Guild Wars 2

The biggest problem with this idea I see is how to make them

1) interesting enough to be done more than once,
2) challenging instead of farmable once all “riddles” get logged and posted in wiki/forums.

ANet has yet to come with a single (efficient) randomized/procedural-generated encounter.

Astralporing.1957:

A hint. Tails do not grow out of your back. They start a little bit lower than this.

I wouldn’t be so sure.

I’m playing at high resolution but I’ve set my UI size to smallest to leave more space for the game itself, and the only thing that bothers me is that I have a hard time hitting the small bar with the arrow above the utility skill when I want to change skills (which I do every now and then, especially in dungeons). So what I suggest is:

• Display the skill choice pop-up not only for left-click on small arrow-bar above the skill, but also on right-click on skill square itself.

This is very easy to implement, but would help players like me a lot.

Tyler Chapman.1832:

Little treat for you guys we snuck in today

11. Fixed in feature build

Anyways tomorrow is my last day at ANet so you won’t be seeing this face on the forums any longer. Hopefully this forum visibility helped ease you guys over. Sorry for all the issues we never got around to I did my best to get as many bugs cleared in the last few months as possible.

~see you in game!

Good news never travel alone. Good luck at your next job and thanks for keeping communication up! I hope people who take your place would also be willing to jump in this thread (and other similar ones) every now and then to keep players informed.

Still, maybe the hefty sum of money from March daily sales will let ANet hire a QA team (so, nothing personal) for the next “season” which will master both game fixing/polishing and the LS at the same time. Competition’s getting stiff around here, that ugly ol’ cuss with the booth next to mine lowered his prices again I mean… new games are coming out, and to keep their loyal fanbase, they’ll eventually have to deal with current issues. And the current feature patch sounds like a step in the right direction.

IndigoSundown.5419:

It’s obvious the OP and his supporters see the new event(s) as “harder,” otherwise there’d be no need for people to have to “learn” to play better. His solution is for ANet to put in tutorial content that encourages people to improve their play.

Thing is, these events are content that encourages people to improve their play. The OP wants there to be a tutorial to do this instead of using content he wants to play. The bad news for his idea is that putting in a tutorial after the fact would not generate the improvement he’s looking for, because:

• New players make up a small portion of the player-base
• Existing players would not go do “tutorial” content unless there was a reward for doing so

If there were rewards for doing so, players like the OP would also be doing the tutorial content, and running into the same issues they’re complaining about now.

Summarised neatly, thanks.

Answering to the last part:

• More “difficult” content will come, as events like Mario were generally received as well-designed and entertaining, and there’s a clear tendency towards such events.
• This content may be introduced game-wide as a (properly scaling) single-person “tutorial dungeon” which has a permanent achievement category (similar to Aetherpath) and gives a good unique reward (similar to the shiny weapons from AP chests), plus gold/laurels. I do remember how eager I was to get my first Zenith skin and how short of gold and laurels I was; competitive-driven players, however, will do this content once to get their APs because there’s nothing better than “free” APs.
• If it is a “dungeon”, the instancing solves the problem of doing content with other people.
• This tutorial dungeon may also let players face mobs of different player professions and builds, as well as, probably, means of temporarily changing stats for measuring damage and survivability.
• This can be introduced as a part of LS – some kind of “Asura Training Grounds” which were built for all heroes after the rumours of a new dragon surfacing; I virtually see how little asuras lecture players and show them exhibits to train on! This content can remain permanent and get highly advertised by NPCs in starting and low-level zones.
• At this stage of the game the “exploration” part of experience can be greatly spoiled by both availability information on the Internet and “activities” like Queensdale zerg which result in players entering other zones and asking for a “train”. So at this point, again, probably a tutorial on other basic in-game “laws” and the “how it was supposed to be played” thing can be implemented there as well.

Exosferatu.2961:

This is a proper anthropomorphic cat

Show Spoiler

hide spoiler

Log Horizon is way better than Sword Art Online.

Looks more like Sugii Gisaburou’s cats to me

DietPepsi.4371:

Lishtenbird.2814:

proper antropomorphic cats

Personally I wouldn’t class those as proper anthropomorphs. They’re more like humans with cat ears and tails, than cats with human qualities. The Charr seem more proper to me personally. (I want to emphasise “personally” so I don’t come off as being rude, or attacking.)

No, you’re actually right. Anthropomorphic cats are cats with human features, felinemorphic humans cat-eared and cat-tailed people are humans with cat features. Between furries and cat-eared, my preference is definitely towards the latter, but again as you noted, that’s a matter of personal preference

DietPepsi.4371:

I dislike how in many games, and movies the non-human races often look just like humans with subtle changes, for example races in Star Trek.
The sylvari are an exception since in the lore, somewhere, I think it says they were modeled after humans since a human planted the seed.

It reminded me of a novel I really liked, Harry Harrison’s “Final Encounter”.

Doggie.3184:

Too bad the Festival hat cat ears are lost to GW1 only forever though, and even if they came here it wouldn’t be an armor skin. u.u

So they existed in GW1? Oh, then it makes even more sense to go post a cat-ear request thread in the BLTC section

FYI: all sigils will have independent cooldowns as of March 18 patch. So better not change anything before that time.

Garambola.2461:

But that 8 gold will not go far if he still needs to level the tailor for other things.

I might have been in a hurry and miscalculated, sorry. Let’s re-calculate:

• If I have a Tailor at 0 and decide to level a Tailor and to craft a Tailor gift, it costs me 278,5g.
• If I have a Tailor at 500 and decide to craft a Tailor gift, it costs me 180g.
• If I have a Leatherworker at 0 and decide to level a Leatherworker and to craft a Leatherworker gift, it costs me 165,4g.
• If I have a Leatherworker at 500 and decide to craft a Leatherworker gift, it costs me 60,4g.

So, even if you have a Tailor at 500, you save 180g-165,4g = 14,6 gold, plus get a maxed profession and 7-10 levels for your alt if you use it for crafting. Even if you don’t, it’s still more profitable (at this specific moment of time with these costs!) to level a Leatherworker only for the gift, and also to level a Tailor if you need it. However, most crafted items are sold for less than they cost because they are used for leveling, and the only reason to level is if you want to get the non-tradeable Ascended armour/weapons.

…or buy it from TP by converting gems to gold.

Garambola.2461:

You are correct. If you want to make other armor for your necromancer, it is better to have the tailor. Levelling leatherworker just for one backpack makes little sense.

No, it does:

T)

• http://www.gw2crafts.net/tailor.html 23,0g
• http://www.gw2crafts.net/tailor_400.html 75,5g
• = 98,5

L)

• http://www.gw2crafts.net/leatherworking.html 21,6g
• http://www.gw2crafts.net/leatherworking_400.html 83,4g
• = 105

T) http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/46741 12g x 15=180g
L) http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/46739 4.03g x 15=60,4g

Total Tailor specific cost: 23+75,5+180=278,5g
Total Leatherworker specific cost: 21,6 + 83,4g + 60,4 = 165,4
note: these costs only show the difference in cost for different professions with leveling 0-500, not the total cost of the backpiece!

Total difference for L vs T ascended spinal blades: 113,1 g

Which means that even if you level Leatherworker from 0 to 500 now to craft the backpiece, you will save 8 gold, plus get a maxed profession and 7-10 levels for your alt if you use it for crafting. That part is a mess, please read my next message below ^^’

The weirdest daily I had was a “Seen Better Days” daily (“View a vista of burning LA”) after slaying Admiral. I wasn’t the only one to get it – some people in the chat noticed it too.

So that one seems pretty ordinary to me, I do not think it’s that much of a bug

Pyroatheist.9031:

If you were to classify every little thing that doesn’t agree with ingame tooltips or simply doesn’t agree with common sense in terms of how the game should be, then you’d be left with nothing but bugs. The balance in the game is atrocious, multiple classes/builds aren’t viable, is this common sense good game design? No, it’s not, but you don’t classify it as a bunch of bugs because it’s not.

Please provide a sufficient number of inaccuracies that people do not consider bugs.

Pyroatheist.9031:

A bug is something functioning in a way that is unintended by the game developers. That’s it. There’s no other definition, full stop.

You are trying to conflate undesired game mechanics with unintended game mechanics. I’m as eager as the next guy to have an actual functional swiftness implementation for mesmer, and for my DE clones to not kitten out on the nearest available target, but I’m precise in my understanding that those are not bugs that can be fixed, but mechanics that must be changed.

Nope, there is. There are two definitions of a bug: the developer’s one and the player’s one (see my previous post). The player is a person who pays for the game, therefore his vision of a bug is of more prevalence. In a business model, the player is a client, and the developer is the executor; when the client pays for his bread, he doesn’t care whether the recipe was followed by the cook to the letter if the cooked bread is salty and not edible – he wants the edible bread he payed for even if it requires a change of the recipe.

Pyroatheist.9031:

If you want devs to listen to your ideas, complaints, and comments, you need to talk in their language, not the language of the common forum rabble.

Being both a player and a developer in my own field facilitates thing for me.
When “representing” a player, I can tell why a player thinks something is a bug.
When providing solutions, I can speak as a developer, see the possible root of the problem and suggest probable workarounds.
That said, a developer should also be able to treat himself as a player to understand why some things are repetitively claimed to be “bugs” even though there is nothing wrong with the code. (Well, not every developer, but those who are responsible for making gameplay decisions).

Pyroatheist.9031:

Many people consider it a bug because they don’t understand how it works. In a game of magic and all the other ridiculous things, trying to apply normal logic to how stuff works is an exercise in futility. If ask most experienced PvPers, they’ll tell you that channeled stealth tracking is an important counter to one of the strongest mechanics in the game.

The margin of plausibility is a subject of eternal debates. However, there are things which people consider normal (like being able to hit holograms, or being able to bleed and poison steel golems, or being able to create clones of flesh and blood), and there are things which they don’t. The stealth tracking is considered as the latter by many people. If you ask me, I’d say that using channeled tracking as a counter to stealth is pretty much similar to countering Shocking Aura with Mirror of Anguish – both work, both give benefits to user, both defy logic, and the only thing that differed (and made it fixed eventually) is noticably higher numbers.

I think there’s a thing worth mentioning:

• How a normal player understands “intended”: «The resulting behaviour of this skill fully corresponds with both the letter (in-game skill description) and the spirit (common sense) of the game.»
• How ANet devs (and Pyroatheist) understand “intended”: «This particular skill code works precisely as we expected it to work, regardless of any other global issues which break functionality or cause inconsistency in behaviour to the end-user.»

Pyroatheist.9031:

Because ranger arrows move fast enough that they’ll still hit you even if you’re moving. If, however, you blinked to a different location, a couple arrows would miss because they were aimed at the spot you used to be. Additionally, you’re talking about a particular channeled skill called Rapid Fire. We all know that channeled skills still track after stealth, though from the number of ignorant complaints about it, you’d think otherwise.

Tyler is 100% correct here, you’re just misunderstanding game mechanics.

There is nothing “ignorant” about common sense. When you go into stealth, it’s only natural that you shouldn’t be tracked by Aetherblade’s lightning or a Toxic Assasin’s long-cast arrow. It is a game design flaw (one of those “lazy solutions” of early stages IMO, just like Temporal Curtain, which I BTW would call “ignorant”), and the fact that many people consider it a bug is not a coincidence but a consequence. A correct “lazy solution” to this problem would be triggering an interrupt on stealth, probably with a 1/2-1 second delay, with a “does not trigger any on-interrupt effects” flag and a “trigger only for skills which require a target” flag.

Tyler Chapman.1832:

4. Working as intended. Good topic for debate on changing in the future.

I do believe you when you say this is intended. But I do not believe that you fully comprehend the situation. Mesmers essentially do not even receive haste; as it does not only not stack with itself but it does not stack with any other classes haste. It is constantly being over-written by other skills and other cooldowns. If the developers wish to completely disconnect mesmer haste from every other haste in the game then please change the boon to a unique one so that it reflects that.

I believe you’re talking about swiftness, not haste or quickness. We do get swiftness, but only on a random basis; we do not have any built-in reliable source of swiftness, since Temporal Curtain’s “intended” behaviour is not reliable.

Tyler Chapman.1832:

Added #28:
28. Illusion of Life. Separate thread.
Those affected by Illusion of Life will instantly become downed after killing something, instead of staying alive. Only applies to PvE.

Fixed in feature build

Nice! Reported it in the respective thread.

Will be fixed in the upcoming feature patch.

Vexander.9850:

All kinds of games have Cat People or Dog People. Let’s branch out a bit.

Fox People. That’s right, make Kitsunes a playable race! They’ll fit in nice and good in Cantha!

Yes, please! I will be the first one to make a red-haired one named Holo. Who cares she’s a wolf anyway!

Elins!

Oh sorry, wrong game :P

But yes, some more elegant creatures – faeries, proper antropomorphic cats – would be a nice way to attract people who prefer cuteness over brutality. And yes again, I agree it’s GW and not a Korean grinder and they would be out of place in this game. /sob

Pyroatheist.9031:

Sometimes when attempting to use illusionary leap, the range indicator will display that you are in range, but the skill will no properly produce a clone. Instead, it will just go on cooldown.

Originally I blamed #14 for it when I learned about that one, but after some observation I tend to agree that it is a separate issue.

Added #28:

28. Illusion of Life. Separate thread.

• Those affected by Illusion of Life will instantly become downed after killing something, instead of staying alive. Only applies to PvE.

Sublimatio.6981:

3.
For the leap/swap, I propose a change for this skill funcionality. I think first usage should be blink to foe, and the ability to swap places, leaving a clone at the enemy. this way we can use 3, launch 2, and go back with 3 for nice combo. Also, mesmer needs a reliable gap closer. It’s really needed when you melee Lupicus or Ancient Ooze, but this gap closer works just so badly and slowly.

Or, it could be leap like warriors have, so it’s really leap, BUT illusionary, as we can return back to where we started.

I disagree as well. I would not like to see a complete reverse-change of functionality.

However, I agree (and that has already been suggested before) that something can and should be changed to improve the current functionality since global pathing issues make this skill severely unreliable.

• The leap behaviour is replaced by spawn-on-target behaviour, and “Illusionary Leap” becomes “Illusionary ShadowStep”.
• To compensate for lack of trackability by opponents in PvP, the clone receives an idle time (equal to the usual leaping time) before it attacks and cripples the target.
• The re-triggering of leap+cripple for all clones created by this skill is left intact or is replaced by the usual running pathing.
• The Swap functionality remains intact. There is, however, a problem of exploiting height difference + long direct pathing (e.g. enemy on a wall), but this can be dealt with in a way similar to other shadowstepping skills.
• The Leap finisher is removed or replaced by a Blast finisher on spawn and/or on swap.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Lishtenbird.2814:

So the helm and these make a set? Never even thought they matched – one is some horn helm, and the others have floating crystals…

http://dulfy.net/2014/03/11/gw2-scarlets-spaulders-skin-in-gemstore/

Just scroll all the way down.

Hm… If you dye them in matching colors, they do look similar I agree that it might be a single person perception issue, but to me the curved attached horns on the helm look completely alien to the straight floating crystals of gloves/shoulders… tl;dr: Hey, even after seeing it, I still don’t think they match!

So the helm and these make a set? Never even thought they matched – one is some horn helm, and the others have floating crystals…

Fenrir.3609:

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

People get hit by it, because they dodge it. They’ve been conditioned by the game to dodge when a red circle appears. But when the knights do their pull attack, you must actually wait and dodge after the circle has disappeared. With all the lag and visibility issues, is it really surprising that a lot of players are struggling to understand the timing of this attack? It’s inconsistent design.

Well yes actually it is surprising unless it is their very first time, if you have eyes in your head it should become obvious very quickly when you have to dodge. Really the only excuse is lag.

Inconsistency really is a recurrent problem with AoE markers (as well as other mechanics). I for one had a hard time timing the cone AoE of blue holo because unlike the knight’s pull, you have to dodge in the middle of the AoE cast; I manage it mostly now, but most people get hit by it regularly.

digiowl.9620:

Meaning that they designed the game for lore hounds, explorers, and experimenters that will poke and prod everything just to see what happens while they keep extensive notes.

I can’t say it’s a bad concept per se – it’s actually a good one, something which makes discovery part of the pleasure. But combined with generic people laziness (who do not derive pleasure from unrewarding discovery) and ability to play and succeed without poking every button and learning from it becomes a timed bomb.

Regarding the rally system. When I started playing, I had a GREAT problem figuring out what my downed skills were doing for a simple reason: when downed, I had no time to read the tooltips. For me, it is only natural to search for information in other sources (so eventually I googled it), but for many people it’s not.

guardian.6489:

Hmm I’m getting flashbacks I could have sworn they’ve done this before…..

“Avoid the shockwave!”

“Tendrils, fall back and attack at range!”

“Watch the Tendrils or you’ll get poisoned”

“STAY AWAY FROM THE WHIRLPOOL!”

“Stay clear of his feet!”

Ya they did that during the Tequatl fight but people still struggled :P

They struggled because it was hard at that point, not because they had no idea what to do:) I really like those hints from NPCs. And IMO, those really contribute to immersion.

Dalanor.5387:

Also, its just a personal opininon, i find it not only selfish but offensive and disrespectfull against other players if you play a MMO if you can’t even understand the language it was writen. Maybe i should try an eastern game to understand why it could be good.

I will always remember how a whole party tried to tell a thief from a non-DE server to use Shadow Refuge in Caudecus Manor, but all he could say was “no speak english”.

wolfpaq.7354:

It really bothers me that you are listing the 25% knight health decrease as something arising from a lack of skill. That decrease has nothing to do with skill. It has everything to do with the design flaws which include…

-snip-

It has nothing to do with skill. It’s a stupidly designed encounter, plain and simple.

I’ve spoken about issues of recent concepts in this thread and other places, but here we’re talking about player skills apart from design flaws. We at Piken were downing all knights consistently post-patch pre-nerf, so I can’t say it was hard; it was, well, challenging because it required a certain amount of skillful people and succeeded even with lots of charriors getting kittened and condi-classes pulled. If TTS succeeded in the 6-minute achievement with the current pre-nerf design, than it clearly shows how skill is prevailing over design here. The Mario fight was, on contrary, hard; the zerg was split into smaller groups, and the margin for error was really small, so eventually it failed more often than not.

Oh, and… I miss the mender duty QQ

Conncept.7638:

I don’t know if there is any point in my explaining this because you are clearly a 99% competitively driven player, and I don’t think you are ever going to understand. But I will try.

Some players, most actually, vary between very little or completely non-competitive. If you ask them why they play you will get two responses: ‘Because it’s fun’, or ‘Because it’s cool’, which basically mean the same thing. You will never get the response ‘Because I’m good at it.’ or ‘Because it’s challenging.’.

Being fun or cool is a combination of all the aesthetics (real and imagined) which happen as a result of the players interactions with the game. The gameplay is driven by the player. In other words the player has an aesthetic experience as the result of his gameplay decisions. The animations drive these aesthetic experiences, the sounds drive these experiences, the responses of the NPCs, Mobs, and environment drive these experiences. And yes, additionally, the varying mechanics of the gameplay drive the experience. The experience is the whole of the parts.

…and I thought that flashing underwear was a good reward itself… (Joking.)

Ok, I see your point but I do not agree on the accent. For me, aesthetics are very important – I had a hard time persuading myself to try GW2 because non-magical medieval setting is ultimately boring to me; I looked at dresses of Blade and Soul, I looked at cute Elins of Tera Online, I looked at their cool looking spells and fantasy worlds and I just couldn’t believe that I was going to walk among wooden barns of Queensdale instead. I also knew I would never try WoW or Wildstar for the same reasons. Still, there were sylvari – a local equivalent of elves, and I gave it a try.

However: I used to play zoomed in at low levels, but when I reached Orr, I was playing zoomed out, and I am playing zoomed out 90% of time now – so I actually never see what my dodges look like in the middle of the fight, covered with particle spam and while I actually look at the mob or my skillbar or mob’s buffbar. That said, I believe that dodging is not the most important thing that requires visual improvement at this stage.

Nature Anthem.1852:

What is the feature build “logged”?

I think it means that some portions get fixed by the feature patch, and the rest gets logged for future work (thus not abandoned).

Xyonon.3987:

Although I like all those changes – isn’kitten bit poor that the greatest buffs we recive are … bugfixes? xD

Since it’s the bug thread, buffs were not supposed to be announced here. We’ve also been told that there’s some nice stuff for us coming.

New Major Trait Unlocked: Tyler’s Feedback

Tyler Chapman.1832:

-snip-

Thanks a lot, that’s a very useful list! Basically, I see that fixable bugs are being addressed now, while some are a result of underlying game-wide issues (shadowstepping, pathing) and may need another LS season to get sorted out.

Some of the points in the list are debatable or confusing (“intended, but bug”), but I guess it’s best we just wait for the feature patch itself and see how it works without forcing answers at this stage

I’ll put a notice at the top of the first post and update the list post-patch.

Conncept.7638:

A) Dodge should both visually and mechanically vary between professions and builds.

• Guardian: Selfless Daring (Heals nearby allies)
• Warrior: Reckless Dodge (Damage foes)
• Engineer: Evasive Powder Keg (Creates a bomb)
• Ranger: Companion’s Defense (Give protection)
• Ranger: Evasive Purity (Remove blind and poison)
• Thief: Expeditious Dodger (Gain swiftness)
• Thief: Feline Grace (Gain endurance)
• Thief: Fleet of Foot (Remove cripple and weakness)
• Thief: Power of Inertia (Gain might)
• Thief: Uncatchable (Leave caltrops behind)
• Elementalist: Evasive Arcana (Create an attunement-based spell)
• Elementalist: Stop, Drop, and Roll (Remove burning and chilled)
• Mesmer: Deceptive Evasion (Create a clone)
• Necromancer: Mark of Evasion (Leave a Mark of Blood)

• The Thief has a special animation for dodging, unlike all the other professions.
• Thief and Mesmer have unique sound effects when dodging

I think that this list is quite nice. Mesmers’ Deceptive Evasion is a widely used trait, I see engineer bombs and ele fields a lot. Enjoyable enough if you ask me.

As to the “negate vs. evade” debate, this is a separate topic. I pretty much like it the way it is – it allows me to use my skills to solo champs instead of healing stats. However I am open to future bosses which will have 50% of damage undodgeable or something.

I feel that the main reason why many people ignore dodging is the fact that they use double-button mouse to walk while playing on their notebooks on a sofa, and naturally a dodge becomes something inconvenient in this “setup”.

Conncept.7638:

I never stated that dodging can’t be fun, I stated that it isn’t in this game, and this game alone. Dodging doesn’t need to be removed it needs to be revamped so players feel compelled to use because it is enjoyable rather than forced to use it to stay competitive.

Hmm. Since I came from UTIII, I actually still miss the wall-dodge feature and I think it is the only problem with dodging here :p What do you exactly mean by making it “enjoyable”? Not getting downed because of a dodge, not needing to heal or not neing pulled for the excavation attack is enjoyable enough for me.

/buffs Lilith Ajit with Protection and Aegis for grape justice

Mad Queen Malafide, kimeekat, I see how you dislike things like insta-kills, but I think you’re missing the point here – It’s not about surprise punishment, it’s actually that I want people to be told what to do to succeed and then for them to perform it with a punishment if they don’t.

Imagine the following:

• In burning LA, not far from the entrance, you see an order NPC who beckons to you and asks for your help.
• When you talk to it, he tells you: “I need an item from this cave, but Twisted Hammerguards are guarding it. They will down you instantly with their hammer smash, so dodge those in order to get past them. Don’t worry, I’ll teleport you back to the entrance if you die, and I’ll reward you if you bring me the item!”
• You get into the cave, and on your way you face several times Twisted Hammerguards and dodge their attacks.
• You get the item, go back, get a reward from NPC and an achievement point from the Living Story list.

Now you should agree that it’s not a “20 page pass/fail essay”, but rather a “let’s draw a pretty V letter, and you get a cake if you succeed but you don’t get to draw W, X, Y and Z if you fail”

Since LS is temporary, I do agree that something like a skillpoint or a quest near the very starting location for each race may be better. Some kind of brute in Queensdale may be an equivalent of this Twisted Hammerguard. Next to it can stand a condition-only affected monster, a condition-casting monster etc. However I would still prefer that these “quests”, even though ultimately simple to an alt-creator, become obligatory to new players.

Ashabhi.1365:

If someone needs to use food, why not say something like “If you use (insert food here) then you’ll add DPS blahblahblah…” instead of “You should be using food, nub!” Maybe send them one so they can try it for themselves?

I used to put a feast of Orrian Steaks before the Mario fight and telling people to it; only about 1/3 did (and no, they didn’t have their own batter food). I linked “+% downed health” food for melee zerkers who get downed easily; we still failed. I give a food reminder for Scarlet’s potion before the knights fight. Other players also do it, but often it still doesn’t help. Before the Teq fight with PSDH, I sent an Undead slaying potion to party members. Will it help? I hope so, but at one moment in future I know I will be too tired to do it for the 100th time. If NPCs did it instead of me every now and then – it would’ve helped.

Ashabhi.1365:

How about explaining to a new person how the rally system works? or when to dodge in a given situation?

That’s what many people currently do at these events – “dodge the large orange aoe when it fades”, “condition phase now [Condition Crash]”, “watch out for menders” etc. I’ve done Scarlet’s Holo fight numerous times now, and I don’t think I remember a fail; either me or other people try to describe what to do at each phase, and miracle or not, our platform often succeeds faster than others.

Devata.6589:

I don’t really care about all the exact stats. If I can do the content I am fine, it’s just not something I care much about. And food, I almost never used ‘foods’ in any game. I have always seen it as a form of cheating.

Whatever your reasons are, please use potions and food, at least the cheapest ones (general level 80 is mostly dirt cheap) during global events where every hero counts (like Knights, Tequatl etc.) It hurts so much to be 5 seconds short of defeating the last knight. When soloing, of course, it’s completely up to you.

Slowpoke.2749:

On topic: The game aims to please casuals because they are the ones who turn the most profit. Casuals log in for short periods and so consume content slower but are more willing to spend cash on gems because they will not [grind champion trains / speed run dungeons / farm material nodes / play the TP / perform other profitable but boring activity] and instead just want to jump right into the “fun” stuff.

But… you never know. As I said in another thread, I’m firmly inclined to think that loyal fanbase provides more long-term support than casuals who tend to switch games instead of mastering them.

SkylightMoon.1980:

lol you didn’t read anything the original OP or comments on the thread said did you? What doesnt make since is why you made a completely new thread and still refer to an OP? I guess this was so important to you that posting a simple comment wasn’t enough. You really wanted your skewed view of elitism and noobism to be heard.

I hope answering you one more time will suffice. I actually went and looked through that thread one more time after your message, but all I saw there was another “People are obliged to help us, all who do not want beginners with low AP and blue gear in their ‘zerk only 80 exp’ groups do not want challenge and are selfish elitists!”. Sorry, but this is very much what skewed view of elitism and noobism is in my opinion.

There are plenty of things to do as a newbie in this game, and I checked it myself. I never jumped into an exp speedrun because I cared to read the description; I asked people if it’s okay for me to stay since I hadn’t played the game for so long if the party had no description. I googled for guides and came up with a viable build eventually. And having experienced that myself, I see no reason why people should be obliged to others once they already invested their 1000(s) of hours and want to have their fun. I enjoy giving hints during Marionette, Escape From LA and Knights/Holo fights because it makes me feel I’m contributing; but when I want to do a speedrun with “80 exp” people, I politely ask a 500 AP lvl 40 ranger to leave the party in the chat, giving the reason that we want a fast run. There are always new players and veterans; stay in your own player slice and enjoy it without envying others, because 99% of PvE is already extremely easy and casual.

JoeytheHutt.1742:

I think you’re wrong. I dont think “lazyness” is the answer to why so many dont play as you wish. It is about choices. I dont remember exactly all anet said when I buyed (bought?) this game, but I remember the “jump in and play” and “if you see someone fighting, go ahead and join, you are helping.”
And then it appears there is alot of mechanics, there is a lot of armor and weapons, even proffesions, that isnt good enough, and there is a lot of people who demand you to research guides, builds and tactics, go on youtube to be “prepared” for dungeons and most of all, understand all these fgj, gs, wp, hambows and whatnot.
Not to mention combo fields, what they do, how they work and wich one to use in different situations and with different players.
Not everybody, but a big lot looks at this and think “heck, this isnt supposed to be a second life or a job or something, this is about me playing a game for fun a couple of hours some afternoons. Dont need that, dont even want to need that”
Because a lot of people dont take this very serious, and why should they? It is a game after all. So they choose not to invest the time and/or effort to be good, and demanding anything else will just make them walk away.

When you play the game, you eventually become better at it; succeeding is what delivers the pleasure, mastering is what makes you feel good (just like the guitar analogy from Thaddeus). If you’re playing the game at mental level 1 continuously and do not evolve, I don’t think it’s okay; you may either go and play a single-player game then, or rather start smoking or drinking alcohol as these hobbies are just as relaxing and challenging. I might be exaggerating here, but I think you get the idea.

Thaddeus.4891:

This kind of boss already exist in the game. Its Kholer. He is clearly there to push people to learn how to dodge. But since it’s optional and have a really bad reward, nobody do it and nobody can learn from it.

I’m doing Kholer 99% of times and haven’t dodged a single time because a) I can’t see anything behind the particle spam and b) it’s stack-boonspam-heal rather then dodging, and instakills from Kholer are not that often in my experience.

SkylightMoon.1980:

Second of all, you misunderstood what the thread you are replying to said. People are sick of being discriminated against because they arn’t running a specific build or having a certain amount of achievement points. It has nothing to do with the fact that they are bad.

“Challenge” is not equal to “annoyance from inexperienced player”. Nobody should be claimed an “elitist” because he “refused” to help low-levels, because nobody is obliged to do it. Elitist do exist, but the OP exaggerates and generalises it too much. Thus the thread title.

Heraldusluminare.2946:

Also, spoon-feed players by having NPCs shout out instructions on how to defeat bosses:

[Assault Knights appear]
Rox: “Looks like Scarlet’s getting annoyed. Don’t forget to use your Scarlet’s Army Slaying Potion if you have any.”

[Assault Knight takes a flying leap]
Majory: “The Assault Knight is going to pull you in, dodge, now!”

[Assault Knights throw up their defensive shields]
Heal-o-Tron: Enemy-unit-has-engaged-shields. Suggest-cessation-of-condition-based-skills.

Yes, please! I loved the Jormag event because NPCs actually hinted me to wash the ledges and protect the golems. It might be less of a discovery, but since mechanics are discovered pretty soon anyway, we can skip the discovery phase altogether.

JJBigs.8456:

TooBz.3065:

I think the skill of the average player is fine. I’ve never run anything with people who are as bad as people here are pretending.

Most people dodge. Few people use consumables in PvE. But most use then in WvW. Frankly, they aren’t necessary to steamroll most of the content.

Your missing the point. Nothing is neccessary. Theres a video of a level 35 engineer, solo’ing Spider Queen from AC. There are videos of no armor dungeon runs. There are surely tons of videos of people beating hard content with no consumables.

Does it mean you should do that because its not needed to faceroll or beat the content?
No it doesnt.

We do it for efficieny, if everyone was like you, things would take 2x as long and even if your not playing for Min/Maxing and a casual player, spending 50 copper on a potion, and 1 silver on food, isnt really a big deal.

You can do anything, you can run 5 Longbow rangers and beat any dungeon. Again, should you?

Just because its not “Do this or fail” Doesnt mean its the correct way, especially when playing with others.

Pretty much this. Thumbed up.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Those are terrible suggestions! Requiring players to use a consumable to beat content is bad and annoying. Insta kills are also bad and annoying.

What the game needs, is a tutorial, and slowly increasing difficulty. The game needs to teach players the required skills naturally as they play through PVE. Players aren’t lazy, but the game designers made a design mistake by not coming up with a decent way to teach players essential combat strategy.

If these suggestions are part of a tutorial, there’s nothing terrible in them. If there’s no repair fee and buffs are 0 copper from NPC, doubly so, even if it is a part of LS. Use it once – get used to it.

Lilith Ajit.6173:

Btw how about the mesmers that port away (sometimes into aoe or other mobs due to the awfulness of that skill) while you’re res’ing them. That makes me sad.

To mesmer’s defense, I can say that this skill is so slow and buggy that I often get it cast at the moment when I don’t want it anymore because somebody is there to help, but alas.

This post used to be a reference to another post. One more possible title of this thread was:

• ANet, Please Teach Your Players How to Play Your Game

This thread is not supposed to be inflammatory. It actually states the evident – a lot of players are too lazy to learn the basics of the game, including but not limited to:

• dodging
• consuming appropriate food
• consuming appropriate utilities
• possibilities of going outside the Queensdale train and world boss zergs

The recent whole-map events often require full-map participation, and the lack of skill of one part of players jeopardizes the experience of the other part of the players. Apart from design flaws, the lack of skill is regarded by players to be the most common reason of failure, and once these players dare to mention this fact, they’re claimed “selfish”, “elitists” et cetera et cetera.

This “lack of skill” is also evident to developers, and that’s why the 1500 citizens limit was lowered to 1200, and Knights got a 25% decrease in health. I counted the buffs once and was purely amazed at the fact that 50% of people who came to fight the knights didn’t eat a Scarlet potion, which always drops from bags and which is dirt cheap! More so, people do not get a coloured buff and do not dodge the pull even when you tell them several times it should/can be done.

So, my question is: what can ANet do to naturally teach players to dodge, to eat appropriate food, to set traits to their characters and so on?

My suggestions are:

• Introduce a required boss(es) that insta-kills you when you fail to dodge when NPC told you to.
• Introduce a required boss(es) that insta-kills you if you do not get a potion and nourishment from NPC which told you to, or a zone which kills you fast if you do not get a potion/nourishment “antidote”.

This can be done in first steps of personal story or at some point in LS and may be a way to teach people play the game in which their failure also means other players’ failure. Once that is done, maybe at least a part of players would understand that many players were annoyed with you not because they are elitists and require pink gear and inhuman skills, but because they are dead tired of failing because you didn’t even care to try your best at the game you’re playing with other people next to you despite their everyday attempts to tell you how to succeed and make everyone happy.

Update to the idea.

• Option 1: join a dungeon guild.
• Option 2: advertise your party through LFG as a newbie party looking for friendly run.

I leveled to 80 in about 3 weeks with no problems whatsoever from being a total MMO noob. I played how I wanted, including PUGing for low-level dungeons with other newbies. All it took me was reading what game said and common sense.

I played for a pretty long time, and now I’m an experienced level 80 and I do fast dungeon runs because doing them fast is my new challenge. I still play how I want, and please do not force me to play how you want only

Charak.9761:

upscaled events with only deter the players and you end up with dead content

remember the new TA path? yeah… no one goes in there anymore.

IMO it’s rather a problem of effort-reward balance which is very often what ANet is bad at (see FoTM 50 rewards). ANet is afraid to give good rewards for hard content (probably because good teams can benefit “too much” from it), thus nobody is doing it.

I visited Aetherpath not so long ago with a half-guild, half-pug group. It took about 2 hours to complete. It was totally fun for me, but a guildie said “I would never ever step in there again.” The thing worth mentioning however is that I buy gems and the guildie doesn’t (and would’ve preferred to run 4-5 other dungeons for the extra 4-5 gold).

• Edited #19, #20 (IC, MS).
• Added #27 Phantasmal Rogue.
• Added link to separate post to #22 Shared Cooldowns.

Max Gladius.6930:

I can confirm they have fixed “holding a bundle and spawning phantasms” for:
Defender
Disenchanter

But
I can confirm they have not fixed “holding a bundle and spawning clones / phantasms” for:
Decoy
Mirror Images
Part of it works now

Ehm… I always thought that the problem was clones because they had to clone the bundle. Phantasms always have another weapons and thus should not have been affected in the first place. Or were they?

Death Slayer.1468:

Also I can mention that I noticed feedback have an offset of 1 sec before it starts and before it ends

Cast feedback and dome appears, 1 sec later the feedback starts reflecting
Feedback dome disappear, 1 sec later the feedback stops reflecting.

I feel there are a lot of different problems with effect/visuals sync in the game. The scorches in Holo fight are an example of those; symbol of swiftness grants swiftness on last pulse when it has already disappeared; Warden’s feedback is out of sync as well. I’m not even sure whether it is a game bug or a client/server sync bug. I’ll try to test Feedback these days though.

Pyroatheist.9031:

Tooltip inaccuracies are not the same things as bugs. We know that it’s not a bug, it’s working as intended. It’s not working how we would like it to be intended, but it is working as intended.

Pyroatheist, I cannot really debate with you as long as we percept the completely opposite things as equally “evident” to us.

A bug is when something is not working as it is officially documented to work. The in-game documentation for a skill is its in-game tooltip; when skill is traited, trait in-game description takes priority, and tooltips (should and usually do) inherit changes.

Temporal Curtain’s tooltip says “grants swiftness, swiftness stacks duration”; it doesn’t grant swiftness and stack duration, thus the skill is bugged. Either the behaviour or the tooltip should be changed. Since we know how it used to work and we have our common sense, we understand that it’s the behaviour that got lazy-fixed and not the tooltip.

The reason to why the behaviour is bugged is similar to why pulsing Symbol of Swiftness may not grant swiftness.

How it works now:

• 00:00:00.0 Symbol of Swiftness gets cast.
• 00:00:03.1 Player enters Symbol of Swiftness. No swiftness applied.
• 00:00:03.9 Player leaves Symbol of Swiftness. No swiftness applied.
• 00:00:04.0 Symbol of Swiftness pulses. Nobody gets swiftness as nobody is in the AoE.

How it should work:

• 00:00:00.0 Symbol of Swiftness gets cast.
• 00:00:03.1 Player enters Symbol of Swiftness. Player receives swiftness. A field_id variable is tied to player_id and a timeout of 1 second is set to a grant_buff(player_id, field_id) function.
• 00:00:03.9 Player leaves Symbol of Swiftness.
• 00:00:04.0 Symbol of Swiftness expires.
• 00:00:04.1 Function grant_buff(player_id, field_id) checks if player_id is in field_id. As the field has expired, the function terminates and no swiftness is granted.

That said, I clearly understand that if every AoE had this correct mechanics, the skill lag amounts would’ve skyrocketed. That’s why we have the current “lazy” pulse system. However, temporal curtain is not an AoE, and due to its specific mechanics, we still need ANet to implement a fix for it. Note to self: I should probably test the invis+veil thing.

Pyroatheist.9031:

This is actually definitely a bug. Way long ago all phantasms used to be this way, and they changed it so that they require a target to actually cast, and they forgot that underwater combat is a thing in this game.

See my previous definition of a bug. This is an annoyance and inconsistent behaviour. Since we never had an in-game description of where it should or should not get cast, we cannot say that it is a bug.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Can you please provide evidence as to which demographics actually spend real money on gems? Take your time, I’ll wait.

I would be ultra happy if ANet rep jumped in and shared some playstyle-to-gem curves, even the most vague ones * hint-hint *, but we know they won’t.

However I believe what I say is true for two reasons:

• Psychology and common sense. No matter what you do, you get tired of it after 1000 iterations. If you do the most grindy and profitable and easy things, you grind enough gold not to buy any gems with real money. If you’re here for mindless zerging and grinding, I highly doubt that you’re with a mature mindset of consciously supporting the game you love; what you actually do is come to the forum to whine how every patch is the worst ever because you have to dodge, to eat dirt cheap potions and to help other people.
• This is actually what ANet is doing at the moment. They do not generally revamp old content, but the things they add (Tequatl, Wurm, recent LS events) are anti-zerg to a large degree. You have to learn mechanics and you have to coordinate to succeed. I really feel they’re trying to cater to those people who like challenge – and if they do it, it means that it has proven to be profitable. The amount of “cheap” newcomers is finite (as seen in financial reports), and dedicated players who are interested in the game is what they need at the moment and will need to hold on to in the future when other major titles hit the market.

timmyf.1490:

I’m shocked that the same development team that figured out loot sharing and shared resource nodes and downscaling and dynamic events and all of the other “cooperate-don’t-compete” functionality would seem so lost when building new content and new mechanics.

I understand that your goal is to bring players together in game. You are (mostly) succeeding in bringing us to the same area, but when we get there, the result is toxic and non-productive.

I do feel they’re trying to change content (and they come up with really nice and enjoyable things actually), but just as you, I am surprised that at the same time they fail at some simple and well, pretty predictable points. To an extent, it feels like GW2 devs are good at coming up with excellent “spherical horse in a vacuum” mechanics, but are terribad at dealing with real-world human psychology.

I remember trying to lead the Lyssa event -

[Seal of Union] next
[Spark of Ilya] next
[Song of Lyss] needs defense
[Seal of Union] needs defense
surpressed
surpressed
surpressed
event chains failed

Not the best way to promote cooperation in an MMO.

- If only people learned to dodge and those 10-20 people searching for Peter the Chatspam and doing the half-hour Cannoneer came to help us, we would’ve managed to take down the last knight…
- You selfish elitist, don’t force people to play how they want!!11oneone
- Where is Peter?
- But you want and can do Peter and events for 60 minutes out of 60, and we can do knights (the thing REQUIRED to experience the finale of the whole LS and to get Scarlet’s chest) only for 15 minutes out of 60! Why can’t we play how WE want and have 4 knight fights per hour? How fair is that?
- silence
- Where is Peter?

That’s what I get from the chat every now and then during the Battle for LA. The reason for it is yet another game concept with contradicting goals in a whole-map event. The issues of this release as I see them (as of current patch and bugs aside) are as follows:

• The knights do not scale, thus requiring the whole map to participate.
• Searching for Peter, doing half-hour Cannoneer and other events is allowed to be done during the knights phase, and because of the non-scaling issue, the 10% percent of people doing these events (who “want to play how they want”) put the experience of the other 90% of players (who “want to play how they want”) at risk.
• Constant rewards for any amount of defeated knights do not really motivate people to try doing more knights if they feel they can fail. This is a controversial issue however, because a) it also can be a penalty-free motivation to do the event for low-pop servers, and b) the largest reward (Scarlet’s chest) is still there as a motivation.
• As mentioned earlier, during the Holo fight, both In Tune and No More Tricks achievements are counter-productive: the easiest way to obtain them is to hit the Holo a couple of times and then disengage for the rest of the fight. Anti-AFK lasers made it harder to AFK, but people who want to exploit achievements can still scale the event but not contribute to DPS.
• And even if you want to contribute throughout the event but get the achievements, you will still be counter-productive because a) not getting hit by scorches requirement means that you will spend ~75% of time without the attunement (you’re cut from it) and thus would not be doing full damage, b) requirement of hitting only with attunement makes engineers, mesmers, rangers and necros highly inefficient as their minions/pets/turrets/illusions count against them and often cannot be controlled.

Now how I see this event should’ve been done:

• At :55 minutes, the map-wide text changes to: “Scarlet’s knights are being configured for assault. All current events will halt in: [-5 minute counter]”
• At :00, all current events stop, their mobs (including Peter) despawn, the map-wide text changes to: “Knights are assaulting Lion’s Arch! Static Knight Health: [hp] Dynamic Knight Health: [hp] Synergetic Knight Health: [hp]” All players can see what is happening and understand they should go help fight knights (and then get their 5 champ boxes and cores and Scarlet’s chest).
• At :15 or when all knights are defeated, events and mobs spawn back/reset. People can decide whether they go help slay Scarlet (extra 15 minutes for average organised fight) or farm mobs for another 45 minutes. All people who participated in any knight event get champ boxes (2-4-6) based on the amount of the defeated knights, plus a chance of cores.
• Optional: unslain knights can still be slain for another 5-10-15 minutes, not giving event exp/karma/champ boxes, but still giving a chance of cores. That would also motivate more people to participate in the event even in overflows and low-pop servers.
• “In Tune” achievement is replaced by “In Sync” achievement, which requires players to kill 3 colored microholos together – which is a mechanic that simplifies further fighting and thus is productive.
• “No More Tricks, Scarlet” achievement is replaced by “Not in Charge” achievement, which requires players to kill all ultraviolet microholos during the last stage before they charge the main holo – which is also productive. Now I know some people are always against achievements which rely on other players, but between an AFK achievement and a group one I choose the latter. Furthermore, unlike Warden dodge achievements, these cannot be abused and always lead to a shorter/easier fight.

EFWinters.5421:

OP read your own post and the answer lies within:

Option 1: Cater to 4 players.
Option 2: Cater to 7 players.

So?

The answer is:

• cater to the 7 lazy zergers/AFKers for the first 50 bucks they paid – which is already done by personal story, story dungeons, world bosses etc.;
• and then cater to the other 4 dedicated players who want challenge to stay in game and who will provide X amount of new 50 bucks gem purchases with new story items in the store.

I do agree that average player skills (as confirmed by the knight’s pull once again) are rather low; but this skill level is generally taken into account when designing any content (apart from Tequatl and Wurm), and that’s why we had the 1200 citizens limit and not 3500 (and even the 1500 one was changed). However what is not taken into account is the ability of players to AFK and do non-contributing tasks in such amounts that they eventually lead to failure. Or rather, the measures to naturally discourage zerging are not thought out enough.

Let’s think for example of why the children event was infamous. The reason is simple: it’s the event closest to the main entrance, thus the most lazy zergers can farm it without spending “unnecessary” time (and money!). A simple solution to that:

• All waypoints are uncontested; zerg can travel freely and easily split throughout the map to contribute to any event they want.
• All waypoints cost 0 copper to use. With the previous election promotions in mind, this makes sense lore-wise: while Mister Evon is “contributing” to equip the army, Ellen pays for waypoints.
• If contesting was that important story-wise, some waypoints might have got contested, with their uncontesting saving extra citizens, creating extra events and further splitting the zerg.

I find it amusing that when I see dead people lying around, it’s usually Great Jungle Wurm Slayers, Sunbringers and Acclaimed Achievers.

Probably these people are dead tired of walking.

By any case, do you have any of the mentioned skills in the underwater skill bar? If yes, what are their places? I heard somewhere that the same skill which is in different slots on terrain and underwater bars may be part of the problem.

Shades.4572:

How awesome Lion’s March!!

I just want this pun to get in game

And thanks for the thread, it’s convenient to check it and plan when you can’t log in. If any dev reads this: if you had the current promo listed on this page straight away, that would have been helpful.

People from failed knights claimed they got chest when other knight succeeded. That’s nice and motivating.

Haven’t tried the anti-AFK fix; sounds good on paper, but I hope it leaves some space to go out of combat and switch weapons/skills (such as the Portal skill mesmers are using currently to unstuck the constantly falling people; or condi staff to focus with pull for UV-phase).

I do not actually like the “no other knights’ health” thing though. I suppose it was a cut-fix for the empty HP counters, but if you are able to put them back by the next hotfix (the one curing blue HP reset), that would be great.

Or if the HP bar itself is the problem, how about putting available calibration slots for other knights there then? This will loosely serve the main purpose (inform those players who are close to finishing their knight of who needs help). It is not really productive to write % and slots in chat while dodging the AoE.

BTW, having those calibration slots displayed map-wide would be excellent – especially when late for event or if rallying from WP.

Tyler Chapman.1832:

Thanks guys all these issues that are bugs have been investigated and logged. Some of these will be seen fixed as soon as the feature build, others, awhile longer. Won’t have much time to continually update this thread but thanks for the visibility and persistence!

/thumbs up
-Tyler

Tyler, thank you very much for your post! A simple acknowledgment by the devs helps to ease tension a lot. If some of the bugfixes even make it to the next patch – great!

Tyler Chapman.1832:

all these issues that are bugs

I always had a feeling I called the thread “broken skills”… Ah well I do agree that some points in the list may not be actual bugs, but as skcamow said, they are here because they feel like broken or too user-unfriendly. If after the patch devs are able to jump in and list things which are working fully as intented and will not be changed, that would be appreciated.

Pyroatheist.9031:

skcamow.3527:

Thanks for the response Powerr.

I have a question regarding your comment, “all these issues that are bugs have been investigated or logged.”

Would be possible for you to let us know which of the items in the list are indeed known bugs?

The documented items are there because it seems to us like functionality is impaired in some way. Some of them are obviously bugs, but others are not. It would be very helpful to know if some of these listed items are intended behavior so we can cease discussing them in a bug related context.

4, 7, 8, 9, and 13 are not bugs, they are complaints. I’d love to see them changed, but there’s a big difference between a bug and a complaint.

Cannot completely agree with you.

• #4 Temporal Curtain. This is a bug. The tooltip says: “Create a wall of energy that grants Swiftness to allies who cross it while crippling foes who touch it.” If I have swiftness and I cross the wall of energy, I am not granted swiftness. Thus, bug. BTW, Wiki says that cripple cannot be evaded; if that is still correct, I should probably list it as well.
• #7 Portal. Agreed, annoyance; however it was listed as a bug because we know many ranged skills have range indicators, and we know that ele conjured weapons have an icon with weapon duration, and that portal itself has an icon with number of uses left and portal active time once it is activated.
• #8 Illusions and invulnerable mobs. Agreed, annoyance.
• #9 Blink not blinking. This is a bug. The tooltip says: “Teleport to a target location.” The range indicator is green, I use the skill and I do not get teleported to target location. Thus, bug. The fact that this is not limited to mesmers is another story.
• #13 Warden’s Feedback. The Warden reflecting past its animation is a bug. The extremely short Temporal Curtain is an annoyance, as we expect it to work as Wall of Reflect but instead it often fails to reflect grenades at point blank from large versions of grenadiers.
• #25 Underwater Phantasms. This one as well is an annoyance and non-consistent behaviour (even though not in your list).

Pyroatheist and skcamow – thanks again for testing IC and MS, I’ll put the new info in the first post today.

Warkupo.1025:

If each person participating was responsible for saving 40 civilians, and I consider that a modest number given my level and what I was actually capable of doing, you would only ever need, at minimum, 37.5 players in the entire zone.

Well, that number depends on location. I based my estimate on my preferred location, the Western Ward Waypoint which I considered “medium” difficulty. It was not too easy as some “easy” no-escort eastern paths and not too unrewarding for solo players as “difficult” Hooligan’s Route, and I spent quite a lot of time killing mobs and stealthing NPCs running past them (which was rather fun because of the unique mechanics of Toxic Alliance cooperation).

But yes, I think that some sort of turning encouragements into more of micro-events similar to escorts and defends (which give loot AND exp+karma) or providing/requiring some sort of personal reward for citizens would have naturally split the zergers and encouraged AFKers to do more. With that in mind, the original 1500 number would have been easily obtainable, and even higher tiers could have been possible. The fact that the tier was lowered to 1200 from 1500 clearly shows us that devs underestimated the zerg mentality of the average map player base.

Ashen.2907:

Raising the participation requirements for event rewards should address any concern about, “idling,” players without labeling those who enjoy watching aspects of online games as exploiters.

You enjoy watching “aspects”? No problem, but the “aspects” you watched would be the only thing you carry out of the event areas. No AP, no loot for you, sorry. If it’s fine with you – it’s fine with me; but please be considerate enough not to do it in the main server as I and other 149 players come to play there and it is really hard to get in during LS releases.

Ashen.2907:

This is an interesting point. Perhaps people participating in zergs should be reported for AFKing because they are in zone in a manner likely to cause event failure.

Sarcasm aside, people participating in zergs should either be (properly) made a part of the global event or excluded from the global event reward altogether. As long as people are encouraged by both fight mechanics and rewards to zerg everything, people will keep coming to the forum to protect zergers because that is the path of least resistance and highest reward.

Kenshin.6154:

About this thread…Can someone lend me a hand for the triple face-palm?

You can try guesting to Deso, tagging the OP and then AFKing till event ends and you get the “Triple Face-Palm” achi

OZFugazi.6178:

the “event” itself encourages low level or new players (by up leveling for the event), clearly out of said 50 players (given the best test conditions) you should have at least 1/4 of that number NOT geared to the specific needs of optimal.

I brought an alt there once and tried to consume the Scarlet potion. Guess what? It required my alt to have level 80.

Sullesa.3052:

There is a group of 5 menders that patrol close to the blue knights spawn. Intercepting and killing them is a top priority. This is not a bug, it is a L2P issue.

Or a learn2readpatchnotes issue:

• Fixed an issue in which assault knights would reset health when targeting players at the edge of their engagement radius.

Agreed. I can wait more to play stable content, but I don’t want to waste (limited) time trying to do the content which might work or not instead of playing old content which works (or bugs of which I’m already aware of).

Ashen.2907:

If the people you are seeking to report for being AFK are saying anything at all in chat, including the message you quote, then they are, by definition, not AFK. You cannot type, “You can’t report me, there’s not an AFK option, you’ll get in trouble instead for a false report,” while, “Away From Keyboard.”

So technically they would be right. You would be sending a false report because you would be accusing them of something they have not done.

People call it “AFK” because it’s short. To be precise, it’s “idling” – which is actually abusing a game flaw for personal profit, thus exploiting.