But why should we consider it appropriate to burden a game that used to have no story-gating to exploration at all, with well… story-gating.
I’ve never heard anyone complain that they could visit a completely equiped Fort Trinity that had members of a Pact that hadn’t even been formed. You know why? Because the people who find that sort of thing immersion-breaking can chose not to play the game that way. Like they used to say: “Play the way you want”.
Breaking this mould made no one any happier but sure made some people less happy.
People just made a norm of an anomaly, thats all
Anomaly? That word has no meaning that applies to this situation, so I have no idea what you mean by that.
Wow, that’s not much faith you have in the narrative team of GW2. But again – I don’t care about which asura built the portal, which one set up the waipoints and the like. I’m talking about the basics of a story: how did we get to an unknown place, far far away from home. Every fairy tail deals with that, so I’m sure they can do that, too.
We got there through a portal made by asura.
A group of asura that have absolutely nothing to do with us went to a place and put that gate there. A group that has neither obligation nor the merest shred of interest in sharing anything with us. Once that gate is firmly established, we are brought in because of some troubles better addressed by people that excel at swinging big sticks at monsters than those that build gates and wave bleeping thingamajiggers at weird stuff.
But why should we consider it appropriate to burden a game that used to have no story-gating to exploration at all, with well… story-gating.
I’ve never heard anyone complain that they could visit a completely equiped Fort Trinity that had members of a Pact that hadn’t even been formed. You know why? Because the people who find that sort of thing immersion-breaking can chose not to play the game that way. Like they used to say: “Play the way you want”.
Breaking this mould made no one any happier but sure made some people less happy.
I’m just responding to Tekey’s notion that they used a ship. I don’t know if their means of conveyance was actually mentioned anywhere. Anyway, airships and construction crews probably fare better in the calm of a bay as well.
Name one location where the player character arrived at before any other PC. Maybe Rata Novus, but even there, we see some stray investigators doing research on it and just happen to be exploring somewhere else while we’re turning the city back on. It’s normal for the maps to be populated upon our arrival. Just try to accept that and move on.
ps. If you weren’t the one arguing against the handwaiving of how everyone got set up on Ember Bay, I apologise. Your post was just the best at hand.
I hope you also read the initial thread, my last comment was just an example of what they could have done. I don’t need to be the first one on the Fire Islands, I can live with that.
But I can’t accept that the story as it is right now doesn’t make any sense. Taking a ship from Rata Sum and arriving on the southernmost island is completely illogical unless it’s explained in the story. The whole thread is about this one single question: Why did the asuran crew avoid the nearest island (from Rata Sum) and go to Ember Bay instead?
Once more, here’s the map: Rata Sum – Ember Bay
We already had some speculation going on but they gave us no official information.
The explanation is in the name of the area. Where other to land a ship than a bay? Bays are historically the places where overseas settlements start. No one, ever, thought it would be a good idea to sail off in a straight line and settle at the first place they encountered. Ships skirted the coastline until a hospital place was discovered. And what do you know? Bays are that.
What difference does it make whether a map is an LS map or non-LS map?
I don’t understand where you’re leading with that question, actually. Can we just pretend I gave the answer you’re fishing for and skip to the part where it all starts making sense?
The access itself to the zones are fixed in time. Currently the only way to Bloodstone Fen is via the airship that you took while doing the story. Currently the only way to access Ember Bay is by taking the portal from Taimi in the Rata Novus lab within the story instance since the open world instance is still pre-LS. Deja vu? I thought I’ve stated this all before.
You did, and I replied.
“I can freely step into a great many instances that are in fixed time. Why bother making a fuss about it here?”
Design choices should be uniform. If entering “fixed time” areas only ever took a standard zoning portal before, making a fuss about these 2 new areas now makes zero sense. It’s a design choice that implies to me they don’t have a clue what they’re doing.
I can freely step into a great many instances that are in fixed time. Why bother making a fuss about it here? Also, the entirety of that justification goes out the window the moment someone uses a portal scroll without doing the appropriate story instance first on that character. I actually have a character that completed the Ember Bay map without first doing the story. And the next day I did do the story. None of it made sense, and I didn’t care.
I find it quite immersion breaking that Tyria has huge swathes of land that we can’t get into at all, by any means. The suddenly open areas of Dry Top and Silverwastes are nothing more than the world becoming less ridiculous. More of that please.
It was never stated in GW2 dialogue that other methods could not work. These are areas where no other methods currently reach and we use a method as shown in the story. Could there be an Asura portal? Sure. Was it established in the story or map events? No.
I don’t quite understand what you mean by “where no other methods currently reach”?
If you want to go somewhere, you walk in its direction until you arrive there. If you run into an obstacle, acquire a conveyance that can overcome or circumvent it. It’s patently ridiculous that an advanced setting that has every method of transport up to and including airships has these arbitrary lines that you cannot cross without something unusual (a story!) happening first.
When you have these inaccessible parts of the world that are like that without rhyme or reason, no method of granting access to them can be immersion breaking, because there never was any immersion to begin with. It’s a stupid constraint of the game that can never make sense at all from an in-universe point of view.
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Maybe they had a look around the place?
Do you really expect every NPCs decision to be justified and every last one of their actions uncovered in minute exposition?
In a fictional world with any verisimilitude to it at all, things happening when our characters aren’t present should be the norm, not the exception.
I find it quite immersion breaking that Tyria has huge swathes of land that we can’t get into at all, by any means. The suddenly open areas of Dry Top and Silverwastes are nothing more than the world becoming less ridiculous. More of that please.
We are there to gather samples and information about the new destroyers after the asura already there got into trouble.
Why did the asura pick that place? I’m sure they have their reasons. Did you expect to be consulted or informed about everything?
Every other time that something turned players hostile to each other in the open world, it was a bug, and it was fixed. It’s not a stretch to assume that the same applies here.
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I still have this bug happen to me all the time, but it has become predictable lately.
Every single time I log on, my inventory window loses a column. I put it right again, and I’m good for that playing session. I can switch characters and do whatever I want and the inventory stays fixed. It doesn’t happen at all anymore until I completely exit the game client. But every time I start up the game again, the column is gone again. Every. Single. Time.
I know it’s being worked on, I can tell from the changing behavior every few updates. So, I hope this information is useful in tracking down the problem.
If you don’t already have journals or pages stashed away, the time-gate for this vendor is just as bad if not worse than the one for ascended material crafting.
Just 10-20 gold? A Zojja’s Breastplate costs close to double at the new merchant. The needed matrices alone are worth about 100g. I can craft 2 ascended coats for the price of buying a single one at Bling-9009.
The bling merchant got my hopes up when I noticed it offered 28 journal pages for completed journals. Unfortunately, there’s nothing worth spending those pages on.
I liked it, though the combat part of the instances was boring. Why did both have to have wave after wave of destroyers? The last instance went on for so long that I thought I was neglecting to do something to advance it and that the destroyers would just keep on coming until I figured it out.
I discovered a funny thing. Playing my mesmer I ended up falling while downed. (Rock-throwing knights only played a small part in it, I started gliding with very low health after being knocked off a platform and couldn’t even take 1 rock).
After falling a long, long way, I activated “Deception” (downed skill 2) and much to my surprise it put me on a ridge I was plummeting past, where I could safely rally.
I don’t know if this possibility is common knowledge and I’m just late to the party, but it made me smile.
The funny thing is, out of all the ways to earn masteries, raids are actually the easiest. You only have to do one single encounter of your choice, which means you can do the easiest one (escort) and never touch raids again. It’s not like you need to clear the entire raid 100 times or something.
You can’t say the same for adventures, story achievements, bosses, etc.
Man I would love to only have to do a single adventure of my choice to unlock all mastery points!
You’re comparing unlocking mastery tracks with gaining mastery points. If you compare unlocking tracks with unlocking tracks, you’ll find that there isn’t a single track that requires doing something more than once to unlock it.
I’ll not participate in the discussion about types of players, I’ll just talk about myself.
Since HoT, there has been a very unfavorable ratio of new content I care about and new content I have no interest in whatsoever. That made me spend significantly less time on the game. Fact!
On this page: https://gw2efficiency.com/account/overview
What does it say exactly when you enter the name of the item in the search box?
Any melee weapon. No aura or xmas-lights animations. No footprints. Looking like an actual weapon you could swing and hurt people with.
The legendary effects would be in the skills effects. They’d carry impact instead of the anemic all-ages contact effects we have now. It needs to look like it hurts. Terribly.
Never going to happen, but a guy can dream.
I’ve been hit by rocks after landing and having finished mining a bloodstone crystal formation. Assuming they were launched while I was still gliding, they must’ve come from really far to take that long to hit me.
We’re just a few weeks away from the 4th Anniversary and I would like to ask that whatever Anet decides to do, please consider everyone.
The 3rd year gift was a very cool dye selection but it was also not able to be used by many of the most avid dye collectors who already had all the dyes available in the selection.
Many of us held out hope that new dye collections would be added and that we could use the gift in the future, but that has not happened.
I realize that it’s a small percentage of the community, but it was disappointing that many of the players who are most interested and focused on dye collecting found themselves excluded.
Please don’t let that happen again.
Thanks
Some new dyes from those packages would’ve been nice, but the unopened ones I still have in storage would net me almost 2,000 gold if I were to just sell to highest bidder of the most expensive one of the moment. I consider that a very nice present.
I don’t count rewards to consider replayability. I just count enjoyment of the content. Having said that, there’s not much in the way of rewards anyway. Skills that only work in the area, and bloodstone equipment I have no use for.
While it’s a nice area and there’s a lot of shiny stuff, there’s nothing there that holds my attention. Some events with big hitpoint-bag champions and floating magical balls, that’s the extent of it.
I second that disagreement. I tend to not use large elaborate back pieces as backpacks while I do like the glider versions. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to dye them? Making the glider dyeable does not remove the option to not dye them for people who use both the backpack and the glider. Win-win.
And if theres one thing that Lazarus needed after so much hype and build-up, was a good presentation. Which he hasn’t gotten.
Lazarus had hype and build-up?
Yes, repeating the story with additional characters is horrible.
My 2nd character needed 3 hours to get through the Hoelbrak instance and maybe a bit longer to get through Rata Novus. Why? Because every time the NPCs started talking, I alt-tabbed (or completely walked away from my PC) to do something more interesting, often to stay away from the game for long stretches of time. I had to restart the Hoelbrak instance once because I was kicked for inactivity.
I won’t be doing it with more characters the way this is set up.
New players who never accumulated thousands of them in the form of the old Skill Points that got changed into Spirit Shards?
They went too far with the limitations.
The enrichment slot being the only one accepting enrichment infusions? Of course!
The enrichment slot only accepting enrichment infusions? Seems unnecessary and punishing.
GW2 has always been an evolving game that had stuff added to it. (HoT did in fact replace huge chunks of the game, by the way). With HoT, its evolutionary course became ruinous for me, adding mostly stuff I have no interest in. It went from a game in a (for me) attractive flux to a game in a (for me) repulsive flux.
then perhaps you should reread through your post history, it is clear you have been very unhappy with GW2 for a very long time to the point where you refer to the fact it offers you nothing. SO HOT did not ruin it for you at all, especially since you got an addition 6 months life out of a game you disliked so much apparently.
I did reread through my post history. There’s nothing there that points to me thinking the game was ruined. Disliking a feature, or a change, doesn’t equate to disliking the game.
Do you remember posting these?
Living story = fragmented story over a long time period. Telling any story in small chunks over a long time period is not a great format.
they need to sort the issues with the new maps, rotating just hides the problem temporarily.
I play GW2 to escape the real world, I do not need a lesson on acceptance and tolerance, im quite happy with my acceptance and tolerance levels, I want a storyline to be about GW lore not sexual orientation.
Holy mackerel, you obviously hate this game.
Edited to add some more hate.
(edited by Manasa Devi.7958)
Please discuss the topic not each other.
well the guy is clearly posting arguments that is more to do with his dislike of GW2 in general than the actual thread at hand.
This may come as a huge surprise, but it’s entirely possible to not like certain aspects of the game but still liking it. Cherry-picking my dislikes proves nothing about me, but speaks volumes about who’s doing it. Some of those cherry-picked quotes aren’t even picked well. One didn’t actually express dislike and another one was about an acknowledged bug that has since been fixed for crying out loud. I can’t dislike bugs now? Tough crowd.
And even if I didn’t like all of GW2 at every point in time over all the years I played, at no point did I consider it ruined until not too long ago. For many months before the launch of HoT, the game was stale, which was about parr for the course for a still expansion-less game of its age. But that’s not the same as ruined. There was hope, an expansion was coming. Post HoT, I don’t see this game ever being worth my time anymore, for reasons I’ve repeated ad nauseam many months ago.
And now apparently, people who don’t think the game is ruined have little else to contribute than to make fools of themselves trying to convince the world that they know my feelings about the game better than I do. Pathetic.
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It ruined the game for me in that it was a huge letdown.
You’ve been complaining about the game since long before HoT. Like years. So how is it HOT ruined the game for you when you were so unhappy before HoT?
Lies.
No it didn’t, you have been complaining about the game for well over a year..continuously, which is a strange thing to do in itself right?
More lies.
It ruined the game for me in that it was a huge letdown.
I’ve complained about dungeons. Not because they were hard but because they were rubbish.
People should just wait until they complete the entire episode next week before making their conclusions.
Or they could not log in to play it because they’ve lost interest because of too many months of Jack Excrement.
Only if they do the same on the forums and not bring their vitriol there as well.
I think that’s for everyone to decide for themselves.
People should just wait until they complete the entire episode next week before making their conclusions.
Or they could not log in to play it because they’ve lost interest because of too many months of Jack Excrement.
I blame the quote train not including the relevant posts. I hate that on these forums. It’s rubbish to have to go back pages to see the start of a conversation.
Anyway, I replaced the first word of my post with “He” and it’s a wrap.
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It is looking more and more like the raid was indeed chapter one of the next living story. Even if they cover it again at this point, they have let that cat out of the bag – providing the story experience to only a small percentage of their players.
As interested as I am in this particular story, this is bad form and bad storytelling.
But the reason it is bad has more to do with the exclusionary nature of raids than anything else. This just proves that they need to focus on developing PVE content for the entire PVE community, even if that means tiered difficulties in raids.
They can always include a synopsis within the LS that covers everything that occurred in the raid.
That is far from the same as giving the players the experience of being the central hero in the first part of their story – which is what players should expect (and experience is not the same as hearing about, reading about, or walking through a cleared instance).
It kills excitement and makes players (rightfully) feel left out by the developers – and it didn’t have to happen.
The moment has passed.
We can only hope Anet learns something from this and doesn’t repeat this mistake in the future.
Should players have the option to play through events referenced from GW1? There’s nothing wrong with providing a synopsis or summary. The story within the raid was fairly small anyway so it’s not as if a large summary would be needed.
Also:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Raid-Narrative-and-Lore/first#post6195598
The amount of story isn’t the point. It was (most likely) the introduction to/beginning of the next story, and they chose to leave the vast majority of players out of it, when they didn’t need to.
You don’t start reading a book 20 pages in or starting a movie at the 15 minute mark – even if one of the characters roughly recaps the story at that point.
It is bad storytelling and a significant misstep by the developers and the narrative team.
in medias res (Classical Latin: [?n m?dia?s re?s], lit. “into the middle things”) opens in the midst of action. (cf. ab ovo, ab initio).1 Often, exposition is bypassed and filled in gradually, either through dialogue, flashbacks or description of past events.
What’s the point of that non sequitur?
It’s not a non sequiter, it’s explaining a commonly used narrative technique, addressing the claim that it’s bad storytelling to say that the claim is not necessarily true.
It’s a narrative technique that has nothing to do with the subject at hand.
He responded to someone saying: “You don’t start reading a book 20 pages in or starting a movie at the 15 minute mark – even if one of the characters roughly recaps the story at that point.”
In media res storytelling still starts at page one of a book or the very start of a movie. In this situation, there actually is something that goes before, but less conveniently accessed. Like you said, “in media res” is a narrative technique, entirely dissimilar to what’s happening here, which is just narrative clumsiness.
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It is looking more and more like the raid was indeed chapter one of the next living story. Even if they cover it again at this point, they have let that cat out of the bag – providing the story experience to only a small percentage of their players.
As interested as I am in this particular story, this is bad form and bad storytelling.
But the reason it is bad has more to do with the exclusionary nature of raids than anything else. This just proves that they need to focus on developing PVE content for the entire PVE community, even if that means tiered difficulties in raids.
They can always include a synopsis within the LS that covers everything that occurred in the raid.
That is far from the same as giving the players the experience of being the central hero in the first part of their story – which is what players should expect (and experience is not the same as hearing about, reading about, or walking through a cleared instance).
It kills excitement and makes players (rightfully) feel left out by the developers – and it didn’t have to happen.
The moment has passed.
We can only hope Anet learns something from this and doesn’t repeat this mistake in the future.
Should players have the option to play through events referenced from GW1? There’s nothing wrong with providing a synopsis or summary. The story within the raid was fairly small anyway so it’s not as if a large summary would be needed.
Also:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Raid-Narrative-and-Lore/first#post6195598
The amount of story isn’t the point. It was (most likely) the introduction to/beginning of the next story, and they chose to leave the vast majority of players out of it, when they didn’t need to.
You don’t start reading a book 20 pages in or starting a movie at the 15 minute mark – even if one of the characters roughly recaps the story at that point.
It is bad storytelling and a significant misstep by the developers and the narrative team.
in medias res (Classical Latin: [?n m?dia?s re?s], lit. “into the middle things”) opens in the midst of action. (cf. ab ovo, ab initio).1 Often, exposition is bypassed and filled in gradually, either through dialogue, flashbacks or description of past events.
What’s the point of that non sequitur?
I haven’t played in weeks. This doesn’t encourage me to get back in.
The WvW one is/was ‘Big Spender’, as well – easily accomplished in the Guild Hall. Or the Jumping Puzzle – portals abounded; took about 3 seconds.
If anything, they seem faster and easier to complete now.
Big Spender is easier now than ever before, with the portable provisioner that miraculously works even outside of WvW.
This is a premium feature and it isn’t cheap.
I personally would prefer the option to choose, or the old setting back permanently.
Various people have various numbers of slots, and this will keep changing in the future.
I use mini inventory covering my mini map constantly and this is messing it up a lil.
I like this version better than the original, but I’d still prefer to have the option to have the slots appear below the regular bags.
That way they wouldn’t cause shifts in regular inventory alignment and the blank space that seems to offend some people would be a non-issue as well. Also, all my characters keep the stuff they always carry with them on the bottom, in invisible bags. The shared slots at the very end of that would be nicely in line with that scheme. For me, this would be perfect in every aspect.
I’ve taken to only opening them with keys I get as drops and selling the rest on the TP. That’s only 4 or 5 a day, but it saves me the trouble of going back into the Observatory to buy more keys and, more importantly, I end up with less of the atrocious drops to get rid of. If I never see an ascended breather recipe again, it will be too soon.
Jumping to the stem is trivially easy if you line yourself up at the closest to perpendicular angle possible. That way, you’ll have a lot of stem between falling short and overshooting.
One aspect of the new loot that could make it appear to be nerfed is the inclusion of some really bad drops to the loot table. If you get a lot of those on a given day, it definitely feels like it’s worse than it was before.
I’ve had days like that. 3 single stack potions, 2 tomes of knowledge and a single mystic coin, out of my 3 tier 4 and 3 tier 3 chests. Nothing good out of the tier 2 and tier 1 chests. (As is to be expected.)
Conversely, I’ve had a day that gave me a weapon chest, an armor chest, a golden fractal longbow (hadn’t unlocked that one yet), an ascended accessory (berserker!) and 2 infused rings that salvaged into a total of 34 matrices, using the 20 charge tool I got a day earlier.
If they’d get rid of the really bad stuff, like the aforementioned tomes and single stack potions, giving the standard Stabilizing Matrix instead of them, it would improve people’s feelings about this new loot a lot, I’m sure.
Are people actually completely overlooking how useful the Shared Slot Bag is?
For people who primarily just play one main character, it has very little use. It’s one bonus slot and nothing more if you play no other characters. Everyone is different. Everyone has different needs.
That’s why ANet needs to learn how to implement OPTIONS… something they almost always seem unable or unwilling to do for some reason.
Yep it baffles the mind they haven’t figured out OPTIONS are the best course of action every time.
Because sometimes OPTIONS are a viable choice for them to add. Sometimes the code will just not allow it. Sometimes trying to add it could actually break things.
Say they add the ability to hide shared inventory slots, but it breaks the game and actually hides every bag. Would you still want the option?
Anything that anyone can conceive of happening on a computer screen can be coded.
Anything.
It might take too many resources, or it might require huge portions of code to be completely rewritten, but none of that means something can’t be done.
If the gems I (and many others) have spent are not worth the trouble, that’s what they should say, and not some feeble excuse.