Guild Wars 2

I wonder how much players will come back / enter the GW2 universe when Anet changes the term “living world” into “growing world”.

I see a strong trend in implementation of permanent content, which is a good thing. They listened to us previously and now we see the result. I like that shift. Now I just feel that the story-delivery has to come on par with this trend. Let people play on their own pace, new stuff every two weeks is awesome,… after this two weeks make those new temporary story parts kind of instanced, so that everyone (even players who start a year from now) can experience it; and players who enjoyed it can repeat it.

Example: a storyteller tells you the story of Braham and the battle of Cragstead. You relive what happened in Brahams eyes… like the GW1 storybooks.

I agree about the dislike for zerg-battles. The most fun I had during LS was mostly content for smaller groups (Zephyr Sanctum scavenger hunt, jumping puzzles, last years Halloween scavenger hunt, Wintersday globe area,… ). Tequatl is the only zerg-like battle I enjoyed, but I haven’t defeated him yet and I’m not sure if I ever have the chance to do so.

I would welcome open world content for smaller groups with nice storytelling, something with depth.

I think a big problem is the way storytelling is handled. The amount of content where some permanent depth to the world is implemented is quite small. It feels like fast food content and to take whole maps out of the game again (Labyrinth Cliffs)… I don’t get that. This map could have been filled with new events, interesting stories and lore (kind of like Southsun Cove).

Havvy.4897:

means that the other players around you have to pick up your slack. No thank you.

As for the changes to the medals, they are currently piggy backing on the threat system that mobs use. They’d have to create an entirely new subsystem to implement this. I’d rather see improvements to the systems they already have than create new subsystems since there’s already enough subsystems in play.

and what exactly is the difference between those players with the buff and Alts who mostly are much more behind in the level and play along everyone else?

I don’t get your second statement. It has nothing to do with the threat-system.

to increase the risk involved, the “heroism” npc wants money for the duel. Pay 1g to fight him. Win, and you’ll get the buff and keep it until you a.) leave the zone, or b.) go down.

It would be an excellent gold sink for more experienced players and would counteract the higher rewards you’ll get for platin-medals.

for a even harder challenge:

do 3 unique events in a row without losing the “Heroism” buff (going down) grants you bonus tokens/progression on your zone-bar + one guaranteed chest. Get another for 6, 9 and 12 events. (once a day).

Higher risk – higher reward.

This isn’t about changing events completely. I think the medal system should get a revamp so that higher rewards are possible for good play.

Events are a bit bland. There is no noticeable difference for getting a silver- or goldmedal. Why not tying a medal to a little challenge?

• bronze medal… participate in killing/healing. No loot reward, only xp, karma, gold.

• silver medal… participate from the start of the event in killing/healing without getting killed. You can choose one piece of loot out of 2 random offers (rare chance for rares and exotics)

• gold medal… participate considerably in killing/healing from the start of the event without going down once. You can choose one piece of loot out of 3 random offers (high chance (30%) for a rare and relatively good chance for exotics (10%)) + mats for ascended gear.

on top of that give platin medals for having a real challenge:

• platin medal… talk to a certain npc before you participate in an event. He’ll challenge you to a duell (something like hard skill challenges where only you can do damage to him). Once you defeat him you’ll get a buff for the duration you’re in the zone: “Heroism”. This buff scales you two levels below the standard zone level and treats your gear as if it is full white.

Participate considerably in an event (killing/healing) without getting downed once (which is much harder now):

Zone-Hero token/Zone progression, which unlocks new cosmetic/functional rewards such as new 18 & 20 slot bags, mini-slots, cosmetic skins for weapons and armor (zonespecific), minis, new dyes, zone-specific utility skills,… + choose one piece of loot out of 5 random offers (high chance (30%) for a rare and relatively good chance for exotics (10%)) + mats for ascended gear.

The idea: get rid of diminishing returns and reward players for spreading out instead:

You have that mob-families (pirates, skelk, ogres,…). Once you kill an enemy of one specific family, all other families gain a bonus of +(random number) 0,5 MF for yourself only. So if you kill 20 pirates, all other families gain +10% MF for you. Other players have their own personal bonus MF on enemy mobs. Maximum amount of bonus MF: +300%

Now you go and kill a ogre. He gained that +10% MF from you killing 20 pirates. For each ogre you kill, ogres lose 0,5% MF until they are on 0 again, while all the other enemies gain MF.

If you haven’t killed Risen for a long time, those will have a pretty huge amount of bonus MF, but lose that again slowly when you start killing those.

TL;DR: killing mob family A increases bonus Magic Find for all other mob families. Killing mob family B after that slowly decreases MF back to norm again, while increasing bMF for the other families.

I wonder if it’s temporary or permanent.

Sorann Peace.9056:

2. ArenaNet has, in the past, made allusions to the idea of introducing a “jungle dragon” as the next elder dragon to fight.

I don’t remember Anet saying something like this, do you have a source?

why designing a new profession when this archetype is already in the game? Give the Necromancer a greatsword and/or dual swords and that’s it.

Fafnir.5124:

Just asking they are under news so when they are up you can link to them from login screen doesn’t that count as ingame (not hard to find). Fragments of hearsay lore and roomers of the realm. Does it really need to be ingame through cinema or dialog what do you think news of gw2 should count as?

don’t you understand, in the launcher they are only up for a couple of days. It’s like temporary content all over again. People like me are asking for permanent story additions.

hedix.1986:

They should just re-direct resources from useless random minigames to something useful, like lore. That little thing called ‘story’ which makes Tyria and drives the game.

as much as I love lore, there are quite a few other things I love in the game and wouldn’t want to miss (including the games) and opinions differ. Who would I be if I’d cut content which a quarter of the players absolutely loves?

I’d love what Sanguis suggests. And why not give bonus magic find on mobs we have gathered information about? Or new gameplay options like extended stun duration on those mobs or decreased poison on yourself etc.

Colin

Any solution will likely include our plans to try and make Living World, and stories around it easier to access, understand, and find out more about even once they have past.

I’d love to have more information about what way of implementation could work for you and the characteristics of that.

-) easy access. Easier to access than a location like a library would be a new UI-element. We already have quite a lot of buttons in our UI, so it should somehow be a logical implementation. The personal story tab could be expanded into a story tab. (personal story, living world story,…) This includes a page for collectibles like those “books” you can find in the world or get via living story achievements etc. I’m thinking in the way of a bank-tab where you can put those books (or send these via the “deploy all” option in the bag-menu).

(I wonder if it’s feasible for Anet to create short story instances in the spirit of Bonus Mission Packs from GW1, where you ARE the character of that story)

well Colin mentioned a few posts above that cutscenes aren’t feasible for them.

ColinJohanson.2394:

While we love the website stories and they won’t be going away, we are working on ways to try and get more of that experience (and story) available to see, and read in game.

Any solution will likely include our plans to try and make Living World, and stories around it easier to access, understand, and find out more about even once they have past.

Thanks for the feedback Colin! Nice to see that the devs acknowledge that the current situation isn’t the optimal one.

I think if you would implement a certain libary into the home instances, people should learn more about the home instance in the first place. I’ve heard a few people say that they have no idea what this “home instance” is and where it’s located. I’d prefer an instanced library in Lions Arch since I feel this is where the most people are located when they’re not out in the world.

(it’s odd, but the home instance is a place I rarely go because it’s so “far” away from my daily routines. Maybe it would be good to have the mystic forge in each of the main cities… I don’t know.)

Having books as rare rewards on the one hand would be exciting, on the other hand it would go against what you’re proposing: the easy access. I can see this now. You should learn about the villains before you start doing the content based around them. Or alongside?!

How about: unlock new pieces of information (pages of a book) while you get the living story achievements. Once the Meta is completed, you’ll have the full story unlocked. Unlocking the pieces would keep people involved in the story of the villain / heroes.

For people who couldn’t complete the achievements and/or have missed the LS-weeks, the missing pages could be rare drops in the open world zones where things happened. Sellable for 1-2g at vendors.

Zacchary.6183:

I think the reason why legendaries are as they are in the first place is so that people would feel tempted to buy it (with real money).

Do you think it would be better for the game if they weren’t tradeable?

a user called Auesis had an idea how to implement Legendaries in a non-grindy way which imho still feels quite epic:

More than that, Legendaries wouldn’t be a gold sink. They would be acquired ONLY through a combination of heavy skill-focused challenges, be it from dungeons or playing in the open world in a specific way. Then, they would be a part of that new achievement panel, where you can extract them for any of your characters, but cannot sell.

This would be awesome in my opinion. Legendaries would still be a long-term goal but without having to accumulate that huge amount of mats. People could no longer complain that you have to grind the mats. Achievement points are gained by every single achievement you can get, playing the game the way you want.

I love the skill barrier too. You should proof your worthiness. It’s not “play the dungeon 200 times” but rather: “kill that boss with all those gambits active” etc. (I’m talking about a possible future implementation of gambits in dungeons,… has been datamined not long ago).

quote-source: http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1osvbp/the_if_i_had_my_way_thread/

I also like that you want to increase the variety. I’m not sure why we have skritt and centaurs on the borderland maps. There is little incentive for players to complete these events, is there?

I like that the new map will be a playground for new ideas. We could see a capture-the-stables mission where the winning team has access to mounts for a certain time I’d rather see such gameplay changes when winning than the example where you get a buff/statistical bonus for killing elementals.

I don’t think its a good way to introduce villains to a game with little to none background story about those in the actual game.

how to avoid the “pay to win” situation: make standard 0815 versions of mounts available at vendors for 50s each. Only cosmetic new mounts will be available as rewards and from the gem store.

small further idea: everyone has a stable in his home instance where you can look at all of your mounts (like the island in GW1 where you had your mini-collection running around).

If you want to see mounts considered by Anet, maybe it would be a good idea to mention it in the current list of things that should be discussed with Anet: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Collaborative-Development-Request-for-Topics/page/11#post3058120

@CptWheezy: I see where you’re coming from and you may have valid concerns. I feel it’s neccessary though, since it probably will happen that only one server is active on one of the new maps at a given time and you need something exciting to do for those players if they have no human enemy to fight.

I also think that this is a great opportunity to bring more players into WvW. A lot of the players have never tried WvW because they don’t like PvP (as they know it from other mmos). This could be the first experience for them… and maybe they have fun killing players together.

gidorah.4960:

i’m on a t2 server i rarely see a que outside of reset night why are you putting so many resources into stuff that i will get to play once a week is this to encourage me to transfer to t1? it wouldnt bother me so much if the reason you give for not fixing alot of problems is lack of resources.

you have access to this map and it’s overflows at anytime, not only when you’re queued.

Superior Rune of the Traveler
1 +10 to all stats +2% crit damage
2 +15% boon duration
3 +10 to all stats +2% crit damage
4 10% condition damage
5 +10 to all stats +2% crit damage
6 25% movement increase

We don’t need this!! We already have waypoints! Remove rune of the traveller from the game!

Just kidding. I’d love to see cosmetic mounts.

it’s funny, the last time I remember people complained about how unfair the clocktower was because huge Norn and Charr griefed the run and made it unplayable for everyone.

Imho the changes are awesome, you still see the progress of the enemies but no one can grief your experience anymore.

What I’d suggest though: make town clothes useable in non-sPvP PvP maps (aka Minigame areas).

Isi.1453:

Wow….I didn’t even know they put lore stories on the website.

I just assumed all the story info was in game.

you’re definitely not alone on this. A lot of my friends don’t care for anything GW2-related which isn’t in the game, they want to play the game as easy as possible (plug and play) and don’t want to search the internet for story-stuff which should be in the game like in “our” time when games like Baldurs Gate or Neverwinter Nights had a huge amount of ingame books which consisted of quite a lot of interesting stuff to read to expand the lore.

Now we have links in the launcher which disappear soon after they’re released… older blogposts are not that easy to find again. I think it would be totally worth it to create a UI for ingame books and just copy&paste each new blogpost into these books. They would make great rewards also, so you could expand the reward variety which would be a good thing, since some already explain about only minis, tonics and back items (as well as gear) as only rewards.

Jon, this certainly sounds like a fun map to me personally, I’d love to play on this map. It also sounds like there is a lot of PvE going on, are you afraid that hardcore WvWers who dislike any form of PvE on “their” playground have a problem with this?

Will PvE mobs give WXP which allows pure PvE-players to farm WXP without killing human players?

(Personally I’d love more PvE on the WvW maps as well – like events for tower-defenders to pass time and have more fun, but I can see the Kittenstorm arriving when this happens)

Twinny.9304:

1 Question: I have heard about this idea for a new open area inside the jumping puzzle on Eternal Battle Grounds which would be ideal for guilds to battle each other (GvG, not its intend purpose i know but u know what I mean), is this map the same idea or instead of etc? in other words in addition to this new map is this area in jumping puzzle EB still happening if it was happening that is?

Anet answered before that if there would be a team creating content for GvG, it wouldn’t be the WvW team.

The Obsidian Sanctum map seems to be completely different to this map where there are still WvW related objectives like keeps, camps, etc.

JonPeters.5630:

I mean for example this Edge of the Mists map, we are intending that each objective potentially has unique guards and keep lords. If that works well we could make changes to EB or borderlands that make the guards/lords at objectives in those maps more unique.

Would be certainly interesting if these guards/lords would have real boss-mechanics.

Sizzle Hint.1820:

Q1: How big is the map compared to the current ones?
Q2: Is it just a copy paste from the current ones or a whole new map?

We got answers about this:

it’s smaller than EB but technically speaking – it plays bigger. Multiple Islands, connected with bridges.

a whole new map, Avatar-like floating islands which are connected via bridges with very different terrain.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/the-edge-of-the-mists-a-new-map-is-coming-to-wvw/

Sorry for the offtopic, but I’m overwhelmed about the quantity of feedback from the devs. Is this the beginning of a new era? This feels great, “we are listening” gets a whole new meaning.

Back to topic:
I don’t quite understand what the goal on this new map is. We don’t get points for the WvW score, but we get “something” we can use (?) on the WvW maps. I guess you were not talking about loot… So what could this be? Another buff like bloodlust, or something more gameplay-changing?

will there be structures which can be claimed as well or just pure brawl/deathmatch?

Are players affected by the bloodlust buff?

Do you feel this could be a nice playground for the GvG crowd, or would this hinder “progression” for other players on this map? (I know about the GvG-Arena in the Obsidian map, love the idea).

Oh well, the topics haven’t even been posted on german forums as far as I’m aware… O_o.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Perhaps my 2nd biggest disappointment in GW2 is that new rewards for the karma system have been sparse and are generally things I have no use for.

Good point, I wonder why there are no new things to purchase with karma. There could be extremely expensive things people need, like 20slot bags, certain new skins… so that people start spending karma again. It’s a great currency imho, since it can’t be traded – perfect for prestige objects.

Bags are easily purchaseable via fractals already, give people who don’t enjoy fractals an alternative way to get them, 14g on the trading post is not a friendly option.

1.) new things to do which benefit the server
2.) make defending more fun (not necessarily more rewarding)

@1.) Giving different kinds of roles more things to do e.g. as solo-roamer: you automatically send map-markers of spotted zergs when targetting (ctrl + t) enemies from any distance.
@2.) e.g. give players something to do while they stay back in a tower. NPCs now sound alarm at incoming enemies while someone is defending that tower and doing activities that make sense (collecting stones to increase defense of walls, train npcs to become stronger npc-defenders,… events like these)

1.) the lack of storytelling / depth in open-world events
2.) generic item drops
3.) lore releases in form of blogs instead of ingame

Wolfheart.1938:

Even if what you typed were my expectations (and they aren’t), this quote alone would justify them.

Well this comment was made quite long ago, what if Anet saw that this didn’t work out, players got bored and wanted more progression and things to work towards to? This actually happened if I remember correctly, so Anet listened, worked on it for months and delivered.

It’s still very much possible to get even for the most casual players. You don’t have to run difficult dungeons in instanced content. You can do this without relying on other people. It only takes a bit longer than the “free loot” exotics you can buy in the trading post after a single dungeon run.

Moshari.8570:

If this were true, you wouldn’t see people complaining about it.

how long have you been in the forums? People here complain about everything.

is Anet planning to reply on other language forums as well with the upcoming posts? The delay of the post is because of “localisation” but I don’t get how this will work? In the German forum there are only very few community guys like Ramon and Martin posting, but rarely/never(?) direct answers from the developer side from the people who are working on that content.

Is this going to change? Are posts on German forums being collected and translated for the devs? I thought devs will be discussing the topic with us. Confused one here.

I REALLY love the male Norn haircut, the one with longer hair. It goes well with the beard too. Would love to see more versions in the future, great job Anet!!

(I have to say, all of the new styles look very high quality)

ah the portal, totally missed it… thanks!!

SoulCrystal.2186:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

I’m confused… I start as a villager, try to collect bones, spider webs… and kill ghosts. Then when killed I spawn as ghost.

Where are those doors, ressources and bosses you people talk about?? O_o

You are playing the PVP mini-game. You get to the labyrinth by going through one of the doors out in the world.

Do I? I got to a room where I can choose between the Clocktower and the PvP minigame. Hmm.

I’m confused… I start as a villager, try to collect bones, spider webs… and kill ghosts. Then when killed I spawn as ghost.

Where are those doors, ressources and bosses you people talk about?? O_o

Vol.5241:

The preview for the next patch looks Halloween themed, so you may get your 2nd set of skins there.

preview? where?

I love the idea about having mounts for the server who dominates the ruins. Players going off their path to cap camps and towers get a speedbuff which makes capping towers and camps much more efficient.

Halloween content seems to be around for a month

twitter:

User: I will be at university when the new content arrives :’(

ANet: awww it will be available for 4 weeks starting today if that is any help. ^AT

personally I love the downed-mode. It’s an awesome opportunity for even bad players to play an important role in battle and have those interact with others more. Imho an option to kill yourself faster / kamikaze would be nice though since some players prefer waypointing back to combat as fast as possible.