. Given that, maybe after intensive refinement, rewards of activity A has been reduced to 5-10% more than activity B, the obvious thing to note is that the very nature of “farming” itself has the ability to explode this to 50-100%, by doing it 10 times. If it cannot be done 10 times, it won’t be farmed.

Fundamentally, therefore, farming only occurs because something can be largely ahead of everything else in terms of rewards. At the same time, something will always be ahead of everything else in terms of rewards because it can be farmed and it will be farmed.

Lets say the optimal farming rate now is 5g per hour. If you nerf the event/s that provide this farm, farmers will move to something that is say 3g per hour. And perhaps the next one is 1-2g hour. Notice that differences, in terms of percentage, is actually the same. Simply, people just move to the next best efficient thing.

Number 2: This optimal calculation can not take into consideration things that are difficult to value. We know the value a particular T6 mat, because we know how much we can sell it for gold. But how much do you value an activity that you actually do not like doing? For example some people would prefer farming Activity A over Activity B even if Activity B is the optimal farming activity by 50% on a per hour basis, because they find that they cannot do Activity B for very long periods of time on end. So eventually, for those people, the gold rate evens out between the two activities.

OR

How much do you value chance? Given that Activity A gives a more consistent drop rate of lower-value loot, and Activity B gives a rare chance of a higher value loot – in the end again, if you do them enough times, they probably even out in terms of gold, but the “optimal” in this sense depends on how much people value the probability.

My general point in all this is:

It’s not that they shouldn’t improve the game, but they should improve the game in the right way. Farming cannot be reduced or avoided, much more especially in mmorpgs. And there is no need to. Like I said, only about 25% (maybe 50% in mmorpgs) of playerbase farms. And this is an essential part of the game.

What they should do is make things more wholistic so that people who choose to farm are simultaneously doing other things too. The Invasion events are a first improvement in this sense. Farmers are no longer just stuck in FS, CS or CoF. Now they are motivated to run all around the world in a different map every hour.

If they want people to pay more attention to DEs and world events, then perhaps indeed they should increase the rewards of those events so that they are equal to the most optimum farming activity.

Farmers wont stop farming then, they will just start farming those events. Basically, its just diverting the farming efforts from one activity towards another, depending on which one the designer chooses.

What, I don’t really understand what you’re arguing here.

The 2nd half of your post is literally what I’ve been talking about this whole time.

zeromius.1604:

Erasculio.2914:

projectcedric.6951:

IN GAMES, it is against human nature to be driven to do something without an end goal or simply “for the experience of it”.

I agree with the end goal, I disagree it’s the same thing we see in MMOs.

In many MMORPGs, I see a lot of people who don’t enjoy the experience of what they are doing, but they are doing it anyway because they want a reward in the end. We see this both in players who say it with all the letters, as well as in those who want the quickest, fastest path to whatever it is they want.

Comparing it with something else, let’s say… The first Sonic game, for example (Sega Genesis FTW!). I’m sure a lot of people had the goal of reaching the end of the game. But I doubt many people played the game if they didn’t enjoy it, just to get to the end. And, likewise, the game had a cheat we could use to arrive straight in the last level, but that wasn’t something everyone did, and I doubt very much it was something even the majority did.

There was a goal. The journey to that goal, however, was equally as important as the goal itself. I don’t believe the same thing happens in MMORPGs, when people claim they don’t want to farm but that’s the only way they will get the gold they need for the shiny stuff they want. This is what I believe happens in MMORPGs:

Genavelle.9516:

The whole point of legendaries is that you spend a lot of time doing crap nobody wants to do so you can get a special unique weapon that only people willing to do that much work can get. If you don’t want to go through that process, then don’t worry about making one.

I can’t help but think something somehow got broken in gaming due to MMORPGs.

It just comes to show you that even with all the innovations and the action combat style of gameplay, Guild Wars 2 still has a ways to go if people have gotten to the point where they don’t play it just the for the heck of it. Who played Elder Scrolls Skyrim, Tales of Xillia, Mass Effect, or Final Fantasy 7 for the phat loot waiting at the end? There are many that have played through these games multiple times even though there isn’t some legendary gear that can be attained through subsequent playthroughs. I’m not saying they’re better games nor do they have more replay value. What I’m saying is that Guild Wars 2 has the potential to keep people hooked in the same way these games did even without the phat loot. It’s just a matter of execution.

Those games are single player games and yes they are better “games” in a sense and have way more replayability.

This game would need a lot done to make it more interesting, w/o rewards.

Just take leveling an alt as an example, it’s not interesting at all 100%’ing the world again on another char, compared to Skyrim.

I would definately like that though, for the existing content to just be, improved, but then ALSO making it rewarding would be great, there’s no reason you can’t have both…

projectcedric.6951:

Knote.2904:

Farming isn’t really an “issue”. The only reason it’s even labeled and sticks out as an activity is because reward isn’t evenly balanced/distributed throughout the game.

If doing any sort of activity in the game was equally as rewarding as zerg farming (give and take depending on the difficulty of said activity) there wouldn’t even BE a concept of “farming” really, it’d just be playing the game whether that means “farming” champions or doing a difficult dungeon with friends, or exploring and doing puzzles.

Yes, but such game is impossible.

The difficulty-yield relationship is part of a game’s mechanics. “Zerging” is part of a game’s dynamics. Dynamics means – how players behave in relation to other players and the mechanics of the game.

This mechanics is not based on game dynamics. That means that if you have perfected the game this way, considering that reward balance is based on single-player gameplay, it is not balanced in multi-player gameplay, and vice versa.

On the other hand, game dynamics adapts. Players’ behavior will move towards which is more efficient in terms of rewards, and not necessarily “fun”. (To be clear, “reward” in this context is not personal reward. It is the objective game reward, which is an essential element in all games.)

Farming and zerging are phenomena that are results of this adaptation. In competitive loot mmorpgs, it is obviously not efficient to zerg, so the players adapt by farming individually.

Hypothetically, let’s say you have designed the perfect game. The perfect game being defined as all activities in the game have the rewards appropriate to their specific difficulty – thus, “reward balanced”. In such a game, there is completely no incentive to do higher difficulty activities.

On the other hand, if higher difficulty activities are imbalance in terms of loot, playerbase will find a way to exploit that system and make it farm-able. In GW2’s case, this is the zerging of champs.

In other words, in any game, there is no design or solution in which the ideal can happen. That’s why it never happens. The successful games are only successful in terms of how much does the intent of the designer is made to reality – given that non of the intents are ideal. In almost all cases, the playerbase loses.

House always wins.

Of course it’s not going to be perfect. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t TRY, and just completely ignore the rewards for certain parts of the game that should be getting a boost…

Just like pvp, it’s never going to be perfectly balanced but you need to keep trying anyway and slowly improve it (which also helps keep the game fresh).

If for example they did balance the rewards really well, and a hardcore optimized method for zerg farming yielded the best rewards by like 5%, that’s still only 5% that’s not enough for some people to bother with the extra effort of hardcore optimization and you can even argue that it’s actually deserved considering the effort involved, compared to relaxed and casual zerg farming which would be less…

Optimal farming being only 5-10% ahead of everything else is still way better than optimal farming being 50-100% ahead of everything else in terms of rewards, so maybe it’s not perfect, it doesn’t need to be, it just needs to IMPROVE.

Erasculio.2914:

projectcedric.6951:

However noble it sounds, it is against human nature to driven to do something without an end goal or simply “for the experience of it”.

False.

Why do people go to the movies? It’s not because they are paid for it. It’s because they will enjoy the experience of seeing the movie. Why do people listen to music? They don’t receive a physical reward for listening to 500 tracks. They do it because they enjoy the experience of listening to music.

You are mistaken when you think the experience itself cannot be the goal. Playing a game to have fun, as opposed to playing a game to reach a reward within said game, is actually the rule, not the exception, as long as you are not talking about MMORPGs. I think MMOs (and its clones) are the only games in which people are so willing to go through experiences they don’t enjoy just to get a reward. In old RPGs, those rewards were not the goal, just auxilliary to the experience.

And getting rewards is also just as satisfying… why else would people put themselves through doing the same boring activity to get it?

It’s also so they can get a carrot, like a legendary, which is also really satisfying.

Fun = satisfying = rewarding = loot/carrots

You don’t think it’s satisfying getting your paycheck at the end of the month and getting that new TV or w/e you’ve been wanting, there’s nothing wrong with a little material satisfaction. Sure some people in the world go overboard with it, too much of a good thing, doesn’t mean it’s completely evil or wrong.

In a game however, it’s best to have both, fun and exciting gameplay AND the rewards, that’s what Anet should be aiming to make all of their content. Not just “oh well this is fun, they don’t need rewards from it they’ll just do it for fun!”

Well unless it’s the most amazing and exciting activity with tons of replayability w/o getting boring, people will do it a few times for fun then ignore it… that’s just how it is, because people ALSO want to get their carrots.

Look at the Queen’s Gauntlet for example, now that it gives jack all, no one will touch it, even I won’t now that I experienced it and got my achievements, sure it was fun but it’s not fun enough for me to keep doing it. Maybe I will once more a week from now, then never again.

For example, let’s say something has a limited amount of fun (100%), I do it w/o rewards for awhile and now it’s only 50% as fun as it was before, now I don’t want to do it. But then it becomes rewarding, so now I can do it for the rewards and it will be fun again because there’s still some “fun” value in it, but now I’m getting rewards so it’s still satisfying. The rewards lets me extract extra “fun value” out of that activity. It’s a very dorky example but there you go, that’s how I see it.

If you didn’t get loot then you didn’t tag it.

Atleast I’m pretty sure that’s the definition of tagging.

I have no problems getting tags as solo player so I’m not sure what you’re doing wrong. Are you focusing too much on conditions?

Personally though I think the whole tag limitations are pointless, you have to be near the mob when it dies to loot it ANYWAY, so how exactly is running by and love tapping a champ going to be abused?

If you must then make it so tagging makes the loot/chest stay longer if tap-tagging is too abusive with multiple champs close enough to each other or something, so you can’t get loot on 5 different mobs, but really when does this happen???

Also they really need to make support abilities help with tagging, if you drop a bunch of aoe healing and boons on people that killed a champ why can’t you get atleast partial credit from that to assist in tagging it? Just doesn’t make sense.

In the end though they should really focus on moving rewards away from mobs and putting them in event victories, mob tagging only rewards selfish gameplay and discourages teamwork plain and simple.