Guild Wars 2

Come play ffxiv.

/thread

You want to know a real way to really just judge a book by it’s cover and be right 60 % of the time.

Achievement points.

Why?

High AP = more time sinked in = more experienced = more skilled. USUALLY.

I have 3 legendaries, I must be a very bad player

though I did finish my 48 fractal sometime at the beginning of the year… no wait.. can it be…

It can only mean…

I am the chosen one!

Being serious, the OP is making a pretty silly generalization. His generalization is based on the assumption that legendary owners farmed all day and night and suck at doing everything else. What he doesn’t realise is that,

A. people didn’t farm day in day out.
B. Time played actually does has a relationship with player skill. In general more time = more experience = more skilled (unless you’re a bad apple).
C. Everything is puggable.

To finish off, your view of legendary people being bad players who don’t know how to play as a group is as bias and racist as me assuming you’re American because you are typing in english though I probably have a better chance of being right than your legendary stereotyping lol.

Wolfheart.1938:

I’m talking about the whole chain that goes from capturing the area north of the temple to the boss fight and following event. Has someone ever soloed it?

The videos I found on youtube are from 2012 but I recall the temple getting harder sometimes in the early 2013. So yeah, anyone tried?

Thanks for the answers!

Yes, I soloed it post patch. No video though. I haven’t gone to orr for awhile since they made it crap again (not the champ farm or wateva fail event thing they had on either)

Belzaboul.7653:

Oh, nice idea. I have an idea with a similar effect. The classes with stealth are given the ability to cause a disarm condition. For the duration, target cannot use weapon skills.
Got any other bright ideas?
Suggesting mechanics which completely nullify key aspects of classes is bad.

Your comparison is kinda extreme. having faint blood trails is nothing compared to someone not being able to attack back at all, which I should mention, is almost what stealth currently does anyways. Faint blood trail at least allows people to know where to estimate their attack and even then, some classes like mesmers don’t even have aoe attacks to do this.

Also bleeding duration is usually short anyways so it’s not like you’ll be bleeding your kitten off the ground forever. I’m sure you’ll be dead from the bleeding long before it hugely compromises your position.

Arheundel.6451:

Lafiel.9372:

You sir, sound like a very bad elementalist.

Have you got anything to prove how bad I am…or are you simply trolling me?
I would have ignored you but…I don’t want the devs to suspect that having problems with ele is a L2p issue so..pls if you can prove how bad is @Keiji Sakuragi, I’d be obliged.
I don’t remember many people from this forum : @ Mrbig, @Diogosilva..they played with me few times, you can ask them how bad I am..

I wasn’t trolling you. While the elementalist does have their own issues, I find it hard to believe and I quote “To play an ele is extremely intensive, you need to pay attention to basically anything..to avoid a quick death, no mistakes allowed, a single mistake and 3/4 of your HP are gone.”

If this is really the way you feel about elementalist, I find it hard to believe how much problems people usually have with elementalist to begin with. I don’t main an ele but i’ve clocked in a couple of hundred hours on them. Sure they require more micromangement but when i’m in WvW, I don’t really pay any extra attention compared to another class in order to kill people. I surely don’t think people find me any easier than another class. I think mesmers have the poorer end of the stick when it comes to paying attention requirements.

Spread your guild out into 6 groups, get all bsoses at the same time. I assume you guys did it one boss at a time with your large zerg which is very ineffective because of scaling. Bosses like komali are really bad when you have more players in since it becomes near impossible to take away his stacks of might and stability.

I once killed komali with a group of 3.

Arheundel.6451:

No amount of number tweaking will ever fix the elementalist

It doesn’t matter if you keep increasing numbers on random skills and increase radius of some other skills, the problems with the ele lie deep in the design concept.

Arcana trait line requirement to play the class

You promoted this profession as highly versatile..but you want us to invest 45% of the available trait pts in a specific line in order to play the profession

Your original concept was a profession able to switch to the right attunement at the right time, but that concept idea never really got implemented, for obvious marketing reasons ( all the illegitimate QQ on unofficial forums ) you decided to change each attunement into something you simply stay for few secs rather than use it at the right time.

The auto-attack on each attunement on every weapon set( save lightning whip ) is so pathetically low ( lowest across all professions ) that to stay into a single attunement ,for more than the necessary time to cast that specific skill, becomes counter-productive and can lead to a quick demise ( main reason why the current conjure design concept suck ..sorry to say that..again) .

After the round of nerfs you conveniently changed the description of the ele from :" use the right element at the right time" to " rotate through your elements to obtain same results as other professions"

Stop lying pls..quite few people realize why you did those changes, the truth is all of you devs understood how stupidly OP was the design of the ele , if the ele would have been left as it was…fewer people would have bought the game right?!

So you started introducing one weakness after the other and the result was the so much complained profession in September : low base HP, low base armor, low base stats, very high CD on skills ( highest among all professions )

The ele community found itself forced to use extremely high defensive builds in order to play the class at all, any buff request completely ignored on the contrary of nerf requests which were openly taken in consideration.

Now I’m not here to ask for more buffs, we’ve have been at it for months , over 1 year really..I’m too tired to fight a pointless battle.

I feel sorry for the Devs, I fully realize that they actully care a lot for the game and try their best..but they simply lack the necessary resources; I consider the elementalist design a disaster, many good ideas but poorly implemented, the profession is unfun to play, not matter how many times I win..there are no easy fights, even somebody who installed the game the other day can potentially beat me if I lose my concentration for a single instant.

To play an ele is extremely intensive, you need to pay attention to basically anything..to avoid a quick death, no mistakes allowed, a single mistake and 3/4 of your HP are gone.

The profession doesn’t need buffs..it needs a complete revalutation, it would require a great deal of resources that now I realize the Devs lack, therefore I’d say that it’s wise to really give up on this profession

You sir, sound like a very bad elementalist.

Oxe.6142:

Lafiel.9372:

How about if you are bleeding you can’t go invis cause people can see your blood trail.

Can be balanced by it being triggered after a certain # of stacks.

I’m happy to see they’re finally working on some fine tuning.

That would effectively kill stealth in game. There are too many ways to stack bleeds easily across many classes.

I like this idea too.

Knote.2904:

Lafiel.9372:

You promoted this profession as highly versatile..but you want us to invest 45% of the available trait pts in a specific line in order to play the profession

Your original concept was a profession able to switch to the right attunement at the right time, but that concept idea never really got implemented, for obvious marketing reasons ( all the illegitimate QQ on unofficial forums ) you decided to change each attunement into something you simply stay for few secs rather than use it at the right time.

Yes this exactly, it’s a huge problem.

The thing is, even if attunements had NO cooldown, people say it would be massively overpowered but I honestly do not think so.

First of course you would just have to put cooldowns on the procs from attunement swapping, just like on-swap sigils, but then this actually opens up the flexibility to use your abilities when you actually need them.

Right now, even with 10 second attunement cooldowns, if you have a clutch/important cooldown in an attunement, you can’t save it and hope to use it right when you need to because of the cooldown.

If staff Ele needs to drop his chill field and swap to water attunement to do so, but doesn’t need the healing/cleanse and swaps out, they’re locked out of their ability to do that for 10-16 seconds JUST so they could drop that chill field. All of a sudden they need that condition cleanse/healing? Nope.

This also encourages you to basically just spam everything on cooldown (the way necro’s are encouraged to spam everything on cooldown) and basically just create a static rotation, this is not a good thing.

Attunement cooldowns do not affect the individual skill cooldowns, which btw are already balanced by having massive cooldowns like kitten seconds. Engineers don’t get locked out their kits when swapping in and out, why should Elementalists suffer this HUGE penalty to access their flexibility?

If each attunement was good as standalone ability set this would actually be perfectly fine, but they’re not. Fire is most of your dmg, Water very low dmg and all of your healing, Earth is all of your hard defensive stuff, Air all your CC, etc.

Lol, why am I quoted for this, I didn’t even say any of that.

How about if you are bleeding you can’t go invis cause people can see your blood trail.

Can be balanced by it being triggered after a certain # of stacks.

I’m happy to see they’re finally working on some fine tuning.

Tom Gore.4035:

Lafiel.9372:

you finally learn to give up doing your dailies. I’ve been doing my dailies everyday without missing even a single one since the early start weekend. The first step is the hardest but man, once you’ve missed one, you don’t really care about it anymore. I urge anyone else who feels like it’s a chore to just leave it. Your time is worth more.

If it feels like a chore and you finally stop it, the next stop won’t be far. Soon you will stop playing at all.

Which you totally should, if it does indeed feel like a chore.

I love doing the daily achi

That’s a problem though if what gw2 has come down to is having fun doing dailies lol

you finally learn to give up doing your dailies. I’ve been doing my dailies everyday without missing even a single one since the early start weekend. The first step is the hardest but man, once you’ve missed one, you don’t really care about it anymore. I urge anyone else who feels like it’s a chore to just leave it. Your time is worth more.

CryxTryx.9208:

Lafiel.9372:

Doesn’t sound like it was easy if you died thousands. However, good job on grinding it out though infinite coin kinda minuses your effort.

Have you completed it?

If yes, what’s your point?

Doesn’t sound like it was easy if you died thousands. However, good job on grinding it out though infinite coin kinda minuses your effort.

Probably missed something, dulfies guide on z2w2 doesn’t cover every single bauble. Well it does but not every one is in the picture and the ones you missed were obvious ones if you had double checked yourself.

I don’t get it. This is obviously a user fault but somehow the mechanic is to blame? I mean I have plenty of things I want to complain about when it comes to Anet but this one aren’t one of them.

I like the Master Grinder one.

Not sure what this thread is about but to be fair, Colin does look like the kind of guy who doesn’t keep his promises and will turn back on his word without hesitation (no sarcasm).

It’s probably the facial hair thing he has going. A common villain thing in movies.

morrolan.9608:

This doesn’t explain why loading times into LA have increased exponentially since the game launched with the same hard drive.

Try reformating your system. Over time, your system is clogged up with all sorts of questionable usages. I know for one, when I formated my laptop, previously, I was experiencing about 10-15 FPS and after format, I was running the game at ~25 FPS (quite a decent improvement) considering all I did was format. So performance does decrease significantly over time if you’re not careful with what you click.

Anet specifically didn’t add fishing in this game because then everyone would realize we were actually eating quaggan meat.

To the people saying to upgrade your power supply, I can tell you 500W is way more than sufficient for your current build. I can do the math for you but probably later when I edit this post. A lot of people tend to overkill their actual need from their power supply. Given that it is a somewhat decent brand which provides reliable consistent power, thus the assumption that it runs at about 80 % efficiency, most systems built around your specs use roughly 345W at peak load (GPU and CPU together + overclocked) which is well within the limit.

Also keep in mind he only has 1 HD, and even if he had several, he’ll have to have a tonne of them before he reaches anywhere near capacity. (hard drives generally take about 7-10 watts each).

Some hard numbers: quick google has told me the 660 TI requires 24 amps on the 12 V+ rail which is equivalent to 288W. Since yours isn’t TI but overclocked, i’ll assume it runs somewhere around this number so the 345 estimate is pretty much spot on in terms of gpu + cpu usage.

Also, if a PSU isn’t providing enough power/amps to your card there is pretty much only three scenarios which can occur and none of which is related to a performance degradation:

The overcurrent protection of the power supply kicks in, causing the power supply to cut power to your system and your computer turns off instantly. This is what is supposed to happen.
The overcurrent protection does not kick in but the power supply is not able to maintain a stable 12V output. This will cause a hard crash of your entire system that will present as a freeze and your screen will show either a garbled image or your screen will go black. This is not what is supposed to happen but if you are using a cheap power supply it is entirely possible that it will happen nonetheless. This can possibly cause damage across your entire system!
The overcurrent protection does not kick, the voltage stays stable and your power supply and/or the wires running between the power supply and the graphics card start running very hot. This is a dangerous situation (FIRE HAZARD!) and can cause the power supply to ultimately fail and potentially take part or all of your system with it!

Last paragraph explanation is courtesy of http://www.enthusiastpc.net/articles/00002/4.aspx

To answer the OP’s original question, your build seems fairly sufficient to run the game GW2 with the exception that you’re using AMD processors :P. As many people have realised or pointed out, this game isn’t the most optimize out there so the performance issue is more related to the game’s engine and latency rather than your computer performance.

What I would recommend is upgrading your HD, based on your specs, it seems to be a pretty old HD (something you dug out from an older system?), I would suggest investing in an SSD which will give you a huge performance increase in terms of loading times both in game and your PC overall. A minimum is at least a WD black Caviar

Lastly, here is a link for power supply wattage recommendations on different graphic cards.

http://forum-en.msi.com/faq/article/printer/power-requirements-for-graphics-cards

and to the guy who gave the amp advice:

http://www.overclock.net/t/880633/psu-amps-myth

This dragon we have already they just revamped the boss fight to require more people with a lot more difficulty and mildly better loot

Was bugged before but they should have fixed it.. unless it wasn’t.

Theftwind.8976:

The sheer amount of materials required to fashion an ascended weapon is ludicrous. I have read fantasy novels ever since I was knee high to a grasshopper and considering “Stormbringer”, “Excalibur”, “Sting and Glamdring”, “Werewindle”, and “Callandor” nowhere could I find a sword that requires over 800 ingots of metal to create. (not counting all the other materials). One can overlook the 1,500 ingots used to create a Legendary such as Twilight as those are used to create a “Gift of Metal” which then becomes part of the sword’s creation. With Ascended however they do not even bother to hide the grind behind the story of a “Gift”, just throw all this stuff into a forge and you will get a sword light enough for you to wield with special powers.

They could have done it differently and still dragged out the process as long as they wanted to. Clues in the world to special recipes, certain beasts to kill for special reagents, skills that need to be required by practice, and so on.

Sadly game developers have lost the ability to tell stories in their games and to make those stories believable. That lack of believable storytelling is what turns great games into a grind. They take the easy/lazy way out by increasing or inflating the costs for items in materials or gold rather then adding real content and sadly this process exists in all games. A game starts out with great promise; there are new stories to be told; new discoveries to be made that fit the story being told but eventually they reach the point where that story no longer makes any sense. It gets lost in the inflation of gold/materials/time or more commonly known as the grind to fill in the gaps.

Single player games have a finite timeline. They have a beginning and an ending to tell a story and thus can be made to be more believable. MMO’s are meant to be ongoing so the timeline they can encompass does not end. The lack of a good story is filled in by the grind and this is a good example of that. One day, hopefully, a developer will begin to understand that the greater and more believable the story you tell the greater your game will be.

This game does not need more developers, it needs more story tellers.

Very good point.

The biggest fail of this SAB is that it’s too long. The last SAB was hugely successfuly because it was right for the majority of the player base. It didn’t feel like a huge grind and it was somewhat fun. Even the achievements were mostly doable and fun to explore.

SAB world 2 is nothing like that, I seriously wish anet would stop using the jumpy and KB like mechanics for the waterfall and stuff. It just doesn’t work very well but aside from that, the worlds are just way too long. Before people go coming in saying you’re complaining about more content?, let me remind you that LESS is MORE sometimes. It’s not about the quantity, a point expressed to the devs many times, it’s about the QUALITY. The current worlds have levels which are so long and have so many mobs that it’s almost impossible to clear without having to kill at least half of them. Sure, this may be the way it was originally intended but why couldn’t you make the levels shorters (i.e. shorter checkpoints). This would give players more room to breath and have breaks in between.

The other thing is, getting mobbed on respawn, a lot of the time, those respawn points are very deadly. There is preexisting mobs that if you didn’t kill or were going for an achievement you left alone get aggreod on respawn with nothing you can do. Good example is the angry hillbillies in zone 1. I think 99 % of games have respawn points which are basically designed to be safe from any enemy encounters, at least for a small duration but nope, not here, i might be invulnerable for a couple of seconds on respawn but they still get aggroed.

This SAB would have been so much better if you divided the content into better sections instead of making it a couple of massive sections that have a lot of running if you die.

Also, the one hit mechanics, many times i’ve said this is a very cheap mechanic and learning by death is almost never the right answer. The dev above responded that this was his “decision call” and we’re free to disagree with it and yes, I disagree with it.

I guess the first one was successful because it was new, innovative and they wanted to get it right. Now when they made the second one, they’re just throw in a bigger team, a bigger budget and demand lengthier contents and say yup, that’s what players want. Like the say, the sequels are always crap until the next fresh reboot.

DiogoSilva.7089:

Combat is streamlined and fluid, the art style and music are gorgeous, there’s plenty to do, and even more so, there was plenty of potential untapped.

Well said. If I had to say that Anet has done anything right, it would be that their combat is extremely fluid and in fact, this is probably the biggest retaining element for me when I compared it to many other games.

However, everything else is just heading down a direction which was not what I expected. I’m carefully observing how FFXIV is handling their current issues at the moment as well as their customer support before I say any permanent goodbyes.

Exactly, adding temporary content like this to us is basically no content.

Mid air knockbacks are OP. Specifically, if I jump a waterfall and it retracts even though i made the jump and am still in air, I still get a KB animation and fall right back to the start. This is probably related to a latancy issue that anet never concerns themself with.

Just addressing your question in the post, yes there is a gear treadmill. Why?, gear treadmill in a game is anything where a new tier of armor is introduced into the game periodically. It has been made clear by Anet that they intend to do two things, introduce higher stat armor as the game goes and to introduce higher level caps (already your clear indication of their intention for a gear treadmill). Now what confuses people or what some people find is acceptable is that this gear treadmill is not as fast as some of your more famous mmos. Instead of taking weeks and months to become obselete it may take half a year to a year.

To be honest, I have nothing wrong with gear progression, in fact, i’m going to be playing a game with plenty of that very soon, but my real problem is how anet tries to accomodate for both genres of players (horizontal vs vertical) and this just kittens a lot of people off. The gear progressioners are getting statistically significant increase with their new tier but not big enough that there is a huge advantage. The problem with non gear progressioners now is that the gear isn’t weak enough that it’s impossible to kill someone with full ascended gear but every time you vs one, you’ll be at a disadvantage. Think of it as a handicap of 88 %

Also, this ascended gear is the info is right at the moment, will cost on average of 100+ g to craft. That is quite a bit of money for most people and in my opinion, is better spent towards your legendary goal rather than your ascended gear.

Here is the quote for their stance on gear and level progression:

“More generally, I hope we’ve been clear that GW2 is not a game with virtually no stat progression in it like GW1 was. That’s why GW2 shipped with a higher level cap, and with a hard separation between PvE and PvP. In GW1 we never advanced the level cap through four campaigns/expansions. The game design didn’t allow for it. But GW2 was designed without those restrictions, and we’ve always expected that we will someday raise the level cap in GW2.”

Sylv.5324:

Danikat.8537:

It seems to me Anet is in a lose/lose situation here.

If they don’t say anything it’s because the game is failing and they don’t want us to know.

If they do say something, even providing numbers, then it’s obvious they’ve wrangled it to look good to cover the fact that the game is failing.

[…]

What would convince people that the game isn’t failing?

Nothing. These folks are obsessed with GW2 failing because it didn’t meet their personal expectations. People have been using the exact same lines, argument, contradictory statements, accusations, and such since before launch.

Others then get all panicked and demand hard numbers. I suggest switching to busy servers for the latter ones, and stop angsting about whether the game will die. It won’t for a long time (GW1 is still going). It won’t tomorrow, it won’t next month, and it won’t a year from now.

Again, people are straying off what this topic was originally intended. No one here is saying gw2 is failing, we are merely collecting opinions on what people feel about the issue.

On a side note, if anet was totally transparent about their numbers, people wouldn’t have any doubts about it. But obviously, we can see a lot of flaws and reason on why they particularly chose to present any figures that way.

For example, instead of showing max players ever on in the INITIAL 9 months, they could have gave us an average player online per month as a bar graph. Obviously, that would show an increasing or decreasing trend which Anet does not want us to see. Regardless, all i’m asking for in this thread is do you feel a difference in people comparing now and a month or two back.

Wow.. so each ascended weapon is going to cost at least 100g to make eh… I was just estimating when I said getting the mats for ascended is 1/8th the way to legendary so you may as well skip it but heck, I was right… ditch the ascended, get the legendary. At least you’ll have changeable stats and know you’re future proofed…

The blue trail does look quite nice, I don’t get why they’re removing it…Again this was something people who made the meteo wanted.. and suddenly taken away.

silvermember.8941:

Lafiel.9372:

What most of the people are underestimating and what some other players are not is that this is a first step. If anet pulls this off, that’s it. They know they can do this and that they can do it again. The first step is the hardest but if you give in then it’s all over. Next up, 2014, transcended gear! Level progression!

What YOU don’t understand is that the majority of players seem to want some form of gear progression or stuff to work on. The most important thing YOU fail to understand is, they gave you a year to come to terms with it, IT IS GOING TO HAPPEN. No amount of forum QQ from a very small and insignificant subset of gamers that cling to a idealogy that the greater market rejected is going to change that.

Arenanet made a big open game and thought players were going to enjoy it and that was proven wrong within the first week WHEN players like myself rushed to 80 and a few others continously ran all the dungeons got their rewards and start complaining about the lack of ENDGAME (well I mainly rushed for money and WvW reasons). These are all facts you cannot deny.

The current trajectory is a different than what Arenanet anticipated, but it is the nature of making a mass market product. You either adopt or go out of business clingying to a idealogy that has proven unsustainable in the market you are attempting to compete in and they choose the adult

tl;dr

YOU fail to understand that complaining on the forum is not going to change the reality that ascended gear is going. They gave you 1 year to accept this inevitability.

all you can do is provide suggestions that steer them from the way you acquire ascended gear, but make no mistake it is coming. You either accept it or quit.

I do understand and most of your post I have actually discussed in remaining part of the post that you have chosen to not quote lol.

I understand that if active vertical progression is the way they want it, then by all means, they’re heading in the right direction for you. Who am I trying to convey to are the players who actually want more horizontal progression than vertical, and that if that is what they want, they have to stand up for themselves now, tell Anet that this is why the joined the game because after this patch, it’s pretty much too late. Also, i’m pretty sure the players who want horizontal progression are a pretty big bunch of us in GW2. Pretty much everyone during the outcry when ascended was first introduced is one of us though an unknown number of them are probably gone by now. In addition, a lot of people did take gw2 manifesto as horizontal progression, similar to its predecessor but we were mislead?

Also, while expressing my view on the forum may not do anything in the end, I would be happy that at least I tried.

While I appreciate the input so far, the goal of this thread was never to try PROVE that the population was declining. I was merely asking for opinions whether other people have felt similar observations as I have.

Vayne – to answer that last part of your comment, that was exactly my point, there is no win situation to show player online thus reason why mmos gradually grew to get rid of it.

Thank you for those who did response to what I was requesting for

Finally, for the ones trying to post up hard numbers, I appreciate your input but like a few have mentioned above, you will carefully observe that the way they express these things are extremely vague.

The only thing it tells us is that the values were higher than previously, how high was the previous value then? For example,

If at the beginning we had 2000 players and just before biweekly updates we had 1000 players and after the bi-weekly updates we had 1100 players, that still makes his sentence legit. Any sentence which say they had an increase from a certain period is really not very useful. Another example, a company average sales in January was 5000, february was 2000, march 2100, april 2200. I can say here that, sales have been increasing steadily since march but completely ignored that we actually lost over half the sales amount since January.

However, if you analyze this sentence a bit more, you will realise that there was a extremely high chance that the server population was on a decline before the bi-weekly updates. This is because if it were otherwise, the dev would have said, player numbers blah blah blah have been increasing since launch, especially after the introduction of bi-weekly updates.

Furthermore, it is expected that if you introduced these kind of temporary contents, people are bound to log on to check it out but my concern is the long term damage this has on the community. Do people really want something to do that they have to do within the 2 weeks every 2 weeks and knowing that is it temporary content. This is a good short term tactic to attract the few who are still lurking about on the edge of leaving but eventually, they’ll figure out this game isn’t going to give them more and the state of the game hasn’t changed since FoTM november. That is actually my biggest concern, a point i’ve been trying to put for for awhile.

The only way where we can be properly informed of the figures is by giving us hard numbers of the average online players per month and to only include players who have logged in at least x amount of time into the statistics.

As always, i’m always glad to hear that people have been seeing positive observations. However, it seems what I have noticed is that these servers are also one of the higher tier servers. Admittedly, those servers will be more packed and the appearance of numbers becomes harder to define. Perhaps with the drop in numbers in the lower tiers, people have transferred towards higher tiers so ultimately, server populations are generally healthy but the total population could still be declining. I’ll love to see more of other people’s thought and input on this and how they feel their server is doing.

hplee.2839:

nope, pretty sure everyone is busy farming the invasion…have you seen the size of the zerg in each overflows?…

Keep in mind, overflow is players from every single server though.

As I have said before, I think looking at your guild and friend roster is actually a good way to judge whether this game is losing players on a small scale.

To Vayne – not sure how old you are, but I’ve played my share of mmos, games older than runescape I believe. I started out in 2D mmos back in late 90s to early 2000s games like dransik classic now known as ashen empires (i’m surprised it’s still here, really brings back memories as a kid lol). Korean games like ragnarok online etc, all of them showed players online back then. This is just a couple examples, i’m sure there are more out there. But this point is not important, we all know why companies now choose not to show players online.

What most of the people are underestimating and what some other players are not is that this is a first step. If anet pulls this off, that’s it. They know they can do this and that they can do it again. The first step is the hardest but if you give in then it’s all over. Next up, 2014, transcended gear! Level progression!

If this is the kind of game you’re looking for then yes, by all means, support the direction of where anet is headed. But if this is not the direction you thought we were heading into, if you came into the game hoping to be able to enjoy a game with horizontal progression, well presented stories and innovative design/mechanics then this is the last chance for us to take our stand before we split ways.

Again let I remind everyone, ascended vs exotics is ~510 stat difference, ~312 stats in it’s current implementation and we haven’t even considered the extra weapon damage ascended gear will have.

I’ll leave you with this old quote by the Anet studio design director said in last year AMA

“More generally, I hope we’ve been clear that GW2 is not a game with virtually no stat progression in it like GW1 was. That’s why GW2 shipped with a higher level cap, and with a hard separation between PvE and PvP. In GW1 we never advanced the level cap through four campaigns/expansions. The game design didn’t allow for it. But GW2 was designed without those restrictions, and we’ve always expected that we will someday raise the level cap in GW2.”

Zeldain.5710:

My feeling (with no numbers of course, purely anecdotal evidence) is that while ArenaNet seems to be pretty decent at selling boxes and getting new players, there are more players leaving out the back of the bus.

So to me, it feels like the net population is shrinking despite new players coming in.

I’ll say it again – the only way to measure this is if they reported players instead of sales. But they seem to refuse that.

I agree, I remember the days when most mmos were proud to show the amount of players online at any given time on a server.

SpehssMehreen.5897:

Conner.4702:

The latest PR bullcrap they released didn’t actually hold any relevant info on how well the game is doing. They can stay it is steadily growing sure and it can very well be the truth, but that doesn’t mean anything without numbers backing them up. If they had a huge drop off at some point and it started rising again after that, than you can claim the game is growing without lying. The concurrent number was that a one off or an average? When was it? Total sales does that include or exclude people that got refunds and if it included how many got refunds.

The info is meant to show the game in a positive light nothing more. Mortal Online frequently does this and they have around 2k users and are losing money hand over fist.

To me it seems population is on the decline, but that is just my viewpoint.

then there comes the question, what makes you think the population is in decline, when the Developers themselves have given us the information we need, information that happens to confirm what many evidence already points to.

@Lafiel, youve already answered your own question, the fact is that the game is growing, now whether gamers can “feel” or Notice this is, as you say, depends from person to person, server to server, someone in the bottom tiers might log into wvw and determine the game is dead, while at the same time someone logs into an invasion event overflow and determines the game is bursting in the seems, etc etc

Well I feel like there is less people. For example, I regularly play on my server and 2 other servers. Back in the days, I would notice a lot more people doing the PvE content (the main ones) like fire elemental or jormag etc. Now this could very well be the doing of the current invasion but even before that time, i’ve noticed drop off in player numbers. I just want to see if other people feel it too.

Also, as conner has explained perfectly well, the numbers given by anet can be twisted, no company is going to give you the cold hard facts (that their game is losing players). Like I said, there could have been a significant drop off in the last 3 months that no one knows about and the numbers stated them are incredibly vague.

And to add to that, if I scroll on my friend list or guild list given that you don’t have incoming and outgoing players often (and I actually think this is the best way to a grasp of what the player base situation is like on a small scale), what used to be a pretty bright lit list has shortened to almost only the real dedicated and loyal players. I’ve noticed a lot of guildies come and go after a couple of months in this game and most of the guys who stay are really the core few. From a percentage wise, only 10 % of my friendlist still come online although I don’t have many virtual friends I guess.

Banquetto – that is promising to hear, what server are you on by the way?

SpehssMehreen.5897:

you determine growth by what you see in pve and wvw ._.

the Game is growing, quiet steadily actually, in fact is anets recent infograph, I think 3.5 million copies were sold and 450k players active at a given time, compared to last decembers 3mil and 300k or soemthing like that, so yes, its growing, suprisingly too for an Mmo in the Summer, a time where Mmos are light on numbers

Fine print says it’s during the initial 9 months not? (obviously the sweet spot for their sales) I’m talking about what has happened in the last 3-4 months where a lot of things have gone downhill for some people. Also, 9 months in is just at where sky pirates starting rolling out.

SpehssMerhreen – I’m not determining growth, I’m just asking whether other people can feel the change or not. There is no concrete way for us players to determine whether this game is really growing or not, it will vary with server and without hard numbers, all we can do is estimate.

Some may say it’s never too late but I think it’s too late.

Something hit me while I was in WvW today, and that it, it feels like the amount of people in my server has greatly decreased. I’m on SoS btw. I used to remember running in wvw borderland and even at our weakest time, we still have a couple who are on. Nowadays, when I am on even during oceanic peak hours, there is very very little people even on. The zerg sizes lead by the commanders are much much smaller and the only time we ever get a queue on anywhere is right on reset.

I’ve observed similar things in PvE as well.

I know this could be various options other than people leaving. For example, they could have simply switched servers or just place less frequent, or play on different times as me or they’re doing the living story temporary contents, farming in the invasions and no longer playing other PvE or WvW content. But I seriously think that this game is actually losing players at this stage so I welcome anyone who gives me feedback on their server about whether or not they notice such an occurrence.

To keep it simple, I would just like a simple response of such:

Server: (your server)
WvW = Yes/no/same (Yes to I have noticed less people, No to I have seen more people and same as in no change)
PvE = Yes/no/same (Yes to I have noticed less people, No to I have seen more people and same as in no change)
Comment: (your thought on what you think the cause is, try keep it simple e.g. I think it’s just people farming invasion why everywhere else feels empty)

Monthly reward and forcing players to wait 2 weeks before they can get their ascended gear is two different things.

You get 30 days to get the monthly reward, you can finish it in the first day or finish it in the last, it doesn’t matter either way.

Ascended gear, you’re not allowed to get it until a minimum amount of days have been reached.

It seems you don’t even understand what good and bad time gating is.

Anet only refunds purchases made directly to them. You need to talk to amazon.

I agree to the fact that anet’s biggest fail is not having a wider range of beta testers or more, a PUBLIC TEST SERVER. And with bi monthly releases, they’re not going to get enough time and feedback I reckon even if the contents were made months prior. I never get why Anet goes for the lazy path of “let’s release it full of bugs and we’ll let the real players find out what’s wrong”. Doesn’t that give you company a huge bad rep? A company which fails at every content they release because they couldn’t be bother doing appropriate amount of testing on it.

a t s e, you were being an elitist the moment you claimed to know a better weapon build than another. The guy was an elitist by asking you to change weaps for DPS reasons. (there are other logical recommendations which aren’t elitist comments, for example, asking a guard to use a staff in TA, or run focus as an ele in specific bosses/dungeonsetc).

In the end, you both as you say “fail” since either weapon is viable and has perfect reasons to be used.

Very good points by this post, I knew from a start what differed in gw2 than other successful esport games like dota 2 or LoL. It’s just not as single player focused. It’s hard to have a significant advantage over another player if you’re vsing 2-3 and since there is no level or gear progression throughout, it comes down to a complete team effort. A single player death will not cause a drastic change in the game and the whole game is basically people working together to cap points. w Unfortunately, anet is greedy as it is and they’re only going to keep trying but only make it worst.

If they focused on GvG as an esport it probably would have worked better. Good scouting by a guild member or the a surprise attack effectively used would be a lot more interesting. Though with the current servers commanders, it may just end up to be boring straight to the point try zerg their way in style. Though even then, zerg vs zerg may still be more interesting…

I generally don’t care how they do this but stop throwing in temporary content, start taking longer to fine touch your content. To me, after reviewing these quotes again, this is obviously an incompetence directed by the lead content designer.

Um, I did the math on ascended gear in another post but here is a short cut and paste version without the calculations

Current available ascended gear is ~312 more stats in total than exotic armor

Full set of ascended gear by the end of all releases is probably going to be about ~510 more stats than exotics.

If you look at it in a PPT gear type you’re looking at about

170 power = 170 more damage
170 pre = ~8% crit chance
170 toughness = 170 armor

This is excluding the extra weapon damage ascended will have. Probably about ~100 more damage.

So yeah.

The 10-12 % increase per trinket/weap adds up more than you think really.