Guild Wars 2

joneirikb.7506:

@Lord Kuru

The name Guild Wars is actually for background/lore/fluff reasons. Though it looks they want to strengthen that aspect a bit in the exp.

Oh, of course, I just thought it was pretty ironic. In any case, I often see people suggesting making WvW based around guilds and guild alliances, but what I’ve observed from T3 all the way down to T7 is that most players are pugs and not running with guilds most of the time. T1 and T2 may be different, of course.

Pikka.6023:

Let players fight for their guild, not for their server. Let guilds form a limited number of alliances such that they are more likely to be on the same team on a map, and less likely to be opponents.

How many of the players on your server are essentially pugs, with very few fellow guild members who play WvW?

In my experience — in T3 and below — that’s most players. Sure there are a couple big(ish) guilds per server, but most of the population are pugs. Despite the name Guild Wars, not much of this game is guild based.

Interesting! I was told they turn faster way back when, and always assumed it was a known fact. Illusions are cool.

It feels like the treb skins during this festival turn faster (which makes sense since they’re tinted guild siege skins). Anyone who has more experience on trebs have the same feeling?

Riku.4821:

Simply stating they need one wont do much. Giving feedback would help more than stating it.

He’s letting Anet know that he doesn’t feel there is enough content to hold the game over until the expansion.

How is that not feedback?

I’d be surprised to see a feature pack before HoT. For whatever reason Anet struggles to create new content. I see Anet riding the “expansion is coming!!” wave all the way until it comes out.

Doktore Mundough.9261:

Is there anything that can be done about this, besides waiting for anet to cut their losses and merge servers? GW2 does not seem to be growing- it’s getting smaller every time I see it.

They already merged servers. Except they called it “megaservers” in order to avoid the stigma of the words “server merge.”

Lendruil.9061:

A start in restoring faith with absolutely zero effort would be giving us back the removed TA path.

Speaking of restoring faith, this would be a really good gesture.

Thanks guys! It’s good to have times to shoot for, or at least compare to.

For dungeon pros, and not-so-pro: for whatever profession you run with, how fast is a good Arah p2 solo run (no exploits besides zerker gear)?

Do you keep track of how fast it takes to do each boss? What about DPS per boss?

I’m thinking of doing solo runs of this path (just for fun, not sure which profession yet — probably warrior or ele) and it’d be nice to have some sort of benchmark to work with.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Yes, but that also requires the absolute highest developer time investment, which makes it an impossibly slow turn-around. I’m hopeful we’ll see something good for us in HoT, but if not there, then not for a long time yet.

I don’t think something like fixing bugs is going to do anything. Not that it’s bad — aside from introducing new bugs — but what’s needed is new content and no amount of bug fixing is going to convince people that new content is coming.

(But while you’re at it, what about getting Brie’s terminal to reset to 100% health if you die so you don’t have to lie there for a minute waiting for that to happen.)

I wonder if Aetherpath is run as much as TA/ForwardUp was.

spoj.9672:

I actually feel sorry for the WvW specialist. Have you seen the welcome he got? I dont envy the task he has ahead of him.

Communication improvements are always good. And i trust Rising to do a good job communicating our feedback. The real question is whether the Devs actively take on the feedback given in the right way. But that is out of our hands and always has been. Atleast this way they are less likely to miss the core issues that concern us the most. It all depends on the devs in the end though.

Well the WvW forum got the equivalent of someone who’s run only a couple dungeons. Imagine someone like that as a specialist in this forum; what ideas might be forwarded to the devs? Pretty scary sounding.

Wanze.8410:

Lord Kuru.3685:

Wanze.8410:

Lord Kuru.3685:

So Anet has target prices for items such as ectos? … so the market isn’t really that free… so if you have an idea of what Anet’s target prices are, you can presumably make a killing when the prices move off of Anet’s target prices?

I dont think they have a precise target price for items, more like a range and they regularly check supply and demand. And I would assume that those ranges also vary depending on what new content they are about to send live in the coming months.

Yeah.. that’s probably right.

What about this: knowing they do interfere in the market means that when they don’t interfere, they feel the price is roughly ok. Silver doubloons, for example.

I would categorize putting silver doubloons on the loot table of gift of mawdrey and star of gratitude as interference.

Oh… didn’t know they were in their loot tables!

azyume.6321:

Servers like DH, HoD, SBI, NSP can queue 2 maps during NA prime time, even tier 6 can queue a map.

As far as I’ve seen NSP does not ever queue 2 maps outside of reset — and possibly not reset either (I rarely play reset). And it’s T3!

etrigan.4213:

Which leads me to believe that the numbers they are seeing in WvW do not warrant any new content.

Metrics can be great, but there’s always the danger of interpreting them wrong, which I think Anet does a lot.

The way I see it, numbers are low likely because of lack of new content, which leads to no more new content because numbers are low.

Wanze.8410:

Lord Kuru.3685:

So Anet has target prices for items such as ectos? … so the market isn’t really that free… so if you have an idea of what Anet’s target prices are, you can presumably make a killing when the prices move off of Anet’s target prices?

I dont think they have a precise target price for items, more like a range and they regularly check supply and demand. And I would assume that those ranges also vary depending on what new content they are about to send live in the coming months.

Yeah.. that’s probably right.

What about this: knowing they do interfere in the market means that when they don’t interfere, they feel the price is roughly ok. Silver doubloons, for example.

So Anet has target prices for items such as ectos? … so the market isn’t really that free… so if you have an idea of what Anet’s target prices are, you can presumably make a killing when the prices move off of Anet’s target prices?

Haven’t had it in a long while. Luck crafting trick killed it?

etrigan.4213:

Actually those seven servers are only overpopulated in WvW.

Actual server population is pretty even if we look at whatever “Very High” means.

We have four “Full” servers, three of them are T1, and the other had to fight hard for place #5.

Every other server is “Very High”(during NA EST at least), and it leads me to believe that its really just a matter of getting more PVE players into WvW.

I wouldn’t be surprised if “Very High” is inflated to sound better, like grade inflation. If you’re not giving metrics out to the public, it’d almost be foolish to not call your lowest population level “Very High.”

In any case though, you’re right, the goal should be to increase the overall WvW population, not declare defeat and consolidate those still playing WvW into fewer and fewer servers.

IMO the underlying problem is the staleness of WvW:

• lack of updates (new maps) and dev attention, combined with
• out of touch devs leading to failed updates (bloodlust ruins, EotM).

As we’ve seen, you can’t retain players this way.

I see no evidence Anet is doing anything about these two problems though, so maybe there is no hope?

Remember when you could go to Lions Arch to ask for help from your servermates in WvW? That’s dead and gone too thanks to megaservers.

It’s good this forum got an experienced dungeon player as specialist. Imagine if it were someone who doesn’t run dungeons and who doesn’t understand stacking and skipping!

Ultimaistanza.4793:

the krytan assassin.9235:

Lord Kuru.3685:

So now all the different varieties of each type of siege look the same. Superior ACs, guild ACs, regular useless ACs all look exactly the same. Lazy.

Although i much prefer the guild siege look over the normal siege look, i need to agree that this update was pretty lazy, atleast expected new ram+golem skins aswell. This is just copy paste and paint

I think you two are really undervaluing what was released for WvW. This event isn’t a massively hyped up event like a Feature Pack, Halloween, or Wintersday. In fact, it wasn’t even announced at all. The only activity it really has is Dragon Ball Arena which is from Dragon Bash and even the environment looks like resources they had from the Canthan district that they originally planed but scrapped.

Beyond that, when have they went through the trouble to change the looks in WvW? Pretty much only during the major reoccurring holidays like Wintersday and the first and third Halloween. Even still, the siege was never changed beyond the look of the projectiles. So, for ANet to actually include WvW in the festivities with differences in looks for an event this minor, I feel it’s really nice and undeserving of the comment “lazy”.

If all they’re going to do is cut and paste skins from guild siege and tint them red, then I’d prefer they spend those resources doing something else. The red lanterns at siege sites is an example of a real change. But the siege skins are not; in fact it’s a bad change because of the confusion caused by the recycling of guild siege skins.

A lot of people think server mergers (particularly of the lower tier servers) will fix the problems in WvW.

Unless the underlying problems of WvW are resolved, it’s just a band-aid, until populations decrease enough to require another merger; then another; then another.

I’m sure a lot of T1/T2 people don’t care what happens in the lower tiers but remember there are map caps. The fewer servers there are, the smaller the theoretical maximum WvW population, the fewer resources Anet can justify into the game mode. Before the time comes where mergers kill every server but those in T1 and T2, you can bet the entire game mode will be shut down. It is in the interest of T1 and T2 to keep the lower tiers alive and decently populated.

Don’t argue for server mergers. It’s not a viable long term solution.

And if a server merger is announced, that means there is no expectation of return to previous population levels (otherwise, it’d be stupid to merger). Basically, it’d be Anet saying “I give up.” That’s why there is such stigma in the MMO world against the words “server merger” and why we have “megaservers” instead.

Caveat: All of this is only if you think Anet has intentions of putting dev resources into WvW. If you think Anet intends to keep the current level of attention to WvW, you may as well argue for mergers because there is no long-term future for WvW, so you may as well make the short-term more fun.

This has been suggested (for years), and would solve the problem:

If you have more/better upgrades than whoever claimed the tower/camp, then yours overwrites theirs.

As for fixing the matchups:

Rewards are not going to work. Lack of rewards can turn people off the game mode, but they’re not going to bring people in: unless you go nuts and end up with EotM again.

Staleness of the game mode is the problem. That’s why populations have diminished so drastically. Rewards aren’t going to fix staleness.

You need new maps. You need them periodically. Say, every 6 months. You don’t have to spend a ton of dev time on them. Just keep them simple. You don’t need tons of gimmicks and fancy terrain all over the place like in the bloodlust area and EotM (and, from what it looks like, the HoT BL).

Keep the game fresh and people stay in the game. One new BL every four years is not going to cut it.

Did anyone suggest this in those listed threads? Probably not. Could it be that forum users have extremely low expectations of Anet, and so they don’t even bother to discuss options that take serious dev effort? I’d say that’s very possible.

So before even reporting on solutions to this problem, I think you need to give players a better idea of how much work the devs are willing to put into WvW so that they can give solutions that take this into account. We are currently assuming very little of the devs and our solutions reflect that.

How many of those who suggest server merges are actually in the lower tiers? How many of those are in T1 and T2, where that suggestion has very little effect on them?

What if I suggested we disband all T1 and T2 servers and spread them out into the lower tiers. I’m sure a lot of T3 and below wouldn’t mind this “fix” as it doesn’t damage their own servers. Does that mean this solution should even be entertained? Probably not.

You have to be careful with metrics and interpreting metrics. I don’t think counting forum posts to determine popularity of suggestions is a very good idea.

Marmatt.8590:

RoChan.1926:

Welcome and congrats on your position. Since I am the few that realize that your position is to facilitate communications between us and the devs… is there anything in particular you would like us to do in the forum ourselves to make it easier/clearer for reporting? For example, I am assuming you will be doing highlights of our forum’s concerns with suggestions and accolades we have made regarding those concerns. Is there some sort of format you would like however to make it easier to address things?

Thank you!

I really enjoyed the CDI format in which many of you participated in, it made things clear and concise on what people wanted while allowing for general discussions.

Topic Title:
Suggested Idea Format
Proposal Overview
<A short description of the proposal that is being put forward>
Goal of Proposal
<What problem are you trying to solve with your proposal>
Proposal Functionality
<How does your proposal work in regard in relation to the current design of GW2>
Associated Risks
<What risks or problems can you foresee with this proposal which you would like to have assistance on from other members of the community>
Please try to be as concise as feasible with your proposal.

This will allow me to make reports a lot faster, and it will allow me to make them more precise when calculating an overall consensus on the subject.

But, people do not have to follow this format! Please feel free to speak your opinion in whatever way you wish. I will be going through every thread, and making a report for each major issue that has been presented.

We done exactly this before. Several times. In fact every few months we get a new community manager who asks exactly this of us, and then nothing… until the new community manager comes as a replacement. You would think the WvW forum specialist would be more sensitive to this as it’s an extremely sore point within the community.

As for your stats that you posted:

Total hours: 2,500 WvW rank: 300 Total AP: 8,500 Total Kills: 5,700

You bring this out to show that you are experienced… so you’re not even aware these aren’t the stats of a WvW player?

On your ZoS application it says you’ve commanded for a year and a half, what’s your commander’s name? What are your thoughts on NSP’s current experience in T3?

I think you should be very specific when reporting about the desire for “new instanced, challenging PvE content,” that that means 5 man dungeon/fractal content and NOT Tequatl/SW/marionette content. I’m pretty sure when Anet speaks of challenging PvE content, they mean the latter and I think most people in this forum want more of the former.

So now all the different varieties of each type of siege look the same. Superior ACs, guild ACs, regular useless ACs all look exactly the same. Lazy.

Chris.3290:

Menaki.6329:

In my eyes T3 is an dead end since over an year. T3 atm kills the rest of the fun you actually have gotten. IoJ is just the last victim, I have lost the interest in wvw and in the game itself.

NSP and IoJ are more vocal about the disparity because it’s worse than ever, but T3 has been the meat-grinder since launch. The only balanced matches have been during seasons, or when an implosion comes down and hasn’t quite hit bottom yet.

I think the number of implosions that brought NSP to rank 8 are the real culprits for the problems. Before S3 any of the T3 servers could have done ok against T2; but they chickened out then went on buying sprees for guilds afterwards.

This. It’s interesting that NSP is now ranked 8th… all the way up from around rank 20… but it’s population has been relatively stable: NSP is definitely no bigger than a year or even two years ago. That’s how far WvW population has fallen.

Not sure why you think the different skins for siege weapons would lead to positive feedback. It’s extremely confusing when regular siege is replace by superior/guild siege skins. Especially since superior siege now also use the same exact skins. Sloppy.

They (still) have delusions of esports grandeur so that’s why they’re taking the MOBA bandwagon.

But with balance patches every 6 months (even if they were ok patches), that’s just not going to cut it.

As for WvW-style GvG. It’s pretty clear that’s never going to happen. It’s definitely not coming before the expansion (pretty much nothing will), and if it were coming for the expansion, they’d certainly be hyping it right now. So three years from now for the next expansion, maybe? Don’t bet on it.

If you’re primarily a WvW player and you buy the expansion, you’re telling them they don’t need to make content/fix hackers & trolls/fix bugs for WvW and you’ll still give them your money. At the very least, wait to buy it when it’s on sale.

I think it’s probably too hard for Anet to figure out how to fit the new currencies into the horrid grid that is the currency UI.

Nyspar.6103:

Here’s how much care there is for Dungeons
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/2-Tokens-In-Dungeons-Penalizing-Speed-Clears/first#post4759709

Wow. I wonder how many tokens I’ve lost as I don’t ever actually look at the rewards and simply assume they’ve done it right. Shoulda known better.

coglin.1867:

Deli.1302:

Life isn’t meant to be fair. If you are not enjoying the WvW on your server, either you pay and transfer or suffer the consequences of not doing so. Anet is unlikely to do anything about “dead” servers for a very long time, especially with an expansion on the way.

This sums it up nicely.

Videles.6759:

A lot of there customers are leaving because of this. So if they don’t care then they shouldn’t cry when customers leave. I’m about to quitte and ask for a refund to. Having 4:1 imbalance all the time is something they should fix. You already paid for the game. A lot people i know are not gonna purchase the expansion and a lot stopped purchasing gems. I think they have no idea the amount of kittened of customers they have about this and that its costing them money.

Prove it. Gayle recently posted about the population surging for some time now. Yet you claim to have better population metrics the the game developers?

I think they know precisely where their customers stand. How do you expect folks to listen to your perspective, when you make such large claims, that has so much evidence supporting the contrary?

You prove it. Because there’s no way population is surging. Unless, of course, they’re including EotM karma trainers in the numbers — which they’ve done in the past. They’ve given themselves a pretty bad reputation when it comes to trustworthiness.

Don’t worry, they’re moving more and more towards no loot drops at all (SW).

Hamster.4861:

Dont worry guise, we’re doing much better in T3 now than we’ve been doing in the past. The Green server only has just barely more points than the other two servers combined, as opposed to being at 15k points 4 hours into the match.

Looking at the map right now, 11:59 pm Friday, I think you spoke too soon (one server ticking +0, the other +20).

Snowreap.5174:

TL;DR – bad matchups can and do happen because math.

You speak as if unbalanced matchups are only an occasional problem that arise from the necessity for variety in matchups.

But unbalanced matchups are, in fact, the norm.

Why so many posts about this now? Because looking at all the expansion announcements, it’s clear that Anet has no plans to resolve this.

Dramen Maidria.1034:

Keep in mind when they said that they would not have been referring to anything in the expansion since this would have been directly against that policy we love so much. There is quite a bit we don’t know about the expansion yet, but from the recent updates it sounds like at the least fractals are being expanded. We just need to be patient. Some of the people I see posting that we are not getting new dungeons also said that there would never be an expansion. It seems like the CDIs were about getting input from us for material they were putting into the expansion, so it isn’t hopeless.

I think it’s a mistake to think their about face on expansions means they might make similar 180 turns on gameplay. The switch to the expansion model is probably purely a money thing, and likely that switch came from the orders of an MBA as opposed to a game dev.

I see zero reason to believe their view on game development has changed at all. In fact, from the various tidbits we know about the expansion, it seems pretty clear that the gameplay will be a natural extension of Anet’s current philosophy on game development.

And that philosophy is: “As long as you’ve grinded out the necessary prerequisites (Level 80, masteries), you can participate and succeed with minimal personal skill and effort.”

The way current content is designed, when your zerg succeeds you feel great because you contributed, but when it fails, you don’t need to take any individual responsibility because you’re just one guy in a big zerg (hypocritical, yes, but that’s human nature). So you never feel bad.

Anet’s target customers are those who want this kind of experience. And that’s why I don’t think there’s much chance of more small-party challenging content.

There is no way getting a Legendary after the expansion is going to be less grindy. Sure, the grind will be different from the grind you go through now, but it’ll still be (at best, just as grindy).

And it’s not like the expansion is coming out in a couple months. It could be out for the Christmas holiday season for all we know.

Purple Miku.7032:

It’s not an exploit in the sense that it’s abusing some sort of glitch/bug, but it’s an exploit in the sense that you’re taking advantage of something that wasn’t intended to be possible to do.

So in other words you won’t get banned for it, but because this is the most popular boss in all of dungeons there’s a lot of people, myself included, that absolutely hate the fact that this is possible to do and wish otherwise.

The main problem is that we know that if ArenaNet does anything about it, it’s not going to be pleasant. Think back to what they did with Malrona in TA up… they could’ve made it so that reflecting her projectile barrage attack doesn’t scale with damage from the poison when reflected but instead chose the easy/lazy route and made the attack unblockable/unreflectable. Inconsistency with one of the core mechanics of the game doesn’t really make a boss fight more interesting.

I and many others believe that if a day comes where they acknowledge this topic with Lupicus, they’re probably going to make his projectiles unblockable+unreflectable or something like that. While the warrior side in me thinks “haha that sounds FUN!”, I have to keep an open mind and understand that for mesmers/guardians that would be a total slap in the face.

They can probably make his projectiles emanate from a higher up location where the reflect walls can’t reach, but that’s probably way more work than they’d be willing to put in. I’d say unblockable and unreflectable is a very likely future for Lupi’s attacks.

As for the OP, the fact is that you’re not going to find many people who do dungeons for fun/challenge anymoe. They’ve been run so many times that people only do them for the gold/rewards; which means they just want to run them as fast as possible.

Naz.2607:

Am I missing something or does “more powerful infusions” sound like a need for more Upgrade Extractors, or new gear….

It’s quite reasonable to predict, given that

• they explicitly stated content will be gated by masteries, and
• they currently use infusions to gate fractals,

that infusions will be used to gate new content (for example, masteries might lead to the ability to craft infusions). And if you want a new build, you have to shell out for the Extractors.

It’s win-win for Anet since most people won’t recognize infusions as gear grind.

They’ve explicitly stated that they have no plans for new dungeon content… which makes sense since they appear to be completely focussed on the open world.

And looking at what they’ve been calling “challenging content” (Tequatl, Wurm, Marionette, etc.) it’s clear they’re not interested in creating gameplay that require individual players to learn their class well, but rather gameplay that challenges a large group’s organizational skills — where each individual player is basically a 1-pressing drone who needs only the ability to follow mapchat/TS instructions on where to stand when pressing 1.

You feel bad now, wait till you decide you need a new build with new gear.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

I see it as Death Penalty like in GW1. Sure, you could remove it by setting foot in town, for free, or carry items to mitigate it (which had gotten pretty cheap and easy to get by Year Five).

It was, however, an incentive to not play sloppy to avoid wasting your time. After all, if death has no consequence, there’s no motivation to change your behavior and just run headlong into the same obstacle until luck smiles on you in pity and lets you progress.

It’s not an incentive to not play sloppy. When your armor breaks, you curse yourself for forgetting to repair the last time you saw the NPC.

So all it does is condition people to repair every time they see a repair NPC; which makes it completely worthless as a game mechanic.

In the current model of armor repair, the only behavior that’s reinforced is for the player to remember to talk to the repair NPC every time he sees the NPC. That makes it a bad mechanic.

By the way, the in-game armor damage/broken graphic doesn’t even show all the relevant information: no backpiece info.

When one of the four T2 servers collapses, they are sure going to have a tough time of it as everyone gets their payback.

Forte.1245:

If I’m not mistaken the first rule clearly states:
While playing Guild Wars 2, you must respect the rights of others and their rights to play and enjoy the Game.
Technically, they infringed on my right to play and enjoy the game, correct? Either way, thanks for the quick reply! I hope this gets resolved soon.

On the other hand, the way they see it, you infringed on their right to get through the dungeon quickly.

Fact is that without the concept of “dungeon owner,” it’s majority rules in parties and you were in the minority.

Next time, create an LFG that says “will watch all cutscenes.”