Guild Wars 2

Failth.2935:

I had to come here and give my own feedback about this since I feel like so many ppl are hating this content.

Search your feelings young skywalker…. that’s not really the case at all.

There are a few haters for sure, most are just venting frustration/disappointment with the bugs.

Maybe you were lucky and didn’t have them, maybe your ping is so high you didn’t get them, or maybe you were patient enough not to even notice they were bugs in the first place.
Either way, most of the ‘hate’ has diminished knowing some fixes are coming tomorrow. (As evidenced by this thread slowing waaaay down.)

If the youtube vids are any indication, some people can’t get ten feet in the rapids without being thrown back for no reason. For me its completely random if I will or not, practically can’t progress at all.

I’m sure there will be plenty of praise to go around if the fixes tomorrow work.

Josh Foreman.8250:

Draygo.9473:

It didn’t go to waste, though I think you learned a lesson in pacing.

Haha… I feel like Peter Jackson should about the last hour of Return of the King.

Hey! That was like a whole third of the book he “skimmed” through for an hour!

(I think he was trying to make up for hatcheting the previous third.)

I have to agree with many of the posters now, the level design is extraordinarily well done, it’s mainly the overload of mechanics which don’t all work as intended, which highlights the length too much.

Every difficult spot or overzealous mechanic in one 10 second section of the map becomes a 10 minute section. Every 10 minute section feels 10 minutes longer than the one before it, and so on.

There is a HUGE amount of content here, it’s completely expected that it would have some crazy bugs and unintended behaviors in the live game. It’s just unfortunate that most of those are in the first “ten minute” section which becomes hours of frustration before you even get to see just how much cool stuff there is ahead.

Then you get to the spike traps and all that frustration comes back.

With all your interaction and willingness to work with our feedback, I’m really looking forward to the patch and hoping to enjoy this content.

Thank you for all your hard work on still the best addition since launch (which wasn’t all that smooth itself).

So there will be purple? XD

Dear kitten in the pound!!!

Just lost what little interest I may have had in trying to get a legendary now….

Josh Foreman.8250:

Is this issue (dying randomly and getting pushed off rocks constantly) happening to you? If so, is it happening as frequently as this video shows? If this is anything more than an edge case than we have a serious problem that will necessitate some serious solution. Thanks for pointing it out.

That’s pretty much exactly it. Everyone I know has problems like that in the rapids. That would be the “frustrating” part.

Josh Foreman.8250:

Monkey Fritz.9052:

W1 was a fun, colorful lighthearted and challenging homage. W2 could be but isn’t.
W2 suffers from the “Lets make it as hard as we remember those games being when we were five and sucked at playing video games.”

I’ve said it several times in this thread so far but I’ll keep repeating it since I don’t expect anyone to read the whole thing. The design intent was NOT to make Normal Mode as hard as it is. There are a combination of factors that are making it so, and we’re currently working on a fix. We want W2 Normal Mode to be slightly more challenging than W1. There are several obvious difficulty spikes that we are addressing by adding check points, removing the buggy waterspouts, making dart traps easier to spot, removing some of them, etc.

All the complaints about the randomness of the rapids, floaty platforming, camera issues, etc. are things I would literally pay a thousand dollars to fix. Maybe even two. I’d cut my salary if we had a way to fix them. We hate them as much as you do. We simply accept the pain of these engine limitations because we feel like the overall content is worth it. I totally understand if other’s find them too annoying to be able to enjoy the content.
I said earlier, we have a great engine for GW2. But making it do platforming stuff is like getting a powerful heavy elephant to win a horse race. It’s not always pretty. Finding the sweet spot between pushing the boundaries of the engine to create new old-school mechanics and keeping the gameplay perfectly smooth is a constant game of compromise. I’m not claiming we’re perfect at it. But we’re trying. Check back after we get the changes in and see if we addressed most of the difficulty spikes.
I’m really appreciative to have this interchange with you guys. Some of your ideas are going directly into our fix. Though most of the warranted complaints are just a limitation of what we can and can’t do with our engine. (Like making the dart traps knock back instead of kill. That was our initial intent, but there’s no way to make it work.)

I am glad you guys are working on the feedback, and do understand a lot of it is the engine. Mostly I was chiming in against the people claiming it “should be hard because oldschool games are hard.” And I, personally, don’t think oldschool games are nearly as hard as they are hyped, and think this current difficulty is more frustrating and limiting than ‘hard.’

And the length is just a bit much, that “Trapped because I can’t even pause the game” feeling is never fun, even if an instance is just 10 minutes too long.

The main thing I am upset about is the account blocking, diminished rewards, and only 1 starter life (any one of those would have ruined even w1 the first time in april, when i absolutely loved it and thought it was the best birthday present ever.)

SAB kept me playing the game after wasting 350 gold trying to get even one fused skin (when I wanted half the set). Having been able to get all the super skins while having fun during the same month kept me from leaving gambler wars 2.

But now as the gamble boxes are being lightened up, I can only assume the NCsoft execs are the reasoning behind the infinite coin.

RvLeshrac.2673:

Duncanmix.5238:

I think most of whine comes from younger generation that didn’t get to experience this type of game. Obviously there are few of older guys too, but I think you guys got carried by the moment.
For me W2 is by far better then W1. W1 was just too, you could run it in about 10 minutes. After day or two of W1 everyone was just farming it multiple times with alts, and super adventure box became super farming box.
W2 reminds me on old school games and really brings up those memories.

Stop saying this crap. It does not. With the exception of some of the worst games of the era, no classic platformer, not even Pitfall, required pixel-edge-of-platform attacking and pixel-perfect jumping.

One of the alligators in SAB requires that you stand almost entirely off the level geometry in order to hit it, and there are several spots where you must stand in locations that are covered by rapids in order to make a jump, with no indication that these are actually safe.

I agree with this post.

In spite of peoples random attempts at remembering their childhood, I still play ‘old school’ games quite regularly. And the artificially inflated difficulty mechanics and pixel perfect requirements only exist in the absolute worst of them.

You had to learn what to do, and then you did it. That is “old school hard.”

It didn’t fail 4 out of 5 tries because the whip wouldn’t catch the hit box just right. You didn’t have to stand in mid air so the sling shot would hit the next turtle instead of repeatedly hitting the one you are already standing on. Falling in the water either killed you, or it didn’t. There was no random ‘will it send you half way back and then let you jump out? Or will it trap you in one spot while devouring your soul?’

W1 was a fun, colorful lighthearted and challenging homage. W2 could be but isn’t.
W2 suffers from the “Lets make it as hard as we remember those games being when we were five and sucked at playing video games.”

Sure, when I first played on my neighbors Snes, super mario world was hard and unforgiving. And when I tried to play Zelda on my best friends 64 and he had to help me through all the tough spots, it was sooo challenging.
But now they are just simple little games that, at most, take an hour or two to get used to them again. Then suddenly “This part was hard before? Took me like two seconds!”

Nilkemia.8507:

I was genuinely looking forward to this update..why did they just decide to make this not fun or worth it?

That about sums up all my problems, which are mostly just questions, into one.

Why nerf dig spots AND make them once per day?
Why remove the obi shards after nerfing the farm completely?
Why make the dig spots once per day if you removed the obi shards?
Why once per account lock the chests/baubles/digspots for the second half of a skin set that was easy to get the first time?

Make a new set harder to get, sure, but the rest of a set that was never fully released 10x more difficult to get? (Assuming the average player having only 5 chr slots and factoring in the subsequently-would-be-major dig spot nerfing that would affect each play through.)

So to sum up what we got:
Baubles are much harder to get than before.
Those lesser rewards are now only once-per-day-per-account (there is no more infuriating set of five words in all of gw2).
There are fewer rewarding items to get but they each cost as much as before.
There is apparently three times as much content to get through, at more than three times the difficulty, and the same amount of time to do it as last time before it’s gone.
Oh, and you only get one life at a time.

Even makes me feel bad for new players, who now have to play W1 with only one starting life… every time. That alone would have killed the fun back in april.
For me going from 8 alts farming daily the time it will take to get 1 skin is now stupidly ridiculous. Casuals actually used to complain about the number of hours it took to ‘farm’ a single skin. Back when it still took most people almost a week to get one skin.

I “farmed” virtually every day in april and managed to get 17 skins via Bauble Bubbles. I shudder to think how many days it would take me, and hours of doing the much longer maps over and over to get even one of each via the bauble bubble mechanic.

Of course I can farm the gold to buy one off tp in about an hour of champ zerging and already bought the complete set… utterly negating any reason to play the ‘game within the game.’

Because the Anet “anti-farm while we remove the ability to farm, but ad farms, and change mechanics to prevent farming this while we give out free gold/karma/skillpoints/acsended crafting mats/cookies to the farmers over here” policy makes so much sense.

I can’t imagine how frustrating world 1 must be now for first timers with only one life at a time….

I doubt I would have enjoyed it nearly as much the first time around without the 5 starter lives.

It’s the same regardless.
It’s not really any easy with a group, nor harder solo. If you are with a group, then someone better than you might get to the checkpoints first or manage to kill the boss before you die to his mechanics too many times.
Really either way it’s a matter of trial and error. The first zone is really easy to get into by yourself and get an idea, or with 2 or a group. Just give it a shot.

(At least it was before when you had 5 lives to start every time. It may be considerably more annoying with or without a group now that you only get 1.)

Because if there was, people would complain endlessly that that achievement item was too hard to get, and that anet was purposefully playing keepaway with the good stuff.

As it stands there is no way to get one of the special skins without completing tribulation mode, so the epic elite i-won-the-internet status remains intact.

Something a little more show-off-able than a mini or title anyway. (Not as if anyone pays any attention to the bazillion easy to get titles anyway). Sometime tomorrow the green and yellow skins will start being shown off and the hate threads will start on how unfair it is to everyone else who can only have the blue ones, even though green/yellow is their favorite color.

Or, maybe when they realise their complaint is about literally nothing more than a color difference they will grow up and realise how childish it all is.

Okay, that last line is a bit far fetched.

Zebulous.2934:

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

• In April the dig spot in the water below the fern in world 1, zone 2 spawned a bauble worth 50, it is now 20.

Well that makes me sad, I think I was the first to find that purple.

Alot more than just that one was reduced. I used to finish w1 z1-2 with close to 500 baubles, now I barely get 200.

And the dig spots are once per day per account now.

So is it the only one that doesn’t drop? Is it bugged? Or is it just not showing up?

I didn’t think it was getting to me until I was playing a new game on my ps3 this weekend and started feeling rushed for no reason…. then I realised why as I’ve done nearly every LS this year…

It’s becoming second nature that I have to finish as many achievements as I can before the time runs out….

boredinbc.2786:

I have zero opinion on the quality if the designs, but from the images you posted the blue does look much less intense in the second photo.

Different lighting, which was intentional.

The Sword in the first photo and the Scepter in the second are both from the first set (first half of the set) the Torch in the first photo and the Focus in the second photo are from the new set. If the only color difference you see is between the lighting of the two photo’s, then it’s not a difference between the two sets.

To me the ‘two’ sets appear to match up just fine.

My guess is that people are comparing the new set in the preview pane, to weapons they already have. But the preview pane offers the dullest lighting in the game.
Everything looks better when actually equipped. and when equipped together I fail to see what the complaint is.

Originally they said all ‘special’ skins were going to be one time deals, proof that you were “there when…”
But people complained enough they’ve backed down on that and already talked about/promised even the return of the halloween skins. So I’m sure the “complete” set will release when world 3 comes out.

SoPP.7034:

My god, the future of GW2? This is pushing P2W.

No need to deny it. Just stop trying to convince yourself it isn’t.

This is the door they should never have opened. Irreparably harming the game.
Sure you don’t have to buy the coin, you don’t even have to play the sab.

But you don’t have to play any LS update, or wvw, or pvp, or dungeons or fractals. So why not time gate everything behind a lock and sell the key in the gem store?

This is exactly what everyone was so happy not to see in the gem store. It’s what set it apart from every cash cow perfectworld/zynga f2p ever made. At least, it did.

ShroomOneUp.6913:

washed out quality of the colors, the way topenetrant red on the handles (the first batch didn´t had so much red, lack of quality in design and the overall presentation.
put set on and 2 next to each other you see what i mean.

Have them all my my mesmer and warrior now, no I really don’t see.

Too much red on the handles? Okay, none of the others really had handles, but the GS has a great big red/pink “jewel” on the pummel and so do the swords, much more glaring than the redish/brown handles on the torch/hammer and mace. No red on the staff.

Colors… core blue and particle effects are identical…
Sword and Scepter next to Torch and Focus…. if anything the new ones are a tad bit more detailed.

Perphection.8209:

What happened here? Am I the only one who is extremely disappointed with the new skins?

Why?
Have you heard the awesome sound effects for the pistol and rifle?

Only thing I was “disappointed” in was the torch, I really wanted and 8-bit flame like the candle from in the sab.

Otherwise, what’s to be disappointed with? They match the theme.

Josh Foreman.8250:

Kaleban.9834:

The reason the devs are so good at it is because they can play with “noclip” on, perhaps they forgot that players don’t have access to the development console?

I’m not sure what you mean by ‘noclip’. But we would have to be pretty stupid to test the difficulty of our content using dev commands. My current guess is that the problem is 1. Lag makes rapids/waterspouts too hard. 2. People aren’t familiar with the content and once they learn the tricks they won’t find it nearly as hard. 3. We devs play constantly so we are more practiced at the content. 4. Our alphas must be better than average as well because we didn’t get anywhere near this amount of complaints over the difficulty during our alpha tests.

My goal is to make Normal Mode more fun than frustrating for average players, so it looks like I’ll have to tone it down to meet that goal. But I still need to give it a few days to make sure 1 and 2 aren’t the primary issue.

3 and 4 are exacerbated by 1.
You and the alphas both likely don’t have the latency and lag issues that every other player has.
Rapids were always ridiculously buggy, even during initial release.

As a “demo” for world 2, I am sure most other players were like me, believing the bugs were simply lack of polish since the level ended broken and with moto telling us it was unfinished. And the limited reward meant most players didn’t bother farming it.

To find out it just as bad as before, and possibly worse so for the day one lag problems, is rather disheartening. The server and the client simply seem to never agree on where the player is and what they are doing.

(And please don’t make me cry anymore about this once a day per account nonsense, as it’s pretty much killed the fun for me and every other altoholic across the entire game.)

fungihoujo.8476:

I’m surprised they don’t make you pay for every champ box you want to open yet.

Shhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!

How do you know they just haven’t thought of it yet?

Black Lion Champ Box Keys.
You know it, I know it, we all know it’s coming.

Bad enough that I should have bought a second copy of the game instead of extra chr slots, at least I’d only be blocked to “twice a day” for the same amount of money.

RvLeshrac.2673:

fungihoujo.8476:

How is this even fun- even if you took out the rewards and the stupid life mechanics… it’s basically a poorly made 3D platformer with lots of grinding.

It seems like they fired everyone who actually had any say in the design of the original and replaced them with sadists who don’t actually give a crap about any of us enjoying the content.

W1 = made for fun in a few of the developers spare time by people who didn’t really expect or care if anyone even liked it that much.
W2 = made to capitalize on possibly the highest praised addition to the game since launch.

Thank you for my pistol skins with the cool laser sound effects.

“What do we want?” – “Cool stuff!”
“When do we want it?” – “Before it’s removed from the game!”
“How do we get it?” – “Farm champs!”

Seems they are just testing out ways to make us pay for each new LS update.

Funny thing is, I would have bought the infinite coin just for fun if the sab had been as fun as before. But won’t even bother playing W2 now that it’s required.

Funny how that works.

^ well, all along they have continued to support delete character farming as a bonafide, non-exploiting, method of legitimate gameplay. Yet at every turn the game is more and more unfriendly to people like us.

As for considering uninstalling and finding a new game? Yeah, this is a definite “Nearly last straw.”
I’ll at least hang around for Mad King.

Been looking forward to the return of SAB for months, but right now it’s not even worth it. Love the sound effects on the pistol and riffle… that I bought off the TP.

(Really even that disappoints me, I really wanted to work towards getting the skins myself. Not be timegated into only getting one or two of them across the whole month.)

Rather than fix the issue: delete character farming for 24 hours a day and getting all the obsidian shards you could ever want.

Nope.
You have more than one chr? Too bad.
You paid for those chr slots? Too bad.
You spent several hours a day, all month last time, because you were having fun and still didn’t get all the skins you wanted for your alts? Too bad.
Account bound this, ‘once per day per account’ that, thanks but I’ll be going back to single player rpgs at this rate of exclusion at every turn.

It’s not like people who play alts are rare or even a small subset of the player base. I like switching between my alts regularly, for fun. But there is nothing left in the game where that is anything but discouraged.

WvW? don’t bother switching to another chr, you’ll lose out on the progression system.
Dungeons? World Bosses? PvE in general? Oh, don’t bother, everything is limited to once per day.
SAB, the best thing any one ever did in an mmo, where rewards were great and fun to get, and limited only to the SAB itself or one set of easily acquired skins? Nope. Once per day.

So what is there to do with alts in this game? Switch off farming champs if one auto attack gets too boring.
At least I was able to buy all the new skins today, time to go back to farming champs.

Even just for one day like last time….. please…..

I was so disappointed that it was only one day before. (I would change it permanently if I could on my end… hint hint.)

I loved it when it was alt friendly.

But then again, I bought this game because it was alt friendly and look how that turned out…

Josh Davis.6015:

Hey StinVec,

I never noticed that! I’ll look into this tomorrow when everyone gets back into the office.

Thanks!

They don’t display in the login screen either…. hint hint.

Savoy.6824:

Thats funny because when I heard about minis attacking I thought it was a fantastic idea to have a mini that did a miniscule amount of damage not enough to really effect anything but to have a cool animation like the laser shooting out of it. I was going to get one. Infact I was prepared to spend 50 dollars of real money on the game. But now, you just lost a sale. It doesnt matter whether you agree that they should do any damage or not. Bottom line is you just lost a sale.

And they just saved you from wasting your money on a BUG that will be fixed later, forcing you to demand a refund.

So… you’re welcome.

This. As OP said, I’ve gotten 10-15 support tokens since the 6th.

Charr == Steampunk Klingons.

Don’t pretend you guys don’t like steampunk when arguing against…. the Asura?
Seriously? Do you know what steampunk is?

I realise the new content has steampunk stuff, but the new content has nothing to do with the voting, the new fractal choices, evon or keil. It was coming in regardless.

Martin Kerstein.3071:

Lord Kuru.3685:

Of course Anet usually only kills characters immediately after we meet them (former ships council guy for example) so this is unlikely to happen.

Could be worse, we could be like Joss Whedon.

Low blow man…. Below the belt even…

*Goes and cries softly in the corner for a few minutes

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

This almost didn’t make it into the game. The song, in particular, was a one of a few voiced-over lines that were recorded early on, before the map was fully designed. By the time I found out about it, Bloodtide Coast was already pretty far along. Needless to say, I felt it was a top-priority to get it in the game and in a place where you could definitely see it if you were paying attention. Henceforth, the friendly Penzan pirate faction was born and we designed a renown heart and a couple of events around it. Fortunately we even had a chance to have that actor come back in and deliver some additional lines to support the character.

Getting that stuff together was definitely some of the most fun I had working on the game. Devon gets a big shout out for his help there. He was building the Priory events around the same area. The tie-in with Penzan was an excellent feat of collaboration.

Well, kudos to you. Probably some of the most fun I’ve had playing the game too

Back when the dailies were static, and five events were required every day, those three events were my prefered set if I needed to get a few extra.

It happens a lot. You have to get hit at the exact moment the piece is harvested. Or have bleeding or poison ticking damage.

But, after mining ori with several alts over the months I have found it happens a lot more with certain classes, and rarely ever with others.

I’m not sure if my guardian has ever had a ruined chunk, but my necro practically can’t even imagine she’s in combat without all of them being ruined.

No idea why that would be, if there’s some kind of toughness check, or just crazy randomness. I’ve lost a few dozen orrichalcum over the months, I’d rather just be unable to harvest and be forced to kill everything first than have something sneak up on me and lose 3s.

I’ve been getting “stuck” a lot lately. After immobilize, after using rocket boots, sometimes after dodging, after using blink, every time I have to release the movement keys (all of them) and push forward/strafe again to start moving.

Does it with both my razer nostromo game pad (direct connection) and my logitech wireless keyboard, so I’m pretty sure its not on my end.

There is already clipping with staff and greatsword, so they might as well just make them visible. Players can always choose to turn off the back item if the clipping bugs them.

Agreed, new animation looks terrible on the asura.

I had to mess around to even see it though, since mine is on a shield wielding engineer.

All back items are ‘removed’ when a shield is stowed on your back. It’s not really a bug. It’s always been that way.

They are also removed when engineer kits are equipped, which is considerably more ‘appearance’ breaking.

Shield using engineers basically never see their back pieces.

It’s something that should be ‘fixed’ somehow, but short of constant clipping issues, feel free to suggest some way the devs could do it without it looking worse.
Entering combat, so that the shield is in your hand, should reveal the back piece. In the options you can keybind a button to draw/sheath your weapons. I use it all the time so I can actually see the shattered wings on my engi.

1500 hours into the game and this is STILL one of the main reasons I avoid SPVP.
It can be frustrating enough in dungeons and wvw, I expect having a wireless mouse doesn’t help, but I’m not going to change hardware to accommodate for a bug.

Its not really an issue. Or, at least, not technically a bug.

Ground targeted “fields” do a swiftness check. If you have swiftness, they won’t apply any more.
This prevents you from stacking swiftness from the same source.

They also apply on ‘pulse’ meaning once per second. Which is why you can sometimes run through guardian staff symbol without getting any swiftness.

They don’t have an internal limit, like some people think, of only applying to each person once. They just do the swiftness check as a backdoor prevention method.

That’s not to say there aren’t some bugs as well, but you have to narrow them down on a per skill basis. I have had swiftness fail to stack from sources that I know stack, but nothing repeatable that I could ever narrow down. Sometimes I wonder if its some kind of server latency issue.

But the not-stacking on ground targeted skills is a matter of design.

Pavel.8531:

I am not sure where to post this, but I had this strange encounter with a Guardian in WvW just now. There was no lag at all, but he kept moving in short, shadowstep-y bursts(every 2-3 seconds), besides his normal movement. Now, before saying “this skill, that skill” – I have over 900 hours on guardian and we have no such skill. I took a screen of him already far away from me, then another, with his name, when he was so foolish to accept my party. I know these can’t be a concrete proof, but if you want to check him out, pm me.

Two things:
1: Just because you didn’t experience lag, doesn’t mean the other player wasn’t having latency issues that would cause a discrepancy between them and the server.

And 2: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Flashing_Blade
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Judge%27s_Intervention
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Merciful_Intervention

A teleporting guardian build does exist.

StinVec.3621:

and Search & Rescue is barely useful at all in that it can only be used on downed, not dead, players.

Because no other class has any ability to revive dead allies.
You may have liked the bug, but it went against the design of the game. It should have been fixed a long time ago to prevent people from getting too attached to it.

Richard Nixon.6573:

Curtis Johnson.8456:

For clarification.. you hit the button twice? or you typed in twice the number you intended? I think i’m reading the first case.

The button does disable briefly to stop double-clicks till the success message comes up next to it.

Disabling the button is definitely a nice feature. It would be nice to have it reset the input numbers to 0 too, so that even if you lag/double click/whatever, you literally can’t accidentally exchange more than you intended.

Yes, this.
While I haven’t seriously burned myself, I have several times spent the money I intended, only to have the input numbers scales to whatever was left on my chr and ended up spending the rest of my funds on a handful more gems.

For this reason I keep most of my money in the bank and only pull out exactly how much I intend to convert to gems.

The “second click” is a really hard habit to break for anyone who avidly uses the BLTP.

An ‘okay’ dialogue might help, but having the input numbers reset to 0 after a gem/gold purchase would be the best preventative.

It makes me feel tiny.
I am convinced GW@ actually exists inside of a pocket dimension, where everything is much smaller.
Look around in game, your not on some strange fantasy world. You’re in someones back yard! Those aren’t giant mushrooms, giant trees, giant crabs, giant undead sea anemones. Those are just normal sized mushrooms, trees, crabs and undead sea anemones.

An ant is ten times as powerful as an equivalent sized human would be, so really you’re just playing an insect-sized humanoid with funny powers. One good magnifying glass and its all over for you, buddy.

Puts things in perspective doesn’t it? :P

Most seem to be missing some important information about
The History of Guild Wars 2

October 2012 – Holiday team releases Mad King ‘event’
Lots of bugs, problems and issues. mostly fixed within the first few days, and mostly ignored because the content was awesome. There was tons of stuff to do, the game was barely even on its feet and ALREADY we were getting awesome new stuff to do.
It was a holiday event, we all KNEW it was going away.

November – Living World Karka ‘event’
All kinds of lead up and promises about a whole new area, major one time events, drastic changes to lions arch (some of us still remember the old lighthouse) great rewards, all a great and amazingly awesome…… idea.
Basically FAILED miserably. They tried to rush as much content as the current F&F in THREE DAYS. All based on one time (literally, once at noon pst) events.
This was a horrendous, pie-in-the-face, blunder of a server-crashing, skill-lagging, qq-fest of an event. Did I mention half the npc’s broke, making the one-time-only lead up events unplayable? They had to be retooled into the game on demand, so some places had two versions of an npc to give todays, and yesterdays, required interaction.

December – holiday team comes back again with Wintersday
Amazing event. Even better than the Mad King stuff, even more content, far fewer bugs, just all around a much better event. Things didn’t happen only once at noon, even the “one time” events were repeatable for days after. So much better.

2013
I was really, REALLY, worried about what the “Living World” team would bring us this time. Now rebranded as the “Living Story” for the above mentioned marketing sales pitch.
They gave us…. the refugees and broken sign posts.
I laughed.

At least they were taking it slow. And that is exactly what they were doing, taking it very slow, trying not to let it blow up in their face, watching player feedback (not for this event, but for future events) and playing off the successes of the holiday events.

The Karka events, southson, it was all too much too soon. Before they were really ready to see the vision that is the Living World come into play.

Yes, they backed off the throttle. But I highly doubt this is what every living story is going to be like. They have said repeatedly that this is a “Test” to make sure their new ideas work. I think they have done a pretty good job.

In January I was afraid to see what would happen after the Karka event.
Now I am really excited to see what is gonna come next.

And one further point.
Yes the new dungeon is a lot of fun. But I sure as kitten don’t want them to just “leave it lying around.” Just because it is only two weeks now does not mean it can’t come back in a few months WITH three XP paths, a new currency and full set of armor. Or, as mentioned, retooled into a much shorter version for the fractals.

Flame and Frost is a TEST.
Holiday content is temporary.
Living World stuff is permanent. (Its been the stated intention since before launch.)

Living Story is a marketing catch all that lets them figure out how they are going to make Living World work. Because it didn’t work the first time, and rather than waste a lot of effort trying to salvage Southson (which one can reasonably expect had a much grander future in play) they took a whole different direction.
They left themselves play to do something more with southson in the future, but once the whole Karka event has faded from the memory of those of us who still suffer from the ptsd.

And all that means that the major content is temporary… for now.

What I’m concerned about is world 2 coming out and being even easier to get BB’s, so the skin prices rise to 100 or 150 BB’s, then all the time I spent collecting BB’s beforehand was wasted, because I could have spent that time in the future collecting more BB’s for the same time investment.

So I’ve been using them for more skins now, since it’s very possible these skins won’t be coming back. And will eventually work on a good sized stack of box ’o fun.

Most people I know are using it to get obsidian shards. Which is likely the biggest concern over delete farming. So don’t expect those to come back for a mere BB next time.

My advice would be to enjoy and get what you can from the content now, because whatever happens when w2 releases you can always do the content for the skins then. Which inevitably would be more fun than pulling out a few stacks of BB’s and buying the new skins right then and there.

Though if it were me, I would give world 2 Red Bauble Bubbles that cost 2 or 4 blue Bauble Bubbles, and make the new skins 50 red bauble bubbles. People playing w2 would get red bauble bubbles as easily as we get blue ones now, but people who farmed w1 ahead of time would end up spending 2-4x as much on the new content. Effectively tipping the hand in favor of those who play the new content over those who farmed the old content.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

I hope to boost the scaling for some of the other popular events as well, but the large bosses (like the Behemoth, or the dragons) require art and/or engineering work, and can’t be upgraded with a simple content change. They’re on “the list” but I don’t have an ETA for when we’ll be able to update them, sorry!

I would love to see them all reach the difficulty level of the Fire Elemental back at launch.

;P

I managed to kill him with only one other person back when everyone avoided him because his attacks were 1-hit instant death, and felt very proud of myself after, lol.

It would be fun with the amount of people doing the bosses now (while also discouraging them as easy farms) but, “The amount of qqing would shake the foundations of the earth” after such a change.

PS: I Love everything you guys have done with Claw of Jormag

CryxTryx.9208:

I think people are over thinking this dodge jumping technique. When I do it, my dodge button is the default ‘V’ and my jump is the default ‘SPACE’.

I use my left thumb and I press ‘V’ and ‘SPACE’ at the exact same time. This has resulted in a dodge jump for me every single time with out fail.

So you don’t have to try and time press jump and then really quickly pressing dodge. I can see how that would be hard. Try just pressing them both together.

I think it has to do with latency.
I’ve even tried binding it to a single button, and even with computer controlled exacting accuracy it still fails randomly for no apparent reason. And 1/10th of a second didn’t work, I finally ended up with 0.02 seconds just to get it to work at all that’s kinda crazy, and it still doesn’t work right!

I did this after a week of trying it normally with a 1 in 20 success rate, and a whole lot of deaths, because I don’t like using macro’s anyway.

Most of my guild has given up even trying to get it to work, we are all pretty convinced that such a small margin of error does not lend itself to the potential of lag.

I would like to know the answer to this as well, is it strictly against policy?
Because I would prefer it be added to the actual keybinds in-game. I don’t mind doing it normally, jump+dodge, IF it actually worked for me.

I don’t really see how it can be an exploit, since I haven’t found a jump yet that can’t be made normally, and haven’t found anywhere I could get to with dodge jump that I couldn’t get to with a little more precision without it. I mainly like it for the awesome animation on my asura.

Cause right now, for me, even with it bound to a single button it is not at all reliable. Safer to judge the distance without it.

Josh Foreman.8250:

I understand that forum response is not a perfect gauge, but it’s all we have to go on.

Well, since the majority of forum feedback in general seems to be negative, while the majority of ingame chat is usually positive (at least on my server), I think the amount of positive feedback about the SAB on the forums is actually a REALLY good indicator.

And I don’t believe I has seen any negative feedback for SAB in-game.
Except for maybe Super Greatsword now being the second most common skin after Twilight. lol

Personally I love the fact that everyone has equal access to the SAB weapons.

(As an aside, there seems to be a pretty common consensus in-game that the forums are a nasty, vile place and most of us would rather be playing the content. Could just be my experience, but I hope all of you guys know that more people come to the forums intent on complaining, while those who appreciate tend more to just log into the game and have fun. So to me, the amount of positive feedback on SAB is a pretty amazing thing.)

Randulf.7614:

Now explain the break dancing/moonwalking spiders with sun glasses…

The answer to this seems quite simple to me:

Why wouldn’t you make breakdancing/moonwalking spiders with sunglasses?

Super Staff of the Hydromancer

Race : Norn
Sex : Female
Profession : Mesmer

In the preview pane, the Super Staff (both the skin, and my weapon) shows the bird facing forward when wielded. But on my character it faces to her right, flapping its wings directly in her face. Which would not only be really annoying for her, it makes a potentially awesome staff look rather silly.

Skin was applied to “Imryldyeen” if that makes any difference.

With everyone driving for the greatsword, i’m not sure if this is unique to me, or if it’s a general issue with the skin. But since the preview pane shows the bird facing forward, I am fairly certain its a glitch, not an odd design choice, lol.

I unequipped everything and re equipped only the staff and the problem persisted.