Guild Wars 2

DivineBeing.2086:

Would we know the outcome of some matches? Sure, but honestly who wouldn’t like to play a game of basketball with Michael Jordan or golf with Tiger Woods? It would be fun to just say you “tried.”

People would like to play against Jordan or Woods because they respect their talent and skill, and the work they put into their sports. Higher tier servers are higher tier simply because of coverage and population. So I feel the two situations are very different.

1. For those who don’t like the stale matches in T1: Players stacked into T1 so hard that they have no competition in T2. Just deserts.

2. Anyone else somewhat disappointed that they calculated the matchup probabilities by running 10,000 simulations instead of actually doing the math?

cesmode.4257:

FeveredDreamer.2693:

I mean I’m glad to see that some attention might be paid to the subject, but it seems kind of laughable to discuss this right after the ascended armor gear grind is revealed. Hopefully something useful comes from the discussion but my expectations are decidedly low.

You know, I hadn’t thought about the timing of this. It is a curious thought, however. I’ll give Anet the benefit of the doubt and say it wasn’t intentional. I don’t think they thought “Well lets get ascended armor out the door, and then talk about it after the fact”.

I guarantee you it was intentional. If Anet is good at anything, it’s spin and looking like they care. They would not have been so foolish as to have such a topic right before releasing the next layer of vertical grind.

What we’ll be seeing is more and more people sticking to one build because they won’t want to grind out another set of gear. Imagine the rage when that one build is made obsolete by nerfs or new skills.

So Anet will have turned a very positive thing (addition of new skills) into a possibly very negative thing (can’t use new builds because of gear lock-in).

Ha! Back in my day, we had to do this once for each piece of gear that we wanted infused!

I remember doing the first mission that required infusions before knowing that I could get infusions! That was fun.

It’s interesting that we still remember these missions — I doubt we will remember fondly the Ascended gear grind we’re going through now.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

skullmount.1758:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Do you have data to suggest that players were not the reason for the progress?

To me, it’s just a coincidence.

Just like the voting between Ellen and Evon just happened to be 48 to 52% (iirc)?

Unless proven otherwise, it is coincidental.

But I have reasons to believe that the voting process was rigged from the beginning however my reasons are unsubstantial thus it remains as a theory.

My theory is that Ellen was already destined to win. How I know? Because Mai Trin already mentioned Scarlet prior to the election and we all know that Scarlet’s existence is connected to the Reactor’s explosion. I doubt that we would see Scarlet at the Fall of Abbadon fractal. So, for Evon to win, that would be a complete disconnect since Scarlet and Abbadon has nothing in common.

However the nightmare tower can be purely coincidental.

Your assumptions are killing you. We know Scarlet is connected to the Reactor’s explosion now because they’ve released the fractal. But there is no reason to believe Anet had the storyline set at the time of the election.

Considering the amount of time between the election and the release of the fractal, they could easily have come up with their story in that time.

If Evon had won, they would have come up with another storyline. (Though Kiel winning was a certainty, considering how she was portrayed in comparison to Evon.)

As for the 52% to 48% win, considering the antitoxin meter was faked, I wouldn’t be surprised if Anet made up those percentages to make it seem the election was close and thus make players feel they had an impact.

I’d like to do a similar thing, except from human to asuran.

But I think I’ll wait for a race-change gemstore item. Anet: you’re leaving money on the table here!

No more leeching off our temple runs and then using all that dragonite ore/gold against us?

The Queen’s Gauntlet seemed to be a good direction in that we saw silver mobs with interesting mechanics for the first time. That was great because champ mobs with unshakeable/defiant effectively removes a bunch of mechanics from the game. Too bad they seemed to not follow up on it.

warbreaker.8154:

Artemis.4059:

What I think is the worst thing about time gated content/gear etc is that if you want to have it the quickest possible way, you NEED to log in every day and make sure you do certain things in game EVERY DAY (daily / farming for monthly, crafting daily parts etc).

If you miss few days, you can not “play more to close the gap”, like you could with exotics or any other stuff, when you can just log in and play more one day (got more gold / karma) and it somehow balanced your break from the game.

So if you don’t have a lot time for playing but you want to quickly get ascended armor – you need to make sure that each day you do those activities which might not be the things you actually enjoy. also, it may leave you with little to no time to do things you like doing. – BAD

This x1000. I work two jobs. I CANNOT play GW2 during the week, and if I get scheduled for the weekend on my second job, then I’m usually too wiped to play on the weekends, too. That’s at least five days a week I am not getting laurels. I binge on the weekends and make up for the lost time, though. With the laurel system, I can’t do that. 30 laurels is a freakin lot when you average 14 laurels a month including monthlies.

I have four characters at 80 and 10 total. I’ve made a legendary weapon. I work hard for my achievements in this game. To be impeded by some awful time gate system is the most frustrating thing for me. When I made my legendary, I could grind at my leisure and make the weapon on my own time. It took me a long time, but I never once felt like I was being held back by the game itself. With the ascended armor, even when I’m done playing and grinding on my own time, it becomes a terrible waiting game that could take up to three months to complete. It’s nonsense. The laurel system sucks.

I get that GW2 still wants to try to keep up the guise that it’s not following in the footsteps of WoW and it’s not a grindfest, but come on. Let’s all stop jerking each other off here. It’s a total grindfest. Who are they trying to kid? Even raiding is a better system than freakin laurels, because it was still something that players could do on their own time without the game physically barring them for arbitrary stupid reasons.

The purpose of laurels is to make people log in every single day — creating a habit that can’t be escaped. Anet is sacrificing customers like you in order to achieve this.

Frostfang.5109:

“Help me and fail!” (is acually “Healthy and able”) Incredible annoying to listen to!

Female charr gaining a boon… Think it’s regenraation.

I’ve always heard it as “healthy and hale” which actually makes sense — gotta listen more closely next time!

I’ve been seeing this quite a bit since the update before the Dec 10 update. I think it’s just a graphical bug.

MastaNeenja.1537:

Lord Kuru.3685:

It’s the quality of the LS that’s the problem, not the quantity. And I don’t think there’s any indication that will improve.

Unfortunately the quantity is the cause of the lack of quality. It is my opinion that they need to either scale back their output or increase their staff.

I think this is only partially true. A large part of the problem (IMO) is that Anet is not capable of telling well-written storylines/characters from bad ones. So I suspect we’ll see better content in a technical sense (less bug-ridden) but the storylines will be just as bad.

Latinkuro.9420:

the way they make it sound, gear will probably not have stats anymore !

Do you have a quote for this because I find it really hard to believe.

Because bleed duration and damage numbers are updated every second, it costs a lot of computer resources (data retrieval and transfer) to handle bleed stacks. Thus the cap.

The solution of fire-and-forget bleeds (duration and damage per tick determined at the instant the bleed is applied) would, IMO, go a very long way in fixing the cap problem because the amount of resources necessary would be vastly reduced.

Nice catch on the livestream comment! And an interesting analysis…

Considering how quickly Anet panicked and started the gear treadmill, it seems believable that a very significant number of people went inactive within the first few months.

Draco.2806:

Good news everyone!

It’s impossible.

Your stats are partially tied to your gear, remember. Gear has fixed stats. So even if they implemented this perfectly sensible and incredibly useful feature, it would only get us part-way there.

“Why not remove stats from gear then and tie them to something else?”

Yeah, that would make sense. What wouldn’t make sense is that then you’d be able to outfit your character in any cool-looking gear you like without buying transmutation stones and introduce some actual cosmetic progression to the game instead of change-your-looks-for-ten-bucks that we have now.

So you see, you have to break the game to make the money. Or at least that’s how many F2P developers think. I think ANet might have made a bit of money by sticking to the promises outlined in their Manifesto, but what do I know?

Actually, this will be a full solution for many because once they have Ascended gear, lots of people will probably never play a build that requires gear change again – after all, who wants to grind for a second set of Ascended gear (and most don’t want to feel like they’re “downgrading” their set by switching to exotics).

Is this the bug where you build a ram (or whatever siege) and when it’s finished you’re stuck for a few seconds?

The way I’ve always gotten out is to man the siege. When you unman, you’re free to move.

I don’t think they’ll ever fix this bug, so it’s good to know swapping weapons works.

Way too late. LS, Season 1 ended for me months ago.

And honestly, Anet’s new statements just sound like their usual spin. I wouldn’t be surprised at all their original plan was to end the Scarlet arc in early March anyway and they’re just making it sound like they’re listening to their customers’ demands to end it early.

Obtena.7952:

Lord Kuru.3685:

Why are you acting so entitled? Why in the world would you think that you should be able to have Best-in-Slot gear by the time you reach level 80? /s

He didn’t say that at all. Seems like you are looking for an argument. I get his point but even as a casual, it’s not hard to deck out in Ascended trinkets and over some months, a weapon as well. Armor will likely be out of reach though.

I was being sarcastic. (See Colin’s quote about having BiS gear upon reaching level 80.)

Ascended gear is an awful mistake. If nothing more, it will hurt Anet’s bottom line: people are not going to create more than one set of gear once they get Ascended. With most skins being one time use, many people will be very reluctant to kill off the skin they’ve already put on an Ascended piece of gear. (With exotics, you can easily get a new piece of gear for the new skin.)

If they were going to change Re-animator anytime soon, they wouldn’t have bothered to reduce its recharge this last patch.

They obviously have zero plans to do anything about it. That’s why they won’t say anything. I seriously doubt they’d come out and say:

“We have heard your complaints and have decided to do nothing.”

Play necro. That way you won’t have to bother with the new healing skill.

Does this work for Legendaries as well?

Zone.1275:

I guess I was wrong on that note, my bad. I still don’t think Scarlet is that bad of a character, though.

Lord Kuru.3685:

As for the next story being better: IMO there’s zero reason to believe that. The fact that the Scarlet story passed through Anet’s hierarchy tells me that Anet does not have the ability to tell good stories from bad. And as far as I can tell, that has not changed.

“Nothing ever changes. People don’t learn from their mistakes.” That’s a pretty shortsighted way of thinking.

Blind faith is just as bad. At this point, there is zero evidence that Anet has learned, or is even capable of learning, from their mistakes. Anet makes the same mistakes over and over — witness the same terrible alliance storyline we’ve had for Living Story after Living Story. Look at Kormir version 2, aka Trahearne. I’m simply basing my prediction on Anet’s consistent talking-the-big-talk but not being able to walk the walk.

They need a winner-take-all ranking system. That encourages double teams and should alleviate a lot of the coverage issues since you’d need a really large population disparity between servers for one server to easily beat two.

I think ranking system that encourages double teams could help alleviate the coverage problem. A winner-takes-all ranking system encourages this.

Zone.1275:

Natsu.2589:

Zone.1275:

She didn’t graduate from the colleges she just took classes. She didn’t stick around the graduate because she’d leave when she lost interest.

You know what the big problem is with that? It’s nothing more than a marginal note from some interview or whatever. They backpaddled with that and still, you have to dig very deep to find this note.

Do you have a source for that? I’d wager you’d have to spend some time to find one, don’t you? Can you honestly blame the author? If this is a serious part of the lore, I can’t help but feel, that Anet did a poor job communicating it.

It didn’t take long to find a source. Even if it did take a while to find it, this guy is writing an article and should make sure all his content is correct. Professionalism is something that game journalism lacks a lot, but allowing them to get away with anything that a normal journalist wouldn’t is just feeding the problem.
http://wartower.tumblr.com/post/60458277036/this-lorespecial-is-about-scarlet-briar-the-evil

Even in the short story it says she only completed the coursework.

But these are outside things, even the short story, and I think they should keep all the story in the game instead of in blog posts. The story wasn’t revealed well, we all know this, but Scarlet isn’t that bad of a character. Scarlet had a lot of potential but the reveal of the story wasn’t enough for players to get a feel for her. I don’t think it’s Scarlet’s, the writers’, or anyone’s fault that the story came out pretty bad so far since I don’t know anything about how they set up the Living Story, and there’s probably more variables than good and bad.

The next story will probably be better because they’ll have experience and will know what works and what doesn’t.

Emissary Vorpp’s dialog during the closing ceremony (source is Closing Ceremony page on gw2wiki):

“Of course. I know of this Scarlet. She earned advanced engineering degrees at each of Rata Sum’s colleges in record time.”

So she did graduate. Whatever Anet said later was just spin to cover the community backlash.

As for the next story being better: IMO there’s zero reason to believe that. The fact that the Scarlet story passed through Anet’s hierarchy tells me that Anet does not have the ability to tell good stories from bad. And as far as I can tell, that has not changed.

Why are you acting so entitled? Why in the world would you think that you should be able to have Best-in-Slot gear by the time you reach level 80? /s

hedix.1986:

Contrary to the OP, I actuallt liked that post, it gave me a lot of hope and it looks like Anet read our feedback on LS and Scarlet and they decided to change the way LS works.
For that, after months of being dissatisfied with the updates, I have to say: thank you for considering the feedback, Anet. Thank you for bringing the Scarlet arc to its end, thank you for preparing future releases as “big features”. Really looking forward to gaming in 2014.

Don’t know if “feature only” is hinting at an expansion or not, but I’d be on board with that, especially if it gives us new areas / progression in the fight against the Elder Dragons.

I’m not convinced Anet listened at all. I’d bet Anet’s plan was to end the Scarlet arc at around the time it’s currently slated to end. After all, Flame and Frost began in January — were they really planning on having Scarlet around for much longer than a year?

Anet’s history of spin (eg. “Ascended gear was intended all along” vs. “we expect players to have BiS gear upon reaching level 80”) make it hard for me to believe them this time.

One of the biggest issues with the whole Scarlet debacle is that her storyline has been approved from the bottom all the way to the top of Anet. That means Anet not only does not have the ability to write good stories, but that they don’t have the ability to tell when a story is bad.

This does not bode well for whatever succeeds the Scarlet storyline.

It doesn’t matter how Ascended armor looks — good or bad. Because there is only one look, Anet is guaranteed a lot of gem sales from people who want to look different from everyone else. They definitely designed it this way.

I actually find AC to have some of the more interesting bosses, mechanics-wise, than many other dungeons.

I wonder how much money Anet saved by holding the data as 1 byte instead of something bigger (an int, perhaps). And how much will they have to spend (in work hours) to convert everything to a larger data type, bug-free.

TPMN.1483:

Well +5% dmg is better than nothing right now.
I would love the -dmg reduction to also be working.

All because we don’t see any feedback doesn’t mean that it isn’t In a list of bugs to fix.
This is probably sorted by severity, priority, difficulty to fix, time to test, estimated resources required (recode, test and release).

Right now given many of the other bugs (I mean features) this may be somewhat lower down on the priority list.
We are going to need to be patient and let them work through the bugs.

I think you are grossly overestimating the amount of work it should take to fix this bug.
As for being low on the priority list, this bug report is one of the most viewed (if not the most viewed) in the bugs forums.

As of this moment, it has taken over 2 months to fix a bug that almost certainly can be found and fixed in less than a minute. That’s pretty bad.

Tyragon.2496:

Berkhof.5804:

it is because for whatever reason, these jumping puzzles use the pvp code for creating the instances.
on the pvp roadmap is letting you bring in your pve cloths into pvp so it will get fixed by then at least.

They have a pretty good reason. sPvP makes makes you unable to use any sort of bundles which can be used for exploit, it also makes it easier to keep the map open with a timer and I also believe that having sPvP maps up is easier than having Overflows, seeing as the JP only has a few people and an Overflow is meant to house about a hundred or more.

It all comes down to technical reasons, instead of having to create a new type of server map that isn’t sPvP or PvE. That might come down the line, but it’s not a priority given how time consuming and probably requires additional resources.

But there weren’t any problems last year in this JP and we could use our regular PvE armor…. or did we do the JP in our town clothes (can’t remember).

Ireth.4087:

it’s easier than last years..but what i want to discuss is anet consuming too much mushrooms. what idiocy is to make it repeatable and ask of us to repeat it freakin 20 times for only ..and read…1 freakin achievement point? up to 15? in total if i repeat this puzzle 300 times? guys you should really stop smoking pot when you put things like this into game. it’s 400% bull as far as reward is considered. both achievement and prize alike.

These are nothing compared to how bad the WvW achievements are.

So the arc won’t end until the beginning of March (2 months after Jan 21) — that’s quite a long time. I’d prefer if they (to continue the TV seasons analogy) cancel the Scarlet series immediately.

Also, is the “just” in “just four releases left” an acknowledgement that people want this to end as soon as possible?

kwalle.3674:

sigh @ people who think it’s “easy to fix”. If it really was easy it would have been done already…

Though it would be nice if a red posted to keep us updated about it.

You’re assuming they care to fix it. I think it’s pretty clear they don’t and aren’t even going to bother.

Edit: And the bug is almost certainly fixable by switching a sign on one line of code.

It’s the quality of the LS that’s the problem, not the quantity. And I don’t think there’s any indication that will improve.

styx.7294:

We’ve been telling them to stop for 13 months now but well, it’s over and done with. All the ascended gear is in and Colin’s on record sayin that there is no plan for any more gear tiers for probably several years now.

What I’m sayin, the only comfort I can give is that this is as bad as it gets (unless they add more stat upgrades to WXP! DON’T DO THAT ARENANET)

Wasn’t Colin also the one who said you should have BiS gear by the time you hit level 80? Fool me once…

Moreoever, even if there’s no plan for more gear tier, a level cap increase will have the same effect — and I wouldn’t be surprised if they raised the level cap as a loophole to introduce more grind.

Avster.1935:

On the bright side…4 more Scarlet releases left…we are nearing the light at the end of the tunnel!

Inb4 Treharne Arc for Living Story Season 2 . . . If that ever happens, I’m just gonna play very sad music on my imaginary violin.

That’s 4 releases too many. Plus, with the break, that means 3 months (break until end of january plus 4 more 2-week releases) until we’re rid of Scarlet.

But the worst part is that the same people who gave us Scarlet will give us the next story — there’s no reason to believe that Anet’s ability to create/vet storylines has improved in any way. My guess: we’ll see storyline that’s just as bad as the Scarlet storyline, just with a different cast of characters.

Now we know why they’ve been putting, into the game, more and more recipes that require over 100 materials.

They’ll just say that the amount of antitoxin injected per player was not constant throughout the event (with injections counting more as the 2-week due date approached). But in the end, even if they technically didn’t lie, they lied.

The suggestion that the Council vote was rigged as well is an interesting thought (though I don’t think that was necessary as everything was clearly stacked against Evon anyway).

You’ll be seeing this a lot more once more people get Ascended gear. People simply won’t have a second set of gear to switch to (and these people won’t have exotic alternate sets because no one wants to feel like they’re “downgrading”). Currently, at least some people have alternate exotic zerker sets.

Hadramir.7834:

It has to be in that order because the gold giver has more to lose. All the party has to do is invite, they got nothing to lose in terms of account belongings.

Not true. By selling to you, the seller is risking the loss of gold that could have been earned by selling to someone who pays upfront (even if partial payment).

IMO Anet missed a huge opportunity to make money off of the gemstore.

Paladin.1279:

Do not freaking yell at us how important it is to hold garrison against CD while IoJ has our keep. Read how points work. UNDERSTAND how points work. If you cannot get 1rst because CD has twice the number of people as you…trying to hold off CD is a waste of time. Let them have the points from us but RETAKE points from IoJ and then head to IoJ to take their points. It is simple math.

We’ve been in so many mismatches (since maybe 2 months before Leagues even began) that I think a large percentage of the population don’t care about PPT anymore. Which fight is more fun: defending T3 keep against CD or PvDooring our garrison from IoJ? That’s where I’m going 90% of the time.

Blame Anet.

Neko.9021:

An Ascended Weapon of your choice with the stat array of your choice. It has an awesome skin with particle effects. Make it Account Bound.

Not a chance. Ascended grind is Anet’s new baby and they will not give it up.

style.6173:

I don’t get why ANET introduces new heal skills when they can’t even balance the skills they already have.

It is true that they can’t balance the skill’s we already have. But they promised new skills before the end of 2013, so here we are. Also, people are getting bored of the skills we’ve had since launch, especially since there are so few. They’re really stuck between a rock and a hard place right now:

Anet seriously needs to get better at balancing.