Guild Wars 2

LOL …. Some of you guys should be in politics…..what a spin job.

/sarcasm…The game makes it too easy to group, it’s like I’m always in a team so my friends list stays empty, because it’s like everyone around me is my friend and trying to help me ……I don’t like that can you please fix that? …./sarcasm off……LOL

Come on guys 9 out of 10 MMO’s today give players a single player path to level cap and WoW was the game that virtually popularized that. There are a crap ton of Group encounters in the game and I bet all of you have been saved by another player coming to your rescue after you got one too many mobs on you…you don’t see that in most MMO’s.

The fact that there’s no kill stealing in the game inspires other players to hit the mobs that are on you and I’ve seen players countless times work their way to my “face down in the mud” body to give me a rez.

The social mechanics ANet implemented in this game basically emulate being in a group with every players near you. You share in the kill and rewards mutually.

I’ve been playing MMO’s since the beta days of UO and this thread reminds me of the arguments back in the day when some thought adding a mini-map was dumbing down the genre, or how instancing was going to be the ruination of the MMO as we know it.

Vanila WoW was cut throat, and the community was horrible. You had all kinds of people wanting to be your friend so long as you could give them a leg up, but once they found a better home and a guild of level 60 players starting to raid you were yesterday’s news. Guilds fractured on a daily bases as the level capped players ran off to join bigger guilds and or drama over loot drops fractured so called friendships …. Yes please lets have more of that, some of you guys really look back at vanilla WoW with rose colored glasses.

About the only thing I’ll agree with is they need to tune up the difficulty on a few encounters so people are really challenged into taking advantage of the cross profession combo mechanics.

In terms that the OP is using with Carrot = Endgame gear grind, I can’t agree more. I do however think it’s a great idea to add in more (OPTIONAL) fluff items or achievements be that in the way of skins, mounts, non-combat pets, housing or guildhalls.

The game is just bloody fun to play and I can’t set it down.

I’d like to see constantly running events that step up and down an event latter in a number of the mid to higher level zones. I know these are supposed to be in the game but if they are they are not telegraphed to the players in a way that makes them understandable and rewarding.

These could become the equivalent of open world dungeons.

The idea goes like this….
Pirate Camp…..>…..forward outpost take over…..> …..Burning of crops/Killing cattle …>..Invading and takeover of town.

So players will find the above event change always in motion at some stage and can join in at any time.

The objective is to push the Pirates back to their camp and take it over for a set amount of time.

If players do not interact with the event the Pirates Push their way into town and take it over, if the player Push back they eventually drive the Pirates back to their camp on the beach.

Once there however the Pirates do not give up easily and bring in Champions to challenge the players. The players must defeat a series of champions and then a final boss.

The rewards for defeating the final boss could be tokes to trade in for a special look gear set.

Once the boss is defeated the Pirates slowly build forces again as the players move on and the event chain starts all over again.

I have a Guardian I’m leveling now, I’ll give this a try.

Thanks for sharing Silentstorm

The Wiki is great and all, but I’d like to see in-game improvements that would better help players find the event s through the UI.

As a thought it might be cool to have a green circle pop up on your map a set time ahead of the event starting, then change to orange when the event is in progress.

The other thing I think could be improved on is you will often see an (X) through a Gate waypoint indicating it’s being contested but players often don’t pick up on the fact that that’s a dynamic event because they don’t get an orange circle on their map.

I would also like to see dynamic events map wide especially if I have the map 100% completed.

As it is now, and what I’ve done and I see many others doing is finding an area were 3 to 5 events start and just rerunning them for 5 to 10 levels.

I’ve put on 10 levels in an evening just bouncing between the same 3 or 4 events, but that’s what happens when players can run around a map for 15 to 20 min’s and come up dry on dynamic events.

They end up taking a bit less XP and Karma and doing the events they know of as a trade off from running around a map aimlessly hoping to bump into a new event and getting Zero Xp and Zero Karma.

I was going to post this in the suggestion area of the forums but would like to get others feedback on this.

The real gem of this game is how the dynamic events bring the player base together to work on mutual objectives, but often there seems to be a lack of active Dynamic events in certain parts of the world.

I’m now on my second pass of the game and I’ve seen all the Heart quest so my personal challenge this time through is to play as many of the dynamic events as I possibly can, but they can be somewhat a challenge to find and understand.
There seems to be hot spots for one-off dynamic events at some points in the game and other areas just seem void of them.

As I understand it many dynamic events are a push system. If players are not there to affect the event it pushes to the next step and then the next. As a result shouldn’t these chaining events always be active at some stage as they chain up and down their event latter?

As it is now it seems I can wander some maps for 30 min. or more looking for an event to join and then sometimes either be too late for it or have to wait for it to catch the attention of other players in the area.

Are events not being properly conveyed to the player’s maps? On my second pass of the game I’m noticing some changes, (towns on fire some camps now occupied by mobs that had NPC’s in them) but no queues on my map indicating that there is an event to push back against? Is this working as intended?

Now that the player base is fanning out wouldn’t it be a good idea to increase the visibility of dynamic events on the player’s mini map?

As another suggestion to hold the spontaneous player groups together long enough for the next chain event to start it would be cool to have a one-off champion mob event spawn in the area. This would help to keep the group working together between the dead zones between chaining events.

I had my head buried in SWTOR hype, and then eventually the game over the last 3 years. Since SWTOR became a model for just about everything you never want to ever see done again in an MMO, I went looking for something else to scratch that MMO itch.

After researching GW2 a bit I really liked what I was hearing about the open world and how dynamic events would allow us to work together grouped or not.

GW2 just had a number of common sense MMO game mechanics that no one had done before and I had to see how that was going to work out.

Pros – Action based combat, All skills have a purpose, you don’t end up with a wall of skill buttons and then get stuck in a rut of using only a 5 skill rotation anyway, Skills attached to weapons allows players to try vastly new combat techniques with the same profession (Class). Outstanding social mechanics with dynamic events, shared quests, and allowing each profession to combat rez. All quest objectives are shared, drops are player specific, and harvesting nodes are phased to the player. Mobs give XP to all that help in the kill. Entire open world feels multi-player with players spontaneously working together in concert. Very well done cross server economy system and useful crafting with a discovery mechanic. No barrier for PvP – WvW if you want to just e-sport you can do that right from level (1).
Overall fun combat, outstanding music and visuals make GW2 a hard game to set down.

All other MMO’s should look hard at the social mechanics at work in GW2 and take a lesson on how game mechanics shape community.

Cons – Dynamics events seem to be clustered together in “Hot Spots” where other parts of the game world are void of them, I’m not sure if this is a bug or by design. Champion classified creatures have no loot drops and are being avoided unless they are attached to a Dynamic event win condition. Some PvE progression centric players may find endgame lacking a gear centric latter to climb. Guild centric and RP focused players may find a lack of Mounts, Housing or Guild based PvE achievements concerning. The length of the path to a legendary Weapon may be discouraging to some. The visibility of Bots can be very annoying to many players, although there presence is less impacting on players then other MMO’s over time they could swing the economy in unnatural and destructive ways. ANet seems to be very slow at addressing the botting issue effectively.

I think it’s almost impossible to answer this question objectively; I’ve been playing MMO’s since before we had world maps and quest systems.

In fact I can remember forum arguments about how adding an in game map was dumbing the MMO genre down…..LOL or how instancing was going to ruin the genre.

So what would I think of GW2 as a noob MMO player, well like all MMO’s the game does a crap job of explaining itself, the information regarding builds.., skills.., damage types.., conditions.., and basically everything you need to know to make informed decisions about building out your character you have to go digging for.

I think I would be impressed with the responsive controls and quite please how the game brings players together into spontaneous teams. I think I would also be impressed by the helpful community both in game and on the forums.

The leveling curve would be about right to hold my attention up to endgame but I would likely perceive the karma gear and other long term goals as too far away to grasp. Becoming disillusioned and discouraged I’d either set the game down or re-role a new toon based on if I had gotten my fill of the combat and story yet or if I had picked up on the WvW action.

So basically just like seasoned MMO Players they would go through what I call the 5 MMO player phases.
Anticipation and Wonderment
Excitement and Joy
Confusion and Determination
Exhaustion and boredom
Disappointed and disillusionment

Well it appears we have a number of people confused as to why Champion are not rewarding players appropriately for the time and effort it takes to bring one down. And this is throughout the entire game.

Could we please have a Developer comment, are they working as intended? Is this something being looked into? Do they have a loot table at all? If a Champion is put into the game that’s not connected to a DE why do they not reward players with a loot chest?

I personally think the fun factor of the level 80 open world zones could be greatly improved if something was done about this, so it would be great to hear something from ANet one way or the other if this is by design or not.

Edge.4180:

Truth is, these are all just symptoms of a problem people have been complaining about since beta. What you’re all saying (and I agree with it) is that the content in this game is much more fun when there are fewer people around.

I have an addendum to this the mechanics of the game breakdown when more than 40 players show up to an event. I can’t fault the game for that this is primarily a symptom of the launch wave making it’s way through the game for the first time.

This game actually plays best when you have between 15 to 25 players working on events in the general area, less than that and the pace of the game slows down, more and the big events start to feel trivial.

Unlike other MMO’s where 90% of the open world content can become trivial with just 2 players working on it.

As the OP pointed out now that the population of the game is more fanned out the early zones play much better the second time round.

Another side effect to giving these open world Champion creatures the best drops is it would make it tough on botters since they rove the map and they take a more logical effort on the part of the player then to stand in one spot and spam an AOE over and over again.

At least I’d feel like I was playing with other players then just assisting the bot camps in the level 80 zones.

Op, I can agree with most of what you said except for giving ANet a Pass on the use of a Random Number Generator to preserve the rarity.

This game fixed a lot of systems to save MMO players from the things they came to hate about the MMO genre the most, from kill steeling to node jacking….. add RNG to the list.

I personally would have thought ANet would have been smart enough to realize MMO players who live and die by RPG rule sets are all about the percentages and the odds.

When you give MMO/RPG players a set of dice with the dots rubbed off effectively making the success or failure based completely on a random event (and not giving them a system to affect to odds) you effectively break the game for them.

Relying on a random chance event to being the precursor to obtaining the most sought after prizes in the game is just a total fail as far as I’m concerned. It’s a black hole money sink of kitten’ing you over that wipes all effort put into it by one RNG is no fun.

I personally think mounts would be a good addition to the game, we need to lose the argument that we can’t have it because it wasn’t in GW1 … come on if we held the game to that then we wouldn’t be able to jump as well.

Likely however we will not see mounts, they could interfere with other mechanics set up to encourage spontaneous team play. While on foot you work through zones at a pace conducive to picking up dynamic events.

Fun is only relative to the individual and we all measure fun from our own unique perspective.

The problem however is not the fun factor it’s the motivation factor that’s lacking.

Now most players will take on one of these Champion characters once or twice, but as soon as you realize that you’re risking your skin and the climax of the encounter is to watch the mob fall over and disappear most will find something better to do with their time.
Now regardless of if you think Champion mobs are worth fighting just for the fun of it or not we all have bills to pay in the way of repair and travel costs. Because of this most players are naturally going to gravitate to content that pays off and help pays the bills.

The net result is the Champion mobs put in the game to spontaneously encourage multiplayer teams forming to take on the greater challenge of taking them down are not working as intended.

Instead the bulk of players are learning to just avoid them for content that has a pay check. So even the players that would like to just take on the Champion mobs for the fun of it have a hard time finding others to enjoy the content with.

I agree Champions need to have better rewards; they have become nothing more than obstacles to avoid at this point.

@wollie.9751
Just to be clear here, NO ONE is asking for a gear tread mill here. It’s about rewards verses effort, and content that’s in the game but getting ignored because players gravitate to what is rewarding.

I don’t care if Champions drop crafting mats or coin they need to add a loot table appropriate to the time it takes to down one or otherwise they will be continued to be just obstacles to be avoided.

People are getting bored at 80 because there is nothing exciting about the level 80 zones. At this point players hang out in outpost doorways with a stick of bubble-gum holding down their (1) key.

This is largely due to the fact that there is nothing more exciting to do that will either drop T6 crafting mats or earn a bit of karma. At this point its more rewarding to stand in one spot killing waves of trash then it is taking on a Champion and if you ask me that’s upside down and backwards to the way it should be.

And that leads into the Karma tread mill end game debate. If you want that epic set of Karma gear for a quarter of a million in Karma that equates to about 3 months for an average player standing in doorways in mobs of players with there (1) key stuck down…..not much fun.

So this is about the fun factor and putting some verity into the end game zones so people that Really want to play the game can have some fun.

That’s precisely the FUN factor that’s missing, without the anticipation of the reward drop the extra effort to take down these champion creatures becomes ….mah. I’ve felt this throughout the entire game. I thought at first they must be broke then I had to ask in chat about it … I thought I was doing something wrong, then I found out that’s just the way it is.
But now at 80 it really takes the fun out of the game when the level 80 zones are just camping outpost doorways hitting the one key killing wave after wave of trash mobs to farm karma or crafting mats.

I’m not disappointed with the game, this seems like something relatively easy to fix. It would make these end game zones a whole lot more fun if the champion mobs wondering around that need 5 to 10 players to take down had a decent loot table and rewarded a bit of karma.

It would give players something worthwhile to do as a group and a whole lot better them scratching their kitten waiting for the next event driven mob to swarm an outpost.

From what I understand the game does this already, for WvW it simply dynamically adjusts a player’s level to level 80, similar to how the dynamic leveling system will scale a players level down to an areas maximum level plus one. Equipment, traits, skills, and everything else follows along. So a level one player will simply be a level one player with the effective stats of a level eighty player.

Not having as much fun with the game at 80 now the focus is off of obtaining levels and shifted to maxing out my gear. It’s obvious players motivations in open world PvE have shifted to small pockets of the world where they can either farm Karma or kill high volumes of trash mobs for a chance at gear or crafting mat drops.

Meanwhile we have all these Elite \ Champion labeled giants walking around that no one has any interest working as a team largely because they often don’t drop loot.

These Elite and Champions creatures are just window dressing and pointless for anyone to spend any time on. The math just doesn’t work out, kill one Giant Champion for one chance at loot (or no loot at all) or kill 10 trash mops in the same amount of time and get 10 chances for the same loot. People are naturally going to take the 10 chances vs the one right?

I would really like to see some motivation given to players to take on these larger mobs intended for opportunities for grouping by giving them guarantied random loot drops even if there a bag of T6 crafting mats to a rare opportunity at an epic piece of armor.

I was mildly annoyed by the lack of loot drops from the Elite \ Champion labeled giants creatures I killed on my way to cap, but now that we can see one every 100 yards or so in the level 80 zones with players just avoiding them their lack of rewarding motivation has become glaringly apparent.

So lets jazz up the end game a bit ANet and give these Elite \ Champion some cool Drops even some RARE T6 crafting mats would be a good start.

I highly respect ANet for the work they’ve done on the game. They defiantly made the right move in the MMO genre to fix the glaring issues that yesteryear MMO’s had.
They really did their homework to build a game where the world feels like more than just a lobby you tool around in waiting for a group or PvP.

With Dynamic events driving players forward and the way they get broadcasted on the map spontaneously brings players together to work on the objective at hand, and many many other little features that gently socially condition players to work cooperatively together.

They however could have done better on their end with security and not having the forums up at launch when they had the entire beta period to get them up and running was a bit of a downer are area’s I think most would agree they could have done better on.

I think GW2 is a huge success and the step the MMO genre needed. It`s the first MMO I`ve played in a long time (maybe ever) that I felt I was in a mutually massively cooperative environment.
Despite some of GW2`s rough edges and early launch problems this game solves so many problems the genre had I`m certain it will become the model future MMO`s will be built on.
Overall the game gets high marks from this 15 year MMO veteran, so I crown it a huge win for MMO gaming.

I remember a MMO developer once talking about the Skinner Box progression in most MMO`s today and pondered why MMO players felt the need to have ever lasting progression. He compared them to FPS games that get played for years because there fun ……that’s where MMO`s need to get to and GW2 takes us in that direction.

Personally I think combat needs to continue to evolve into a more tactical player skill focused system to give players that opportunity to really improve over time.

The progression players feel in FPS games are their own real world skills improving over time and testing that skill against other players makes them fun.

We need to take a step back from the table top progression systems MMO`s are modeled after and come up with a hybrid system that works player skill into the mix.

You know I was about to just post get over it …or it just bow dude ….but for crying out loud it’s a MY LITTLE PONY’s Short bow …… Come on ANET this is ridiculous are you guys giggling in the back room every time you see a player with one of these equipped?

Seriously is this the best you could do ….. it shoots rainbows …..what does it use for ammunition Lollypops.

Rangers are going to be using this thing so let`s theme it appropriately, it should be carved out of Heart wood dark and green , replace the Unicorn with a wolfs head with wings of an eagle for the tips and it should shoot the spirits of the forest not rainbows.

TIP: If you want to meet new people and group up the best time to ask for a group is after you fight your way to someone’s lifeless body and give them a Rez. While you have their attention and their giving you a grateful “TY”, pop the question.

Start a Guild or find a guild where the theme is group centric. This thread alone implies there are a number of people that are looking to have a more social experience, so hook up and build a guild of likeminded people. Like all MMO the social experience is somewhat up to the player.

The games PvE mechanics are built to provide a socially cooperative experience instead of pitting players against each other and squabble over resources. Beyond this I don’t know what more the developers could do to provide a catalyst for groups.

Jestunhi.7429:

If fighting alongside someone outside of a group isn’t social interaction then nor is fighting alongside someone in a group.

There is no difference except his health is now on the left of your screen.

I have to agree with this, I think this game is more social than any other MMO to date. You simply are working on objectives together with everyone in the area.

The games mechanics mimic group play without actually needing to be in a group the only difference is you don’t see a row of health bars down the left side of your screen.
You actual see the social mechanics at work every time in mid fight someone tries to give you a Rez or lays down an AOE and other change their tactics to take advantage of a combo maneuver.

I personally don’t need someone texting about their cat in a chat window to feel like I’m having an interactive social game experience. The social aspects of the game come through on a much more tactile manner than any other MMO I’ve played.

I simply always feel like I’m having a multiplayer experience when other are nearby, in fact the only time I start to not enjoy the experience is when there are fewer players to fight alongside.

The simple solution as always if you want to have a more traditional grouping experience is to find an active guild to hook up with.

I don’t think that it’s the mechanics of the game that are making players appear antisocial; I think it has more to do with how popular voice communication has become.

I may be working with others in the area I’m in but most of the time I’m in a VOIP chat channel with 50 other players in my guild.

Using text chat to communicate with other players also becomes problematic as MMO combat becomes more action and reaction based.

I also have to agree with the above poster, I never accept a random invitation to group from someone that hasn’t sent me a tell first.

Shared loot and experience is the best thing to happen to the MMO genre in years, trust me you do not want to go back to the cut ‘n’ paste mechanic of mob tagging and rewarding only the player that hits the mob first.

A mob tagging mechanic simply makes an MMO play worse the more players that are in the area with players kill stealing and stepping on each other’s heads to get ahead.
In GW2 everyone in the zone is essentially working as a team regardless of if you tagged them to join a group or not.

This is changing the way MMO players play the game. You will see people go out of their way to give a player a rez or just spontaneously follow you and start playing in a way that compliments your combat style to proc. Combat combo’s.

NO, if you change this mechanic and force players to compete against each other for mobs and loot drops you would change the cooperative nature of the community.

If you are the type of player that needs to see a list of player health bars down the left side of your screen to feel you are interacting with others join an active guild or become the one to send out group requests.

Masterpyro.4310:

That’s a good idea, however I have seen cases where people with innapproriate names are suddenly changed to something random. You would never be able to login again cause you’d have no idea what your name was.

Also, Mike. Are you guys permanently black listing those IPs as you see them or waiting til they try all their passwords to add to your new password blacklist? I think taking out their botnets would be more effective than building a library of passwords that I hope to god you arent saving in plain text or that any of your employees can ever read

I’m not suggesting your displayed forum name become your account name only the method for creating a unique forum name should be adopted for ensuring the user also creates a never before used account name.

Hi Mike,
I’m sure this outrageous hacking has all been a frustrating experience for your side of the fence as well as the users that got hacked, and I’d like to make a suggestion.

No pointing fingers, this is strictly in the interest of better security, every time I make this suggestion the thread gets deleted (not locked out right deleted )

I really feel there is a flaw in using a person’s email as there account name, my email is the one gateway to my online presence I make (many make) public, and often is not encrypted in web site data bases.

So once I have a hacked data base from a game forum or Sony or Blizzard, all I have to do is get my own GW2 account and start changing my email address over and over again checking each one of the emails on my list until I get a hit telling me that the email is already in use.

Now I have a confirmed GW2 user name because I know it’s the same as the persons email address, half my work is done. Now if I’m a good hacker I have data bases from multiple sources and I have several passwords commonly used and associated with this email address now I just have to try them one by one until I get in.

So why not help users protect themselves by making sure there account can not be associated with any other game, fan site, or account they may have signed up to in the past.

When a user creates an account let them pick a user name as an example “Gw2Logun” now just like you did for the forum names randomly generate the rest for them as an example “Rv42” so now my User Name is Gw2Logun.Rv42.

Since the User Name “Gw2Logun.Rv42” never existed until “right now” it renders any data a hacker may have from other sources useless because neither the email nor the password from any of their lists can be associated to this new account name. You can still ask the user to authenticate the account with a valid email address but this does not associate the account name to previously used passwords unless ArenaNet themselves get hacked.

This would effectively reduce these attacks using stolen hack data to be as ineffective as brute force attack.