Guild Wars 2

eldrin.6471:

The HOT hype train ended up a train wreck.

Pretty much, it’s not what I wanted at all so I’m here instead of playing. Not the best £30 I’ve ever spent.

I hate everything about the new map, being constantly told “no” by the game is not fun. I can’t even get a Vista without farming another 1 million XP. The map is huge and difficult to navigate and feels completely empty most of the time. It’s honestly the complete opposite of what I was expecting. I just want to run through my story while simultaneously unlocking my elite spec, no forced XP grinds, no gating just enjoyment. The only thing I like about this expansion is my Revenant who I can’t even fully experience. I really can’t remember a worse expansion that I’ve played.

I absolutely hate the new map and everything about it. The gating is a total fun killer, I can’t even get this Vista until I unlock gliding 2, how stupid is that? It’s an absolute chore, and not even close to enjoyable. This is a terrible expansion that has moved the game into a completely different (wrong) direction. Oh and the NPC for my personal story is bugged so I can’t speak to him.

I’m really not enjoying it at all. I hate how everything is gated, oh you want that Vista? Well tough luck, you don’t have updraft. Want that skill point? “You’re not worthy”. And the amount of XP you need is just insane. The map has a horrible layout that’s just a chore to traverse. It’s probably the worst expansion for any MMO I’ve ever played.

Same issue here, I can’t progress my story because he won’t speak to me.

Female Asura.

I just hate how you’ve done the new maps, it’s just awful. I’m currently gated in my story because I need some mushroom rubbish to reach the area I need to get to. Why can’t I just play more story?

You basically pay for the right to farm for the content you thought you were paying for.

I’m hoping the devs will see fit to respond in the morning.

Doombeldore.5074:

Bought it a couple of hours ago and i am totally regretting it. Feels like a massive rip off considering what you are getting.

Probably because you get very little for your money out of the gate.

morrolan.9608:

This is a terrible system. You have to effectively level up THEN use mastery points. It should just be based on mastery points.

Was confused at first as well, the whole system feels like a rough draft.

I’m glad that you can admit when you’re wrong, thank you.

Azure Prower.8701:

Thanathos.2063:

If that’s grindy for you, you haven’t played any other MMO before, no offense…

I’ve played plenty MMOs before. Even Korean grinders.

Guild Wars 2 is starting to become a Korean grinder. Hours of mindlessly, grinding of mobs to progress.

GW2’s greatest strength was it wasn’t like other MMOs, so I have no idea why they went in a completely different direction with the expansion.

LittleSparta.4569:

For you people that say HoT is not fun, what do you say to the majority of players who think it’s really fun? Pretty sure it’s just you at this point, whether it’s ability to immerse yourself in a sotry or experience, explore, do the story and events, have fun in halloween.

If you want to access what you paid for, how about go play it? It honestly doesn’t take ages to get a lot of the story and unlock 1 mastery to continue

And who says the majority are happy?

I played WoW for 5.5 years, I played it like a job and back then that’s what I wanted but that’s not what I want now. The thing that really drew me to GW2 was how casual friendly it was, all the huge grinds were totally optional (legendaries mostly) but I think HoT has completely missed the mark, it’s no longer the game it once was and that’s a shame.

I play games to have fun, not to tirelessly repeat the same thing over and over so I can access the content I actually want to do and paid for.

It seems we’re not alone (unlike in game, ho ho): http://www.reddit.com/r/guildwars2/comments/3q1z2c/_/

Can we get a response from a dev? This is a massive problem. I don’t play MMOs to feel completely alone.

SkylightMoon.1980:

This really needs to be brought to the attention of the devs because I think its very unhealth for the game and actually for the new maps. For the meta event in auric basin, tangled depths, and dragosn stand, you need a full map easily. Verdant brink I guess as well.

Basically all the maps designs are based around having a full map do them, you cant do these events with ten people.

And this is the exact reason I didn’t enjoy myself while doing the new map, trying to do hard kitten events with 3 people isn’t fun.

EU here and the first area was a ghost town, I thought it would be packed.

I’ll let you know, most of the content is currently gated.

I started the new content on my Revenant and saw less than 10 people in the space of an hour, it felt completely dead.

I feel the same, there’s no real direction. I feel like I’m just running around looking for stuff to do and the mobs are very hard to solo and it feels like the new zone is dead. It’s not what I was expecting really.

It’s definitely no longer the casual friendly MMO it once was, a complete 180 in philosophy.

I’ve noticed the same, this really needs to be fixed somehow.

Jalis with Hammer is my favourite, hopefully it’ll be viable.

I’m also not a massive fan of this, a toggle would be appreciated. Now if it made our weapons glow, I’d be happy with that.

So much of the new content is gated behind massive amounts of grinding, it makes you wonder what we actually paid for. I really don’t know why they changed their game philosophy so drastically with HoT.

There’s a good Reddit post about this here: http://www.reddit.com/r/guildwars2/comments/3q0d0e/_/

They’ve definitely moved away from the casual friendly philosophy with HoT and that’s a shame, it’s what I and I assume many others found so appealing when compared to other MMOs. I played WoW like a job for 5.5 years and I didn’t want that again, but I missed the genre and GW2 was perfect but not so much any more. Even the story is gated behind masteries.

They’re too busy giving average games 9/10 for kickbacks.

JediYoda.1275:

MrH.2591:

RIP my alts.

15chars

its not as bad everyone is making it out to be, its really okay, really it is

4 maps with 10 HP x 10 = 400 HP’s and if have done map completion or just done all the HP’s in core game you already 1/2 way to unlocking full elite spec. You just need just 60 HP to just to use it.

Only my main has anywhere near map completion, my alts are screwed.

8am is good for me, I’ll get on a few hours after launch so hopefully it’ll stable by then.

RIP my alts.

15chars

Chris Cleary.8017:

Playing Nice and Exploits

Hey everyone! Just letting you know, in case you weren’t aware, Heart of Thorns is launching soon! With any new expansion there are bound to be a couple of things that are inevitably going to happen when the floodgates open.

Playing Nice
Guild Wars 2 has the best community, it is known. Let’s keep it that way!

While everyone plays a little bit differently, keep in mind that you aren’t the only one out there. Keeping your chat and actions friendly allows everyone to have a great experience when playing together.

I just want to remind everyone that we will be monitoring for players that are causing issues for others. If you feel someone is stepping over the line, the report function in-game is the best tool at your disposal (right click the chat/player selection and select Report).

The last thing that we want to do is to have to put some people into timeout because they are making the game not enjoyable for others, but we will.

Exploits
Let’s talk about exploits. Exploits can be described as the abuse of a bug or unintended game design to gain an advantage over other players. For example, maybe that vendor is selling items for 1/100th of their sell value, or perhaps an escort event spawns an infinite number of instantly respawning loot piñatas when you cause the NPC to get stuck.

Exploits are bad news for everyone, and while we hope there won’t be any…ok I’ll just go with that.

We have a team ready to investigate issues and monitor activity, but our players our greatest asset when it comes to keeping Tyria a fair place.

If you happen to run across an exploit (or even if you think something may be an exploit) please don’t hesitate to send an email to exploits@arena.net. Feel free to send us your screenshots/videos/selfies/essays/poems if you believe you have found an exploit in the game!

What about people who kick others before the last boss in Fractals to invite friends for the gear? These people are scum and nothing ever seems to happen to them when reported.

Female Slyvari.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Unlocking your elite spec is a training line in your training panel that costs hero points. You do need to have trained all the existing training lines before you’re allowed to put hero points into your elite spec.

If you’ve got all the hero points in the existing game you’ll have enough to train about half the elite specialization training line on launch day. The rest you’ll need to earn in the jungle or via the new system Tyler outlined yesterday from WvW. The number of points to fully train your elite spec is higher than other training lines – but hero challenges in the jungle are worth 10 points each, so it’s not actually as big as it appears.

Consider me worried, that sounds like an awful lot of work to unlock something I paid £30 to have access to. As someone with more than one character I really feel like unlocking elite specs will turn into a real slog.

I’ll level to 35 via the Halloween content, then I’ll boost to 80. I’d boost all the way if I had enough tomes, sod levelling normally.

My guild used to do this in WoW, we’d sell mounts, gear, achievements, ranks etc, it was amazing for us, every week we’d mail out gold to everyone in the guild, this meant no one had to farm and it served as a little perk.

People seemed to enjoy it but I thought it was a hard to follow mess.

I paid £30 for the expansion so I could access elite specs, I don’t want to have to jump through hoops to unlock them for all my characters, I really hope it’s a quick and a painless experience.

I’ve got a feeling elite specs are going to be a pain for people with alts.

So that’s 7am in the UK? That’s pretty great actually, it’ll be live by the time most of us get up.

I have enough CoF tokens to buy her full Exotic gear, and I have about 45 Tomes to help with the levelling but apart from that I’m not that prepared sadly.

Toxicity.5392:

Windows 10 is pretty bad.
The core is about the same as 7/8 for the most part, the ui is a little improved over 8, however load times seemed longer for me and many people get some stutters with it, at which this point I’d attribute to old BIOSes for old motherboards. (I get bad dpc latency spikes = audio dropouts, video stutters, and gigabyte refuses to support my mobo since 4 weeks after it came out – back in 2011)

10 will constantly spy on you, and harass you to update – even after running one of those privacy tools and attempting to disable forced updates. Not to mention some of the updates have ruined peoples installs.

This drive me to Linux. GW2 runs okay with the portable WineGW2 fork (if a bit buggy).
Mint is recommended for (very) old PCs – its basically like Windows except the automatic updates actually update everything on your pc. Installs faster, sets up faster, etc.
Antergos/Arch for newer PCs/more experienced users. Once set up it’s much nicer, cleaner, and up to date than Mint/*buntu distros. But it takes longer and is quite a bit more difficult.

I’ve been using Windows 10 since day one and it’s great, I’m not sure why you seem to hate it so much? And you can disable all the “spying”, it takes about 2 minutes. As for forced updates, in reality it works great, people freaked out over nothing.

So I can level my Revenant while doing the Halloween content? 2 birds.

I used WinAuth, it took 2 minutes. It only asks for the code if you log in from a different location so you don’t even notice it’s there.

They should be easy to obtain, I didn’t spend £30 on the expansion to sod about farming hero points.

PyrateSilly.4710:

It will be sometime between 9am PST and 5pm PST. Those are the regular office hours for ANet.

On the 23rd? That’s 4pm – 12pm GMT, so we almost get it a day late?

Levelling my Revenant via the Halloween content, win win.

There’s nothing quite as exciting as a midnight launch, so 12 GMT please!

Customer support said I should be eligible for the free character slot and if I haven’t received it by the end of Friday they’ll sort me out. So it looks like all’s well that ends well.

Healix.5819:

MrH.2591:

And I don’t have anywhere near enough gold sadly.

I just rolled to 80 on a free account doing map completion. By 80, I had ~10g. I then dumped everything that could be sold on the trading post. I ended up with ~100g, which I used to buy full exotics, then dumped the rest into creating guild banks.

A character slot currently costs ~160g. It’s really not that difficult.

OK.