Guild Wars 2

Dramen Maidria.1034:

As long as the clown car is actually a clown car

Anet should have turned all dredge clown cars into actual clown cars for Halloween — that would have been awesome!

I sure hope Anet doesn’t point to this one new skill and say that they have fulfilled their promise of bringing in new skills in 2013.

Have No Faith In Me.1840:

Even if they do ‘tie it together’ you’ll always know in the back of your mind that the ‘living story’ was just a random assortment of non threatening ideas on pieces of paper that were sticky taped together and handed in 6 months late to its teacher who instantly marks it with an F.

This. And the F is well deserved.

Suddenflame.2601:

Since it failed to edit my post i will do it this way. From anecdotal evidence gear doesn’t make a difference. My lvl30 mesmer in masterworks beat a lvl80 mesmer in exotics without losing 50% hp. He had better gear and everything but lost due to difference in skill.

It’s impossible to scientifically test this as players skill changes over time and are situational. The best evidence we have is anecdotal and is what we have to go off of. I can easily make a controlled test that can test this, but the results of the test would be deceptive. Since having 2 people fight using the same gear then giving the loser the better gear would prove nothing. Since the loser lost he may have gained insight in how to counter his opponent. His skill increased where as the winner might get kitteny the next fight and lose to decrease in skill.

So best evidence of skill > gear is through anecdotal evidence as it shows specific situations where gear should have had a clear advantage but failed to deliver said advantage.

Terrible argument. Those with better gear have an advantage from their stats being bigger. If they lose to someone with worse gear it’s because their skill level is so low that the stats advantage wasn’t enough for them to win.

Skill level and stats advantage are two completely different things.

Zaxares.5419:

While I agree that the prices for the new stuff is rather exorbitant (especially the Halloween Pail… I think the mini should be 10k and the Pail 5k), I think we need to take a longer term view. Players now have permanent Candy Corn nodes in their home instances. Therefore, there’s going to be a continuous supply of CC coming in all year round, and if there isn’t a big enough sink for them, over time it’s just going to build up to crazy numbers and we’ll be back to having millions of CC on the Trading Post selling at 1c above vendor price.

Apparently Sonders the Seller is going to continue selling both Halloween and Dragon Bash stuff permanently going forward, so the high prices of the Bloody Prince mini and the Pail is there to ensure there is always something to ensure that Candy Corn will have a decent price and non-excessive volume.

The high prices may backfire on Anet though. With such high prices, it’s possible that very very few people will even go for these items — which means candy corn just accumulates even more.

If Anet wanted to remove candy corn from the economy, they should have sold consumables for (far fewer) candy corn.

Who’s to say they won’t increase recipes by 10 times again next year!

If you want to do WvW then you’d better start crafting now. Ascended gear and stat progression in general is an arms race where you don’t want to fall further behind than you already are. Ascended armor is coming in a few months to further escalate this arms race.

Better to slowly craft now for a few minutes each day than to have to do it all in one enormously tedious session.

Reverence.6915:

T1 NA server. 5 minute queue into home borderlands (not bothered trying for EBG). Where’s the queues?

If you’re talking about the time when you’re posting, which is 1:51 am pacific time, then that actually shows how bad it is in T1 NA. 5 minute queues at 1:51 am pacific time probably means HORRIFIC queues during primetime.

I think you have to compare these achievements with the usual Living Story achievements — that’s how Anet looks at them. And with the Living Story achievements you usually have to do (almost all) aspects of the Living Story to get the meta-achievement. Like it or not, the intention is not to truly measure whether you contribute to WvW. It’s to make/force you do all aspects of WvW.

In NA: the devs warned people about stacking into T1. But people went anyway. There are no queues in the lower tiers. I wouldn’t be surprised if Anet intended for this to happen and they’re expecting people to destack because of it.

In EU: no idea. But there’s clearly a BIG difference between NA and EU in this regards:
NSP is ranked #15 in NA and there are currently no queues to speak of. (FSP, who has queues — see post above — is ranked #17 in EU.)

If they restore your guild bank to what it was before the hack, all the stuff that had been put in the bank after that point would be lost. Now you’d have more players upset. If they just give you your 25 gold back, then they run the risk of people fraudulently claim their account has been hacked.

I don’t think this is an indication that Anet doesn’t care about its customers — it’s a pretty no-win situation for Anet here.

On tengu: I’d want the Talon Silverwing-type tengu not the ones that appear in GW2.

It’s already a fail on Anet’s part that players had to guess/extrapolate when the event was going to end.

Whatever the media format, the story should be told in that format. This is a video game, the story should be told interactively. It’s fine to have supplementary story material to read outside of the game — but when the in-game story is not adequate, then we have problems. That is the case here.

Have the reward(s) for the meta achievement been announced, as in what’s in the chest that the key opens?

It may not even be worth it to put in extra effort for the meta.

A while back there was a rumor that Anet was putting gambits — like in the Queen’s Gauntlet — in dungeons.

It seems like a good idea. For those who find the dungeon too hard, don’t use gambits. For those who find them too easy/unchallenging, use gambits and get bonus rewards.

Anyone have ideas for gambits that would make dungeons more fun/challenging?

Here’s a few to start it off:

• Play with fewer than 5 players.
• Each player has a small bubble around him/her that other players can’t enter. This would disallow stacking. To make it funnier, if your bubble touches someone else’s, you both get knocked back. A variation where Anet already has the code: take damage if you’re near a party member.
• If you get downed you die.
• You have to kill every single mob in the path — hopefully this satisfies those who hate skipping.
• Each player loses a utility slot.
• Dredge clown cars spawn with each boss.

Awful idea. How would you like it if every time you tried to sell on the TP you got the infamous “Error trying to sell” because players who play the TP get priority so they never have to see that error.

How are you ever supposed to attract new players with a system like yours?

There are zero queues in the lower tier server (NA) servers. After innumerable warnings that this would happen, bandwagoners and stackers are, at this point, simply getting what they deserve.

Hoskinsed.4296:

please fix this issue.. as it has costed me many deaths.

Think about how many kills you’ve gotten because of it as well.

Seriously though — skill lag is one of the worst technical problems in the game right now.

As far as I know the 1 and the 10 recipe have the same odds.

The difference is that with the 1 recipe, you make more attempts so the RNG evens out — you’ll have less chance of the RNG screwing you over. Conversely, you’ll have less chance of getting the clovers faster than the probabilities say you should.

Vertical progression excludes new players from the game. This does the same thing. Both are bad ideas.

Redenaz.8631:

You can actually cook with Candy Corn, which is why I’d say they didn’t do a similar thing to the Zhaitaffy vendor’s other treats during Dragon Bash. You can cook the consumables on this page, and even more once you’ve made Candy Corn Glaze out of it.

A lot of these treats also drop from the Halloween event, no cooking required.

I think these items are easily forgotten or overlooked. While I don’t know how effective they are compared to other cooking recipes, since I haven’t leveled in cooking yet, at least they’re a use for candy corn that doesn’t require ten thousand candy corn.

This is true. But judging from peoples’ responses to the candy corn debacle, it seems that, for whatever reason, most are not interested/satisfied with using candy corn for cooking. (I personally find crafting the worst and dullest part of the whole game.)

I think a direct trade: consumable for candy corn is far more appealing because it’s easy and simple. If you want people to spend their candy corns (and I’m assuming Anet does), make it easy for them to do it!

butch.8136:

They’re fixing the queue system and bringing in an overflow map early next year. They’re working on it.

After all this time, Anet manages to disincentivize stacking into T1 — and then they have to go a screw it all up with this overflow map idea. One step forward, two steps back.

When dungeon token merchants sell runes the confirmation dialog box repeats the rune name:

“Are you sure you want to purchase Superior Rune of Sanctuary of Sanctuary?”

Tested at SE and HoTW merchants.

I would have liked to see some consumables that could be bought with candy corn (exactly like how zhaitaffy could buy you consumables during Dragon Bash).

That would have had potential to remove candy corn from the economy, thus allowing the event items (e.g. halloween pail) to not require as much candy corn. We probably would have had less anger and despair over this holiday event.

Thoughts?

Chuck Zitto.2367:

Why all of a sudden do they have to come into wvw for them?

Because, APs.

Nyxion.9142:

Johje Holan.4607:

I just trash my dragonite ore. Can’t be bothered with Ascended.

Ascended are most usefull in fotm. I can’t understand why OP whines about them if he plays wvw.

Ascended are needed in WvW because of the arms race Anet started by introducing stat progression.

TobyTucker.5317:

IMHO if you’re looking for “rewards”, WvW is NOT the place to be.

In a way this is nice. It means only those who truly want to WvW are in WvW.

HOWEVER, with the introduction of the Ascended gear grind, that positive is overshadowed by the fact that we have far less gold/materials to craft the gear — and the funny thing is we’re probably the ones who need it most because it’s an arms race now.

Tongku.5326:

I got over 20 ranks just last night (had 3 boosters though) and expect to be done with this one in 4 days, 5 tops via regular, everyday WvW gameplay. I do not see any problems whatsoever unless you get one of those match ups where 2 servers just get spawn camped on all maps and yours is on the short end of the stick, in which case, simply go PvE, come back next week.

Is this happening to anyone? I haven’t seen serious spawn camping in a while — now when one server is severely outmatched, it just becomes karma train fodder.

By the way, if your server is getting stomped now, it’s likely to be stomped the whole season as the current matchups are pretty much the most balanced they can get.

Knote.2904:

Well, you really just need to take into account opportunity cost.

If each dust is 15s, that then means every 15 silver you can accumulate is just 1 dust.

Thus, you don’t need to worry about trying to hunt dust itself, just 15 silver, then another 15 silver.

I think he knows this… perhaps this feels too “real world”?

A long time ago I would farm for armored scales. It felt exciting to get one as a drop! Now if I want armored scales, I farm gold — I don’t even bother looking at my drops before selling on the TP. It feels like work. Pretty interesting, considering I’m pretty much doing the same thing.

On the other hand, if you couldn’t buy crystalline dust — if it were account bound, you would be in the same situation as those who don’t have enough dragonite or empyreal fragments. I’m not sure which situation is worse.

Ikaros.7219:

congratulations to the darkhaven campers in the obsidian. you are total kittenholes since all you do is camp and kill people who are just trying to get an achievement.

Congratulations indeed! (For real.)

lordkrall.7241:

Lord Kuru.3685:

I do the temple zergs for dragonite. I personally do not find them fun and am almost certainly taking the place of someone who would enjoy it more than I (our temple zergs frequently overflow).

That’s not a good thing.

So why are you doing them?
You can get dragonite by doing other things than Temples if you don’t like them.

Temples give the best return on time spent for dragonite (when there’s a regular zerg) and you can’t realistically accumulate dragonite from WvW.

It’ll definitely calm down soon. The nature of Achievement Hunters is that they get their achievements and then immediately go for the next achievement set.

I do the temple zergs for dragonite. I personally do not find them fun and am almost certainly taking the place of someone who would enjoy it more than I (our temple zergs frequently overflow).

That’s not a good thing.

NornBearPig.9814:

People are here because of the rewards, not because of the league system. Leagues were one of the worst ways they could have implemented all these rewards, but just like you the devs will probably rave about about how it was the leagues that saved WvW.

This. You have to think whether it was the leagues or the APs that brought people out. I think it’s pretty clear it’s the APs. So the thread title should be “AP incentives in WvW are a success.”

But then this is day one. We expected AP hunters to come out in droves. The problem is, the nature of the AP hunter is such that when the next set of APs come out, they all go do that instead.

DarcShriek.5829:

You would think the Manifesto was the Holy Bible or something. Do people worship this thing and offer ritual sacrifices to it?

The manifesto listed Anet’s core ideals and intentions for the game. Many many people bought the game based on these words. To many people, Anet has gone back or even turned 180 degrees on many of those words — that’s why they feel betrayed. It’s as simple as that.

Snowreap.5174:

actually 8 * 7 / 2 makes more sense.

from the perspective of any single server, you have 8 choices of a first opponent, and 7 remaining choices for a second opponent, but getting A then B is the same outcome as getting B then A, so you divide by 2.

so I would have calculated 28 matchups.

-ken

You’re counting the number of possible matchups that one server can have. I’m counting the total possible number of matches overall (all servers in the league).

Either way, we’re talking 28 weeks for every possible matchup to happen. (For my numbers, there are 84 possible matchups and 3 matchups per week, 84/3 = 28.)

In any case, I believe we were guaranteed that every server would meet every other server at least once — not that every possible matchup would happen.

Solstice.1097:

Lord Kuru.3685:

GrandmaFunk.3052:

the value of a match is the same whether it’s week 1 or week 7

and since it’s 7 matches, doesn’t that allow for every possible matchup to be played once?

In a League of 9 servers and 3 servers per match, there are a total of 84 possible matchups.

86 but yea i think it should be 8 weeks so we face each server twice not some twice some once.

Are you sure 86? It should be “9 choose 3,” no?

Zero Day.2594:

Lord Kuru.3685:

Plus, there are also level cap increases that have the same effect, just in a different way.

Which I, personally wouldn’t mind so much… K they make it lvl90 instead of 80, along with 10 more levels of content to play through, that’s okay…. At the end, getting 90 gear should be “easy” (through dungeon tokens, before they had crazy DR, at least for me was “easy”)… The rest of the gear to grind for are just specifically for looks.
The catch is, they most likely won’t release skins to chase for since they can be bought through the gem store and I think that that’s their intent (buy the looks through gems). Adding in new tier of gear didn’t do much, except make a “very little amount” of people cry.

You can bet they’ll have level 90 ascended gear if they raise the level cap. So the grind will never end.

Jayne.9251:

I’d quote myself from three weeks ago ….. Instead I’ll just link this from Sept. 29:

DevonCarver.5370:

I’d just like to make a note of one thing that I think people aren’t considering when they transfer to stacked worlds. You will not, repeat will not, be able to receive the reward based on overall world place in the league, unless you achieve the meta achievement for the season. If you aren’t able to get into WvW much, you won’t get the rewards. So it is absolutely taking a risk to transfer to a world that has a large WvW population.

Yep. Good post from Devon. For those who stole guilds from lower tiers or who stacked to T1 — just deserts.

GrandmaFunk.3052:

the value of a match is the same whether it’s week 1 or week 7

and since it’s 7 matches, doesn’t that allow for every possible matchup to be played once?

In a League of 9 servers and 3 servers per match, there are a total of 84 possible matchups.

Khisanth.2948:

The second point is not quite correct. The gemstore boxes(Rich Dragon Coffers) did not drop. They were gemstore only.

Yes, but the regular coffers which dropped as a green did have tickets (at small probability). For this Halloween, I don’t believe there are even such thing as tickets — it’s BLC RNG and that’s it.

Mackdose.6504:

Lord Kuru.3685:

At some point enough people will have Ascended gear that Anet will have to deal with it by raising boss health or decreasing timers.

Why? They can increase difficulty using mechanics. If Ascended gear is the plateau, wouldn’t it make more sense to not start monster power creep?

Monster power creep is the easier way. They have already shown over the course of a year that increasing difficulty in mechanics is not their strong point. Also, DPS is DPS — the ascended guy will do more damage to the tune of ~20% no matter what the mechanics (unless it’s forcing us to use environmental weapons)

Furthermore, (IMO) it’s unlikely Ascended gear is the plateau. They added a tier once, they’ll do it again. Plus, there are also level cap increases that have the same effect, just in a different way.

Iason Evan.3806:

Yeah, “C” is now auto switching to preferred target. Switch it back to closest and keep the preferred for TAB targeting and all should be good.

Yes. I just checked it against a champ with two regular mobs. The champ was behind the two mobs, but the “C” targeting locked on the champ. Looking at the update notes, this is either a bug or an undocumented change.

At some point enough people will have Ascended gear that Anet will have to deal with it by raising boss health or decreasing timers.

I’m sure Anet has a measure of difficulty for their content and they design fights to that difficulty level. The better gear you have though, the less difficult the content. When most people have Ascended gear, Anet is gonna have to up the difficulty in order to not have the game be too easy for those people. Those with alts, or new players will be left holding the bag.

Look at Tequatl. If you finish just as the timer expires, that’s 15 minutes. With Ascended gear and the estimated 20% DPS increase, you finish with a very comfortable 3 minutes to spare. It’s a lot more than a few seconds — and this probably the kind of content we’re likely to see in the future (more Tequatls).

Tommyknocker.6089:

Last year also had TONS of rich candy corn nodes everywhere in the human areas. Seems to me they have pushed the target a bit to far to the right with this one. Even a small chance at a skin or recipe would be welcome too, but if you don’t want to farm the labyrinth, you’re out of luck for much candy corn this year.

Yes… that too. I think some intermediate rewards (consumables for candy corn, for example) would have helped a lot. Now it’s either go big or go home, and I, for one, am going home.

OGDeadHead.8326:

Use TAB for normal targeting, and another key for closest target like I do, problem solved. I very much prefer the new way TAB-targeting works.

I do use a different key for closest target, and it’s not giving me closest target — it’s giving me the highest priority target (champs first). So maybe this is a bug, not a feature?

We should have had at least some consumables sold for reasonable amounts of candy corn, so easy/intermediate sized rewards are available. The way it is now, either you go for the epic grind, or you skip the event.

I’m finding the doors really unfun for what they are — “contentless content”. Sometimes, you just want to mindlessly grind and cycling thru these doors satisfies that urge. However, I’m finding Halloween’s doors far less fun than Dragon Bash nodes.
They’re pretty much the same content, but:

• Dragon Bash: Could buy a variety of stuff with small amounts of zhaitaffy so even if you weren’t hardcore farming, you could buy something useful (foods, for example) with the fruits of your labor.
• Dragon Bash: Gemstore RNG boxes were available as drops in open world — this combined with the existence of tickets were, IMO, the best compromise between players getting cool skins and Anet making some money.

• Halloween: Can only buy enormously expensive items with candy corn — so why bother at all. No small or intermediate sized purchases possible.
• Halloween: Skins hidden in BLC’s with basically zero possibility of keys dropping in open world.

Conclusion: Dragon Bash nodes and Halloween doors are essentially the same content, but rewards make a huge difference, even if the rewards are very small or have low probability of dropping. Dragon Bash nodes felt fun (when you wanted mindless content) but Halloween doors just feels grindy.

Thoughts?

Why does the “closest target” button no longer choose the closest target but instead the “preferred target”? It’s really annoying to not get the target you expect.

In my opinion, “closest target” should give you closest target while the “tab” key should cycle through targets “preferred targets”. That way you have both options available to you.

Why don’t you do this in WvW? Just get someone from an opposing server to be your test dummy. The only problem is the low health pool.

A full toughness, vitality warrior with massive health-signet regeneration, perhaps? Maybe you can have others giving him perma protection. Maybe someone (or many someones) healing the test dummy as well with water field blasts — I don’t think there’s RNG in healing, so you just need to count how many times he was healed.