Guild Wars 2

Kamara.4187:

I wasn’t looking for the worlds help when I invested in GW2 for all of us, I was simply looking for fun things that we could engage in, and accomplish as a family.

Sorry, but that’s not how ArenaNet thinks you should play the game.

You are still quite free to play it their way, however.

But only their way.

zaced.7948:

get a job.
10$ an hour converts to 100 gold. no method in the game will earn you taht much. instead of wasting time ingame just farm your gold in rl.

Perfect! This way you can earn money to buy gold for a game you don’t have time to play because you’re too busy working.

I love the delicious irony of that.

What Goes Around

Labjax.2465:

Anet is great at having visions and making things from those visions, but they don’t seem to be that great at sticking to a vision in the long-term.

Nailed it, and an excellent post overall.

I think a lot of what we see is a consequence of “iterating”, which is a development model that supersedes any single game element, or even the grand vision of the game itself. It’s a core philosophy of ArenaNet that is both a blessing and a curse for the company, the game, and the players.

The very nature of an iterative approach eschews long-term stability in favor of short-term agility. If an idea works, they run with it. If it doesn’t, they may commit to another pass to fix it, but they might just as well drop it altogether for something entirely different — and hopefully (but not necessarily) better.

Inevitably, what results is a patchwork of different ideas, each chosen for its own merits, that reflects a process of experimentation and evolution more than a faithful execution of a single coherent plan.

The Living World exemplifies this, both in terms of its delivery, which has changed with each season, and its narrative, which has become increasingly subordinate to the mechanics of the game.

They had to change course with the Living World, because they are still recovering from the lavishly disastrous decision to literally throw away tons of Season One content and leave players both old and new with little more than old memories and smoldering ruins to show for it all. In this case, iterating was necessary to save the game from an ignominious end, and that ability to abandon a bad strategy even after going all-in illustrates the strength of the iterative model.

The weaknesses appear in cases like Heart of Thorns which, though enjoyable in itself (my opinion) is somewhat unceremoniously grafted onto the core game in a way that has left a large percentage of players cold on a wide range of fronts. There are a lot of new directions encompassed in the expansion, but it’s a jarring arrival for the community overall and alienates enough paying customers to become a costly Faustian bargain if left as is.

The day can be saved, however, with a relatively modest pass or two to address some of the more glaring issues players have raised, but action must come quickly enough to smooth things over before attrition becomes critical.

Season Three of the Living World appears to embody a grand design that ran out of time. It does seem story hooks were created to allow for a more thematic introduction to elite specializations, but what materialized was effectively “here you go: get to work and start doing hero challenges.”

Many other threads are left dangling, but those may well be dealt with as Season Three continues.

The overall effect of the iterative model is something of a roller coaster ride for both developers and players, with highs and lows at every turn, and that’s not always an easy thing to deal with. But there is a silver lining.

With each iteration, ArenaNet does learn important lessons, does apply them to future endeavors, and they do seem to be getting better at it. As the process matures, the net result may well end up being better than any single grand vision could yield.

Or it may end up being a big, untenable mess.

Here’s hoping elegance eventually arises from the turbulence.

Sorry, I know you’ve had to do a lot of cleanup to remove the jokes, but I really think this thread should be stickied for better visibility.

And then this post deleted.

Our characters obviously knew Mordremoth back from high school when they used to hang out together.

He’s always been like this, sticking his tendrils all up in everybody’s bidness.

If you want a positive thread, don’t start it off with negative post.

That would be a very helpful and sensible filter to add to the LFG tool.

I thought this was going to be about the Goon Squad, but yeah, nice touch by ArenaNet.

Ayrilana.1396:

Which I have and haven’t ran into an issue with. Every mobs doesn’t need to be made so that you can faceroll through otherwise we have what we had before the expansion. If you see mobs that apply conditions, equip utilities that cleanse. If you see mobs that do knock downs, daze, and the like, have stability at the ready. It doesn’t take much to prepare for what you’re about to fight unless having to do that in the first place is the real issue.

I haven’t seen any platypuses in my travels. Should I therefore conclude platypuses don’t exist?

The stun-locking occurs when dealing with multiple mobs that have disabling control effects. Several different types of HoT mobs have them, such as beetles, teragriffs, chaks, punishers, cavaliers/mounts, wyverns and the like. Mobs that don’t possess these abilities won’t cause the problem.

If you haven’t encountered the stun-locking issue, you can find such scenarios in any HoT map by fighting several enemies with such abilities at once. This can occur during dynamic events, especially upscaled events that take place in confined spaces, such as caves, ledges or platforms.

If you still don’t believe it possible, you can get a quick taste by running into a crowd of mobs with such abilities in the open world — such as beetles in the Verdant Brink, for example — though I don’t recommend doing so otherwise.

Having stability for such eventualities is nice for professions which have ready access to it, but even then, it’s easy to blow through all the stability possible very quickly, and the cooldowns tend to be long.

In protracted fights with lots of mobs, which are de rigeur in HoT events, it can become an issue, hence the comments to that effect which you are unsuccessfully attempting to refute.

Concluding players desire faceroll content because they don’t like stun-locking is as fallacious as concluding problems don’t exist because you are unaware of them. That’s straw-man bashing, which, though easier than confronting actual differing opinions, doesn’t convince anyone of anything, other than that straw-man bashing isn’t constructive.

Moreover, you will never convince the many players beside yourself who have been subjected to stun-locking that it never happens, and the very idea that they would believe you over their own in-game experiences is patently absurd.

If you don’t see a problem with stun-locking and haven’t experienced it yourself, that’s great, and I’m happy for you. But making false, condescending statements about other players when you apparently don’t understand what they’re talking about looks as silly as it sounds, so I advise against it.

Out Of Action

I gave it the old Harvard Try for the past couple of weeks, but I’ve given up the Action Camera (AC) for now.

On the bright side, I love how the Action Camera keeps my character in mouse-turn mode. My right mouse button was grateful for the break. The targeting reticule is awesome, and I really love the heads-up in-range indicator, which is much more natural than having to look down at my skill bar all the time to see if I’m in range. Given how unforgiving GW2 is about using skills against targets that aren’t in range, it was a breath of fresh air.

Unfortunately, I encountered a lot of trouble with the Action Camera.

It’s way too hard to keep the crosshairs on moving targets while dodging and running to get outside of AOE circles, which is the most common combat situation in just about all HoT content, and even in 1v1s against easy single mobs in Central Tyria, it can be a pain.

Losing autoattack and having to reestablish it each time the crosshairs drift off target results in having to spam the attack buttons to keep autoattacks going, which negates the point of autoattacks in the first place and is a not a problem with normal mode.

The left mouse button doesn’t maintain autoattacks unless held down, which becomes tedious in long fights, especially when moving around and evading. It’s also not consistent, as with some weapons it does seem to maintain autoattacks as long as the crosshairs are on target, while it doesn’t with others. I went back to using my old autoattack button instead of the left mouse button after a couple of days, because it was far more reliable and consistent.

When zoomed out in third-person view, it is extremely easy to have this happen constantly, and due to parallax effects, it can be difficult to acquire and maintain a new target reliably. It’s especially problematic during boss fights, and worst of all in world boss fights when the camera zooms out even more.

I can’t count the number of times I would find myself in the middle of a typical particle-effect and AOE battle storm not attacking when I thought I was, or fired off a skill only to have it misfire and go on cooldown because the crosshairs weren’t “on target” enough, despite being aimed visually at a large target.

With siege weapons, AC is clumsy, and getting knocked into cursor mode by interaction prompts during story and dynamic events really messes things up, especially in the middle of combat. The toggle button for switching between AC and normal mode became one of my most-used buttons because of these and other collisions with the rest of the interface.

Due to the “short leash” movement scheme, in which the character behaves as if being dragged around instead of moving where directed, jumping puzzles are a nightmare, navigating tricky terrain is awkward and any movement requiring precision is harder to do.

I would strongly prefer it if the character always faced wherever the crosshairs were pointing, like a permanent mouse turn mode. Doing that would make movement more precise and solve all the problems caused by the “leash”.

It’s not clear if there’s a way to look around without changing direction while running or gliding, so I found myself missing being able to do that easily in normal mode, and usually switched into it to do that.

Despite my strongly preferring to stay in AC mode as much as possible (I hate having to hold the right mouse button down just to be able steer my character without using turning keys, which are much worse), I ultimately found myself switching back to normal mode more and more as time went on.

I really, really wanted it to work, but the Action Camera just ended up feeling like a handicap instead of an advantage.

I love the concept, would continue using it if it wasn’t so squirrelly, and in many ways, it’s almost there, but the Action Camera just doesn’t play well with the skill paradigm under its current constraints.

I hope to see another pass correct some of these problems soon. Until then, I guess my poor old right mouse button is going to continue to suffer more wear and tear as I keep it pressed down for mouse turning.

Ayrilana.1396:

Astralporing.1957:

Ayrilana.1396:

Use stability, stun breaks, blocks, and evades/dodges.

With the cc rate you get in the monster rich environment (and there’s way too many of those) you will get all of those on cooldown within seconds. And then get stunlocked anyway.

I have yet to run into that issue on any of my characters (one of each class).

It happens when you fight more than one of them.

Chaba.5410:

Wait, how do you not have gold for gear if you had previously gotten a lot of gold from dungeons?

My guess: gambling it away betting on the Cattlepult.

Watch out, those cows are rigged!

QTwo.6824:

As a solo player within my own guild with myself as the only member what I noticed is that much of what I paid cash money for was suddenly put beyond my reach. As a clan member of a small guild, it does seem that we will have a much more difficult process ahead of us in comparison to the larger guilds.

Actually, being in the same boat as part of a small family guild, I’ve found it much easier, since I have zero interest in the new regime and no longer bother with it at all.

Quite liberating, really.

Guild Wars 2 ruined other “classic” MMOs for me, which leaves it as the best by default.

I’m both pleased and displeased by that. Pleased because I love the game and really like ArenaNet as a company. Displeased because whenever they screw something up, they’ve screwed it up in the only MMO I can bring myself to play.

Fortunately, they tend to get it right more than they get it wrong, and when they realize something’s wrong, they tend to be pretty good about “iterating” and making necessary changes.

If they could be convinced to integrate quality assurance more directly into their design and engineering processes, they would rob me of the vast majority of my complaints. Which allows me to say…

ArenaNet, please. Rob me.

Spider nerf incoming…

Asking for an “excuse” implies there is something that needs to be excused.

There isn’t.

The net effect of this thread: more complaints about guild halls.

The only immutable law of the universe is the Law of Irony.

Doam.8305:

Also the forums are most definitely drying up the TC created this topic two days ago and were still on page 1 closer to launch this would’ve had quite a deal more posts with trolls and white knights but it seems the rational people have all but abandoned ship.

Or they’re too busy playing the game to bother with the forums.

I’ve been playing a lot since HoT launched (and I should mention I wasn’t playing much at all before it did), and both in maps and looking at the LFG tool there’s still plenty going on. That includes HoT content, Silverwastes Vinewrath taxis and chest farming are still big, Teq runs, etc. Heck, people are even doing CoF speed runs to grind masteries, ironically enough, despite the loot nerf.

Now granted, that’s just my own informal survey over the past couple of weeks, and thus not necessarily an accurate accounting of the state of the game overall, but it still seems to me like plenty of people are playing GW2.

If you’re in a dead HoT map, however, it will look like ArenaNet might shut its doors any day now.

That’s why I think it is urgent they get a handle on this map population problem, lest dead maps lead people to think GW2 itself is dead and become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As always, I may be wrong, but I really don’t think GW2 is anywhere near dead.

At least, not yet.

Hyper Cutter.9376:

Hell, taxiing actually predates the megaservers.

Everyone to Blackgate on the count of three!

1… 2…

Narrrz.7532:

If someone says to me they’re having difficulty, I would absolutely, regarding them as an equal, tell them, “you might just need to get better at it”.

Nothing wrong with offering encouragement. One of my favorites, as a great mentor once said…

“Practice makes better; there’s no such thing as perfect.”

Hawken son of Z.1367:

I need to stop visiting these forums..

You said it, not me.

Narrrz.7532:

Majic.4801:

A “nice” way would be to offer useful advice, as other players have done, which would be constructive, rather than counterproductive.

Insulting other players gets no point across other than illustrating the shortcomings of those who do it.

We spent the first part of the thread explaining how to beat these enemies. If you still have difficulty doing so when you understand the mechanics, the best advice i can give you is “learn to play better”.
I’m sorry if you take offense from the insinuation that you are not already a good player, but you have to understand that there are bad players out there, and if explanations fail, the best advice we have to offer is “get better”

I take no offense at all, though I’m forced to wonder where you got the idea I’m having trouble with the content, since that was my first comment in the thread and didn’t say anything of the sort.

You claimed you were not sure if there was a nice way to tell other players “you might just not actually be very good at this game.” I suggested a more constructive alternative, since telling players they’re bad accomplishes nothing worthwhile, but that point seems to have been lost.

Should I suggest you “get better” at reading? I don’t think you would appreciate that any more than being told you were a “bad player”, nor do I think it would help you or anyone else.

Instead, please understand there is never a need to tell anyone they are a “bad player” — all that does is alienate people and accomplish less than saying nothing at all.

Offering helpful advice and recommending ways of improving is a much better way to go, which is what I hope is getting across.

If I’m not making that clear enough, I’m quite willing to keep trying, if it can help.

For quick reference, here’s the link: 64-bit Client Beta FAQ

It may or may not solve the problem, and the game really shouldn’t screw you out of credit or prevent you from reentering a map you got dropped from when trouble strikes in the first place, but if your computer supports it, the 64-bit client does seem to solve some problems.

May all your future adventures be epic in a more positive sense.

They never promised it, but Colin did say this:

Also, because Season 1 of Living World was not built with the Journal in mind, it will not be available in the story Journal on initial launch when Season 2 begins. We do hope to add Season 1 to the Journal in the future.

I’m sure Colin hopes Guild Wars 2 will eventually become the bestselling MMO of all time, but that doesn’t mean he will promise it.

I would love to see it, but making Season One replayable is unlikely to be an easy task, and given the need to focus resources on new content, it may never end up actually happening.

But you never know. Maybe it will happen.

Hope springs eternal.

Narrrz.7532:

Coyote.7031:

Nice to see we’re back to insulting each other again. Please continue, let’s see this “award winning community” in action.

I’m not sure that there’s a nice way to say, “you might just not actually be very good at this game”
I don’t mind sugar coating but i think it’s less essential than getting the point across.

A “nice” way would be to offer useful advice, as other players have done, which would be constructive, rather than counterproductive.

Insulting other players gets no point across other than illustrating the shortcomings of those who do it.

You’re not alone in wondering. A similar topic:

HoT after the launch herd

Trayzer.7268:

Dengar.1785:

Further more, what is wrong with attempting challenges in groups in an MMO?

yeah, the mmo joker… i’m sick of reading this in every thread when people voice honest complains.

It’s a convenient meme to throw out, sort of like “All Your Base”, except more stale and less cogent. It could literally be replaced with a hash of random characters and be both more constructive and persuasive.

I’ve seen it used in every forum in every MMO I’ve played since 2003, and it has the dubious distinction of never changing a single person’s mind, ever. Yet, like a stubborn rash, it persists, to be received with just as much appreciation and acclaim.

ArenaNet could have structured hero challenges so groups would have an incentive to repeat them — which the nominal daily repeat credit currently in place (and which almost nobody knows about) utterly fails to do.

Instead, we have occasional but virulent profanity-laced abuse in map chat for players seeking to complete the hero challenges instead of assisting with meta events.

Absent a better implementation that actually encourages players to repeat group-only hero challenges, there is absolutely nothing wrong with scaling them appropriately, and everything wrong with leaving them the way they are.

Fluffball.8307:

It’s understandable that anet did not expect players to organize themselves at the expense of the megaserver at first, but by this point they probably should know better, or at least explain it to newbies who have no idea what a taxi is. Players have been implementing the current tactic for literally years with things like Tequatl, triple trouble, vine wrath, etc.

That’s just it: they should know better, because players have been doing this for a year and a half, to the point that the events you listed depend on it for successful completion.

The map population algorithm should account for player behavior, including taxiing, and compensate as necessary to keep maps well-populated. That’s the primary reason for implementing the megaserver system in the first place.

But that’s water under the bridge. What matters most now is what ArenaNet does about it, and how quickly they take action.

The longer this drags on, the more damage it will cause.

Fluffball.8307:

It’s not bugged (well it might be in some ways, but not relevant for this discussion), people are leaving maps intentionally.

Bugged or not, taxiing or not, empty maps are what players and reviewers are seeing and reporting.

“HoT is dead” is not a good impression for the expansion to make so soon after launch, especially given its group-content focus, and the overwhelming majority of people who find themselves in dead maps will never see this thread, these forums, or any of the various apologias they contain.

It’s a problem only ArenaNet can solve, it must be solved within the game itself, and it is very much in their (and our) best interests that they do so as quickly as possible.

This happens when you go to sell at the highest bid price, and someone manages to sell first before you list it.

You end up with a listing for what was formerly the highest bid price, which is now a little higher than the second-highest bid price.

This is extremely common with commodities such as crafting resources.

64-bit Client Beta FAQ

It may or may not solve the problem, but if you have a 64-bit system, it’s worth a shot.

Harper.4173:

“The finest treasures withing the Forgotten City” are 1 rare, 10 Aurillium and a blue. Those are the finest treasures that Tarir has to offer an “honored” ally.

That’s about all they have left after making the mortgage payments on their solid gold city.

And let’s not even try to guess what the interest rates are like on a multi-century loan contract. Or insurance and property taxes on a place that big.

That way lies madness.

Then there are all the life insurance payouts for Exalted who sacrifice themselves to protect the city, on top of union scale and pension plans for burnishers.

It’s amazing the Tarir City Council can make ends meet at all.

Test.8734:

But anyway, the LFG thing isn’t a solution to this issue. Using it to taxi people from empty maps to not so empty maps isn’t what the system was created for; players improvise using it because that’s the best option right now, but it’s more a “less worse” option than a good option.

Taxiing is probably both the cause of and cure for low map populations.

Because irony.

Hawken son of Z.1367:

Its an MMO, people are supposed to work with other people to accomplish things. If you want to play alone. Then gtho tbh…. Go play a single player game.

Hard to imagine why so many people would want to play solo when they could spend their valuable leisure time surrounded by friendly, helpful players bringing sunshine and happiness into their lives.

It seems game reviewers are also noticing the problem:

IGN: Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns Review

And yes, Leif Johnson does know about the LFG tool.

Congratulations!

Just five more years to retirement.

StevenMah.9854:

Majic.4801:

All they see are dead maps, and that is the impression they will have of Heart of Thorns.

I don’t think that bodes well for anyone.

Wait…hmmmm, so HoT is pretty dead? (Yet to buy HoT here)

I don’t think so, but players who play the game (probably the majority) rather than visiting the forums may conclude as much if they land in underpopulated maps.

There’s nothing in the game which warns them about this issue, and so no reason to think dead maps are the result of a bug. Hence the conclusion that “HoT is dead”.

In total, I’m sure there are plenty of players in the new zones, but they’re either “taxied in” and clustered in maps non-taxiing players are unlikely to be assigned to (since the maps are already well-populated), or ending up in maps that may not have as many players as they should, which can make completing much of the content more difficult or even impossible.

That can lead to frustration and dissatisfaction with the expansion, even for players who might otherwise love it.

That’s a problem.

The workaround is to use the LFG tool to taxi into a better map instance, but if players don’t know about that, they won’t try it.

tobascodagama.2961:

This is a big problem, though. How many players know how to find and use a taxi? How many know how to use a taxi but simply don’t want to?

Taxiing isn’t a game mechanic, it’s a side effect of the megaserver system that players have learned to use to their advantage. ANet shouldn’t be relying on it, they should be tweaking event scaling and megaserver sorting so that taxis aren’t necessary.

Definitely, especially when we consider what fraction of the player base bothers with the forums at all (not the majority) and probably has no idea there is even a problem with the map population mechanic.

All they see are dead maps, and that is the impression they will have of Heart of Thorns.

I don’t think that bodes well for anyone.

Do not go gentle into that good night
Rage, rage against the dying of the client.

There is absolutely no way a frog strumming a lute can’t be cool.

Tigaseye.2047:

So, assuming we agree it’s the latter, just by making the game, universally (and unavoidably) more intense, you are effectively (albeit, perhaps, inadvertently) catering to those types of people.

While there certainly are “those types of people”, including a die-hard contingent in these very forums, I don’t think increasing the difficulty of content necessarily involves catering only to them.

ArenaNet has gotten a lot of feedback from a lot of different kinds of players, and many have complained about things being too easy. Indeed, threads on the subject are common enough to be a stereotype in the forums.

A similar assumption could be made about raiders and raid culture, but again, the extremes tend to stand out the most, and in reality, most raiders are just like any other players. They just like raiding, and raiding is all about winning big or losing big.

I say that as a former raider of some experience in other games (and a veteran of a particularly nasty pirate corp in EVE, for that matter), so I may be biased — though I’m no longer into raiding and tend to prefer content that’s less structured or “on the rails” these days. But seriously, there are good and bad people in just about any constituency, stereotypes notwithstanding.

I think it was sensible for ArenaNet to design HoT to be more difficult, though I think it would have been wise to introduce it more gradually through the zone progression to help players adapt more naturally.

And regardless of that, some things are currently just silly and need adjustment. Getting popped for 17k out of stealth by a single frog just doesn’t seem balanced.

Done right, however, I believe HoT can appeal to almost any kind of player, even a really laid-back casual player, as long as the content is properly scaled, the mechanics and game systems function well, and the game environment doesn’t drop too many pianos on peoples’ heads.

HoT’s not quite there, and getting things just right is never easy, but I really don’t think it’s that far from being a good fit for most GW2 fans.

But of course, Your Mileage May Vary, first and foremost, ever and anon.

Kal Spiro.9745:

Well, I never said I was a good commander.

I doubt you’re a bad one, either.

Well, half an hour later, now I know. Since this thread came up first in a Google search, here’s what I did:

I entered the Svanir camp and waited by the totem because I didn’t want to miss the necessary event again (destroy the dragon totem). Eventually the event chain came back around, I was able to help defeat the converted ice shamans and use the totem to destroy it.

I waited by the totem to make sure I didn’t miss the event, because the first time I was sent there from the grawl camp, there were over a dozen players working the Svanir camp, and the event was over before I could arrive. Turns out that meant the longest possible wait, which means between 20-30 minutes.

Should the same happen to you, it’s likely you can follow the event chain while you wait to pick up some more credit, and should be able to participate in the dragon totem event without any trouble, even if it’s heavily farmed.

Meanwhile, these collisions between the Living World story steps and open world events (the same thing happens with Mordrem wolves in the Iron Marches) reflect a design philosophy that doesn’t consider actual conditions in the game and insufficient testing of a critical game component.

This bug was reported, discussed in this thread and others, should have been fixed at least a year ago, and still plagues players to this day.

Utterly. Asinine.

I’m stuck on Fenris now because the event was farmed before I could reach it.

These collisions between the story and open world farming are incredibly frustrating and utterly asinine.

Why hasn’t this been fixed?

And what am I supposed to do now?

Kal Spiro.9745:

Majic.4801:

And learning the events, of course, requires understanding what’s going on and how to coordinate efforts, which cryptic or nonexistent communication prevents.

Kafka eat your heart out.

Correct, which is why no one would adopt cryptic short hand. You apparently think shorthand means writing in code only you can decipher, but all it means is using abbreviations for things in place of the whole thing. Every time someone says PoI they’re using short hand. When someone in Tarir says North needs more, West stop DPS, that is technically short hand. And it is short hand that doesn’t require linking or anything. It’s just about being smart about how you say stuff.

Basically it seems that if you feel you need to repeat yourself so often you’re probably already in trouble.

Yet you never made that clear until just now, which made your point hard to decipher and led to misunderstanding.

Oh the irony.

Kal Spiro.9745:

These are not random event chains in open world. Nor Dynamic Events. This is Zone Meta Events in End Game areas we’re talking about here. So actually yes it is like Raid or Dungeons, if to a lesser and different extent. People are expected to know what to do, or to learn it very quickly. Otherwise stay out of the way. If you can’t deal with that you really shouldn’t be involved in it in the first place.

And learning the events, of course, requires understanding what’s going on and how to coordinate efforts, which cryptic or nonexistent communication prevents.

Kafka eat your heart out.

I have 34 level 80 characters, and as one might expect from someone who has leveled that many of them, I really don’t mind the process.

So it goes with unlocking elites, which, aside from exploring and catching up on Season Two, is mainly what I’ve been doing in the Heart of Maguuma. I’ve actually been having fun unlocking the elites and have made a sort of minigame of it.

The only issue is group-only hero challenges, which are getting harder to get people together for as more and more players have already done them and the opportunity cost of not doing meta events runs rather high.

I don’t want or expect anyone to drop what they’re doing for me, so I work around the problems with the current system as best I can.

It’s not going to get better over time, so I really think ArenaNet needs to make hero challenges scale properly from solo through groups of any size, and be genuinely challenging at any scale.

There simply isn’t a reasonable argument against doing so.

Looks like they really took a bath on Wildstar.

Not a fan of the game myself, but I still hate to see things like that happen.

vespers.1759:

I wonder why they chose the released date they did if they couldn’t finish the content by that date….

Pure speculation on my part, but I suspect fiscal pressures, development cycle planning and capitalization on the holiday shopping season were key factors.

Releasing unfinished expansions isn’t unprecedented. As a former LOTRO player, both Rise of Isenguard and Riders of Rohan spring immediately to mind.

Hopefully Heart of Thorns will fare better.

Tigaseye.2047:

The fact game devs take the, totally unreasonable, opinions of these totally unreasonable type of customers seriously is the true insanity, here and will inevitably minimise the popularity of their games.

Granted, I haven’t seen everything, but so far I haven’t seen any evidence that anyone at ArenaNet appreciates players who devote themselves to attacking other players for giving honest feedback. Indeed, they seem to resent it as much as — and perhaps more than — players do.

Admittedly, much of the criticism directed at Guild Wars 2 or ArenaNet is unsubstantiated, a product of frustration (which everyone experiences in a game at some point or another) or, in extreme cases, a patently infantile perspective. But a lot of it is relevant, constructive and deserves to be heard.

What all feedback about the game — pro, con or indifferent; cogent or confused; polite or profane — has in common is that it represents the opinion of a paying customer, or at the very least, someone interested enough to comment.

Whatever form it may take, product feedback is information of immense value to a business, and anyone seeking to discourage it or isolate ArenaNet from it for any reason does a grave disservice.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.