WvW is getting better but still needs work (like the new hints they’ve showed us for the borderlands). Profession balance still needs work and there are still loads of problems with traits they need to address (some being completely useless still, others required).
As far as PvE, Adverture box was fun (and the devs expressed they were apparently surprised we loved it as much as we did which is just funny). I think Southsun is cursed. The latest one was better but man it still had issues. I hope they rescue Owain and then drop a nuke on it so we never go back. Dragonbash just felt grindy. I liked how some of DE wrote extremely sarcastic or otherwise negative mails to you advertising it but that was all we got. Instead of the people crashing the bash being over zealous people who didn’t like the fact there was a celebration making light of the dragons we got a random invasion of pirates. Which make me wonder if anyone is trying to connect all the stories at all (lets just ignore the whole Scarlet supposedly connected to Flame and Frost). They couldn’t connect the setup mail to the end of the story arc. Why was it even there?
As far as the latest stuff, yeah the politics thing was interesting. Frankly, I think they should either give us more direct say of what they should work on (similar to Eve) or they just leave these content patches to the devs and not pretend to give us a choice in the matter. And the Queen Speech stuff is fun and all but they need to better figure out what they’re going to do about farming (because I doubt they intended people to farm pirates and not care if the meta fails). Their handle on the economy has me a bit worried.
As far as promised stuff (LFG tool, guild halls, 500 crafting, etc…etc…) we’ll see.
Yeah, chasing achievement points isn’t a great goal, especially in multiplayer. Think of it less like a to do list and more like a journal. What you didn’t do is sometimes just as important as what you did do.
As far as the UI, can you be a bit more descriptive about what confuses you? How are you attempting to use it? Where do you get stymied?
People clutter can be an issue. I strongly suggest moving your character to another city. Divinities Reach is a good off city as it is still populated but not overly so. I personally hang out in the Grove because I just like it (small, easy to run around). The only thing you miss out on is easy access to the mystic forge, some (not all) badge vendors, and easy queueing for fractals (which can be solved with a simple port).
Okay, now you’re making me think you’re trolling again. You like limited items but you don’t like it when you take a break and you can no longer get them because they’re limited? Huh? Additionally, a lot of the limited items are coming back (e.g. the skins). The Adventure box is coming back. And we’re getting the limited dungeons back as fractals in the future probably. And believe me, the plot isn’t so complicated that you can’t be easily caught up on what happened if you’re worried about that.
So is the main problem you have that the game makes you feel like you have to log in more than a half hour a week or that the content that they push out every 2 weeks is not that extensive?
Sorry but your post comes off as confused and the point about not wanting to see people in LA (I’d rather LA just stop crashing for me) makes this come across as a round about way to express dissatisfaction and tell people they should too. Are you looking for help acclimating to the new UI and such or just looking to complain? Complaining is fine (lots of threads complaining) just want to know what you’re doing.
Canach was trying to destroy the consortium after they set him up as a patsy. The revolt he was instigating wasn’t for the good of the workers, it was just an easy way to screw up the plans of the consortium and allowed him to delude himself. So it wasn’t incompetence as far as a plan so much as he was somewhat of a tragic character.
And Trahearne isn’t hated in game. Some people don’t like him but the characters all think he is a strong character and the game attempts to show him as such (admittedly they could have done better but you can’t say launch missteps = they tried to make Trahearne a bad character).
And when did they kill off Gixx? He was a strong patriarchal figure who was far from incompetent and showed genuine concern for people under him. Knut (who did show up during the LS) also comes across as a strong leader (who unfortunately couldn’t help combat the invasion directly). And Rytlock is coming across better after he got over the grr Logan bad stuff.
Seriously, there is some pretty extreme cherry picking here (e.g. neglecting to say how Rox is about as weak of a character as Braham…she pines over joining Rytlock’s warband).
WP tends to favor the melodramatic (e.g. the sylvari are all evil idea from before launch). I’m not really a fan of melodrama in this instance because I just don’t think it could work in an MMO (and we get enough guild melodrama as it is). But if you are looking for that kind of story I can see why you’d like it. Different people have different preferences.
Edit: When the writers do put in drama they usually underplay it (the most we get is Caithe pining over Faolain in various ways and Eir constantly being confronted with past mistakes). The Logan silliness is the only obvious one I can think of.
The chest backlog is due to the change in achievements. You’ll stop getting the one a day after it catches up to your achievement point reward (basically, you get one every 500). The rewards are all cosmetic to avoid power creep for those who play longer. The rest of the post frankly makes me think you’re trolling so if you could better explain you might get more help.
For the amount of flak they’ve been getting over RNG items I can see why they’d avoid RNG in this instance. I’m just hoping they let us mystic forge excess minis some day.
Yeah, unless you’re running around in extremely bad gear (low level, missing pieces, etc…) I don’t really see how you’d be at a significant disadvantage. Ascended items are nice and a goal to work towards but not reason to sideline someone over. An achievable goal is to have a set of exotic gear with stats to match your role in wvw.
Scarlet’s intelligence being unbelievable aside (because the short story did nothing to clear up her being the smartest person on the planet by a significant margin with little effort) I’m just wondering how people think the Elder Dragons will be any better? People complained about Trahearne being boring so we get Scarlet (who went in the opposite direction). People complained about Zhaitan only popping up at the very very end and being not really directly involved. So we get Scarlet who is extremely involved after a supposedly long period of being involved in the background (I don’t believe she could lead all those factions from the information given but hey, they might fix this some day). Demanding more Elder Dragons and expecting any change just seems a bit silly when the problem is more with how the story is being presented and not so much the characters in them.
I think the main problem as far as technologies mentioned is the level of communication. We’ve been told guild upgrades and halls are coming in some fashion. We have no idea when and what the changes will be. Same thing for LFG tool. Basically, we get info on the system a couple weeks before it hits so we have very little idea what we’re going to get until it is just about to hit. And then you get people who seem to imply these technologies magically pop out of a box fully formed and they just needed to uncomment a line of code.
As far as living story, my only complaint is that there doesn’t seem to be any real continuity between arcs. Yeah, Scarlet is supposedly connected to all of them somehow but that is only because we’re repeatedly told there is (not shown). It feels a bit like the story is being written on the fly as they finish new tech and art. The story is then posted to the website instead of being available in game. That isn’t right. And putting it in game would make the amount of content delivered seem much larger (because you don’t have to go play hide and seek looking for it).
Oh, and if you don’t want to be guilty of the very thing some people claim “fanboys” are guilty of, probably best to drop words like “fanboys”. You want a constructive discussion of what is going on, right? So best not to belittle a side just because they don’t think the way you think.
Completers just need to group up and make strike teams when event starts and focus on scarlet minions,you will get the event done and farmers will get there loot win/win
If only it were so easy. Unfortunately, the numbers don’t always work out (especially on overflow severs that usually aren’t completely full). It is easy to blame others for not working together and ignore the impact of your own actions.
I agree that the good guys are mostly white hats (all of DE are good guys with some angst to try to make things interesting and Kiel is pretty much lawful good). But there are some grey areas. The Consortium has done some pretty bad things. But they’re not mustache twirling villains (they’re still in LA after all).
At this point I assume there was a goof for characters made at the very very start (there was about an hour gap between my ele and the rest of my toons being made).
Uh, I can understand it not being a “point” in favor of marnick’s argument (that being there are lots of male focused story elements that reflect positively on the gender) but I don’t see how that somehow proves the OP’s argument. Every single starter bad guy is the same species and extremely discriminatory in some way. Human’s fight people who are against the Queen and are racist against Charr. Sylvari fight a bunch of insane people who think being cruel to each other is a great way to do things. Asura fight even more morally bankrupt scientists (I kid, I kid). And so on.
They stated they made these sides incredibly unlikable completely intentionally. Saying that one group being incredibly misogynistic jerks (emphasis on the jerks part) means they’re blatantly trying to push “female empowerment” (whatever that means) at the expense of males is silly because it completely glosses over every other aspect of that group. Them being jerks exists because they don’t want players thinking joining up with that group should be an option. Same reason why they have the Nightmare Court torture puppies (literally). They’re trying to make you not like them on a personal level. And last time I checked misogynistic jerks are generally not well liked because of their personality, not because there is some vast “female empowerment” plot.
Yeah, she’s a massive stereotype of a villain, but I still enjoyed what little we got on her. She’s a refreshing change from what we’ve seen so far. Now if every villain from here until the last living story is like her, I’ll start seeing a problem.
The only thing I found a bit jarring was Vorpp’s line, “I know of this Scarlet…” and her having been trained and studied so much with multiple races. How come no-one else seemed to have heard about her until now? Especially when Mai-Trin was captured and full on said her name. Were our characters too busy killing an elder dragon to have even heard of her?
She is the outlier for the most part so I wouldn’t worry about more manic villains. The immediate villains so far have been (in no real order):
Angry animals either enraged by a greedy company messing with them or an angry ex-employee of said company messing with them
A race of stupid moles that are admittedly picked on by the other races and a group of jerk outcasts that no one likes deciding to kill a bunch of people because no one likes them
A computer program that wants our princess
Poorly designed toys
A group of pirates that want to take over a pirate city
The voting system could not be a one person one vote system and it would have to be anonymous otherwise, yes, there would be shenanigans to get bad people into power.
I disagree that we can use achievement points as a proxy for competence. It has the exact same problems as using gold as a proxy. It is very easy to get a high amount of achievement points and have very very little experience doing the job. For instance, I have quite a few achievements points. I am under no delusion that I’d be a good commander. I have no idea how to manage open field combat in WvW let alone allocate resources. And I don’t really pay enough attention to meta events in PvE to understand the intricacies in enough detail to lead a group of people well. So I like the game and play it so I have achievement points but I don’t have the competence to lead people because I don’t practice it (there is no achievement for leading people well in this game).
Lets put it this way, they said early on in the games development that different professions will have themes and will use the same thing in different ways. One example is how elementalists can turn rocks into meteors (not just throw the rock really fast or something). Are you just annoyed at the general way mesmers use things (e.g. the torch, something that is a light source has a stealth ability)?
They should stop using slang for the city names and instead fix the achievement wording. lol They’re making the game artificially harder with language.
I think part of the problem is that Karkas are a serious pain in the rear to kill. You can solo the individual invasion forces much easier than the Karka events. That and the reward is more predictable. The invasion happens, you run around for 45 minutes and you get some loot. In Southsun you run around for who knows how long and you eventually get a shot at killing the queen (which is harder to kill than Scarlet).
Yeah, not arguing that there aren’t focuses. My elementalist has support and more damage oriented builds. But my support build can still do some damage and my damage build can still heal and remove conditions. The force field shield idea would probably have very very low damage (unless you’re going up against not very intelligent enemies that can reflect a high amount of damage onto themselves) while negating a very significant amount of damage (support builds so far can negate damage but usually it isn’t super powerful).
It would make a lot of sense for the Mad King to have someone to enact his plans the rest of the year (from his stand point). And the targets for Scarlet being primarily Kryta makes sense too (the whole flame and frost thing still makes little sense but hey).
It isn’t built in anymore than any other profession that has access to blast finishers. The only other instances of “stealth” are from the transform animation bugging out and not drawing the person as mist, a tornado, etc… Another fun form of the bug is when it leaves clones standing around (no one else can see them but the elementalist and they do nothing but just stand there).
There would have to be a set number of commanders so it wouldn’t inflate and be used as a status symbol. The commanders being able to deputize people (Lts or whatever) would potentially help deal with increased responsibilities during big events. But yeah, not going to happen because it would have to be a huge system to work at all (basically, look at Eve).
Yes yes these arguments are great (RISC vs CISC is also fun). The most apparent issue right now is Anets complete lack of communication. We got an official forum support guy, finally. But the stickies are horribly out of date and giving false information still. And we still have no information on what is actually going on (I don’t blame any support person, they have no ability to change what is going on and I do take them at their word that they’re communicating our concerns). We should probably think of ways to help with rather have pointless arguments that won’t change anything.
Frankly, the only way that would increase the overall competence of commanders is if they were voted on some how. That is never going to happen because the game just isn’t set up for that.
Trahearne isn’t that bad of a character. If you play a sylvari it actually fleshes out his character quite a bit (and more specifically the “Act with wisdom, but act” line) and he actually does grow quite a bit. The problem is they kind of failed to introduce his character to everyone else and then his bad AI and somewhat funny (in a bad sort of way) lines makes the character come across as more useless than he should. Pretty much, he suffers from a rushed narrative and the end game quests being rushed and often buggy.
Well, posted a support ticket for the famous dstBits crash. I’m just curious as to what is causing this extremely predictable crash (thankfully I can complete invasion meta events before I crash or I’d be extremely annoyed).’
Edit: we need to get the submitting a ticket sticky updated as they now require us to download an app to make a pdf of the system profile.
I didn’t like how they were handling Logan before but they’re doing better.
Eir has that whole quiet desperation thing going on (especially when her kid comes back). You have to read a lot into her motivations and talk to npcs that aren’t required.
I never played an asura so I don’t really know what is going on with Zojja beyond the obvious (and she has been excluded from the living story so far). And Rytlock got a lot better when they made his character less about being the anti-Logan and more about being his own character.
Also, reading the Snaff comment, has anyone considered this may be one of those early Sylvari that Kudu experimented on?
Wouldn’t be as cool as a Mursaat in disguise, but it’d make her…acceptable.
Also, why aren’t we talking to that tree to find out more about her?
Probably because people were complaining that the personal story became too sylvari-centric so they don’t want to keep going back to the Pale Tree for major plot points.
There’s been numerous threads on the Living Story Discussion forum as well as the General Discussion forum about players who feel stressed, burned out, exhausted etc. from the pace of the 2 week release schedule, as well as some players who feel that the rapid pace is also creating a higher incidence of bugs and glitches. I’m part of the former group.
The key here is not that we DISLIKE the updates. We’re all for new content. We just would like more time to digest it all, as far as the first group is concerned.
This post is different from your original position which implied you had hard data that everyone hates “rapid” updates. They’re getting better almost every time too. Remember the Karka invasion and how no one really saw the invasion of LA because the servers exploded? The bugs are becoming less game breaking (e.g. the servers crashing) and more annoying (e.g. watchwork mini being vaporized).
So the practice is obviously helping them improve the content. And the only content that is repeatedly lame seems to be Southsun for whatever reason (original was plagued with problems and the Canach boss fight in the second was just weird and buggy…don’t know what they were thinking).
Did you play the same story mode dungeons that I did? The guy is a walking emotional time bomb and it is severely impairing his judgement.
It is true. Anise seems to be trying to make Logan realize that his emotional issues are dangerous for him AND for the Queen. Like you said, he is a walking emotional time bomb. I mean, when he the watchknight became Rytlock during the opening ceremony, he lowered his guard, he hesitated. He could have died.
I blamed Anise before. I thought she had a cruel sense of humor. But after hearing the conversation between Anise and Logan after defeating Scarlet in her playhouse, I finally understood Anise’s motives. She is trying to protect the Queen and to protect Kryta, and if Logan does not stop acting like a little boy, people will get hurt (again). This lesson she might be trying to teach Logan can save many lives in the long run, as I see it.
And Anise isn’t the first person to try to teach Logan this lesson. Jennah herself tried and failed. Anise just has a less…friendly way of trying to get this point across to him.
We’re committed to releasing Living World updates every two weeks. As always, thanks for the feedback.
And I’m committed to not spending another dime on this game until you guys acknowledge that many of us do not want rapid-fire content shoved down our throats every two weeks.
Seriously, it is so frustrating to see you guys stubbornly clinging to this idea that nobody asked for in the first place while simultaneously sticking your fingers in your ears and humming loud enough so that you can continue to ignore the feedback from those of us who hate this kind of release schedule.
Slow it down.
Can you link a source for this quantitative data suggesting that people don’t like these updates?
You find Logan publicly calling out the Queen repeatedly in the middle of crisis situations to be okay? He rather repeatedly over steps his bounds. Anise is calling him out on this behavior.
Repeatedly? you mean once? For a tactically idiotic move? (you don’t hide the Queen’s whereabouts from the most important, trusted human fighter in the world who’s single handedly done more to defeat the ED’s than either of these 2. that’s pant’s-on-head reasoning)
Overstepping his bound? You mean like “the queen exploded, there are monster everywhere, I don’t know what my defensive position is or how to find the Queen if she exists at all & it’s the woman I love & I’m supposed to act normal” that “over stepping his bounds?” that’s the “petulant” question that needs to be “called out”. that’s where Anise needed to step in for the queen & ask what he’s doing about hunting Scarlet down even though it’s none of her business. (& apparently it’s ok for her to over-step her bounds under the guise of attitude) After showing she’s not to be trusted by making the Clockwork show a personal attack on him.
yeah, Logan’s the one who’s off kilter here.. kitten
Did you play the same story mode dungeons that I did? The guy is a walking emotional time bomb and it is severely impairing his judgement.
Now that we’re talking about Zojja, kind of weird that she isn’t around (Rytlock was mentioned). Pretty much the only characters that have been missing from the living story have been Zojja and Caithe (and Caithe isn’t into the whole celebration thing so the lack of her makes sense). Assume this is a scheduling problem.
You find being an jerk entertaining? ok.. Anise is another over-compensatey character. we’ll make her bossy, talk down to Logan for no logical reason, constantly jab with quips, be the “real” protector of the queen & that will be her “attitude”. nah, Anise blows.
You find Logan publicly calling out the Queen repeatedly in the middle of crisis situations to be okay? He rather repeatedly over steps his bounds. Anise is calling him out on this behavior.
Necessary from a story stand point, I mean. Logan’s character requires a counter point or it ends up feeling like we’re intruding on Logan and Jennah’s couples counseling session. And as much as I like Rytlock, his “grr, Logan bad” attitude wasn’t that entertaining.
Yeah, I never saw the turrets as being the main use for take root. It was more like icing if they managed to do any damage (I’d maybe consider otherwise if some more utility turrets/healing turrets were thrown in). So never bothered to check duration.
