Question for the devs: Is this megaservers, actually a budget driven choice. Aka less players, still crazy amount of servers active, to much money wasted, and you want to sell some servers to make money on them, lower maintenance cost.
GW2 doesn’t have this kind of server structure (1 world = 1 server rack etc). All game maps are distributed dynamically across the whole server hardware. Additional capacity is added or detracted as needed. Modern data centers have this kind of capability.
Things like character data, guild data and the market are shared databases that go across everything.
The Megaserver may free up some resources, but overall, this is a gameplay-driven decision. The “daed gaem” shouts have been around since the game launched. From what we actually know, after the larger drop in players around the end of 2012, the numbers have stabilized and are now actually rising.
Well, it doesn’t quite work yet, that’s the problem You still need an extra button to use the soft targeting for a skill. The option would remove that and automatically use the soft target (if you don’t have a hard-locked target already).
AoE cursor maybe depends on class? With staff Ele I use so many AoEs that I prefer the freedom to place them independently of where I look.
Crosshair is kinda unneccessary, as the game does already highlight your soft target. So you already have visual feedback on what you’re targeting, and it’s kinda more elegant than a mark on your screen. (also works better with 3D and VR. You know, future proofing etc )
Personally I wouldn’t even need 3 and 4, but yeah, it’s kinda already in the game, we’d only need Arenanet to actually wrap it into a neat Settings option. Low-hanging fruit.
Point 1 and 2 do exist in the game right now. I guess the lesson from your post is they aren’t noticeable enough?
Point 3, very much agree. The Dynamic Event system provided a starting point for this, but it just needs to expand, it needs to do more to really work in the long term.
Interesting post indeed, although shouldn’t this be on the dungeons section? I agree that the ai on gw2 mobs are very limited and unfortunately can be infinitely abused.
It would probably make sense to balance the mobs in the open world diferently from dungeon mobs, but the basic sentiment is the same for both.
There is a keybind to make your character turn 180° instantly, could be usefull for your scenario.
If they gave us the option to use the game’s soft targeting for targeted skills, that would be such an improvement for staff. You could probably play without ever actually locking a target again.
That is already 90% implemented. The game “soft-targets” anything in the middle of the screen. There’s actually a (unbound) keybind to lock the soft target.
An option like “Always use soft targeting for skills that require a target if no target is locked” would essentially give you the Combat Mode targeting functionality.
1. How would you find that person in the current system? There’s nothing changin here.
2. The system still groups players from RP servers together. Not everyone on an RP server is an RPer though, they already are playing with non-RPers. Not much of a change there either.
3. Good point! Player caps per map will have to be adjusted so that maps are populated, but not crowded. For example, current cap is likely too much, if you remember the crowding at launch.
4. No idea what problem you’re talking about. The DE system actually makes a lot more sense in a megaserver infrastructure, as it doesn’t have most of the problems of a traditional quest system or phasing.
5. Worlds are already only relevant for WvW, again hardly anything changes.
6. Not a problem. GW2 server infrastructure was already working kind of like a megaserver before. That’s what enabled guesting and cross-realm dungeons. The separation into worlds was pretty much artificial to begin with. This new system is just more efficient in handling low population maps.
7. If they are your friends, the system already puts you on the same map to begin with.
Shouldn’t the roleplayers who tend to be on same homeworld and in guilds together have a better experience due to this change just like anyone else? You are more likely to be put on the same map as your fellow roleplayers.
The system wouldn’t know if someone is a role player, unless it will come with some way for RPers to flag themselves as such. Maybe that’s exactly what will happen. We’ll see tomorrow.
First of all, these people are freaking out prematurely. We’ll get an answer for that problem in the next two blog posts. But patience was never a strength of the forum mob …
Role playing in this context means: playing your character in as many ways as possible as if he/she really was a living person in this game world.
I wonder what the player limit per map is going to be. If this means populations like at launch, that would actually be bad. So many systems in GW2 work best with small groups of players. A mob of 50 people steamrolling one event after the other can be just about as bad as playing alone.
Relatively stable 60FPS (framelimiter enabled) on a late 2012 i5 iMac with NVIDIA 680MX with OSX. Sometimes dropping to about 40. Lower in large scale zergs of course. Most settings on high, except shadows &reflection, and no AA.
Estimated 20% lower than on Windows 7, which runs pretty solid at 60FPS.
Intel, but it’s only quad core no HT so I could probably get more if I upgraded. Thinking of going hex core+HT when skylake is out
Wouldn’t help with this game, doesn’t benefit from more cores. Unless you’re interested in other games with engines that really scale up with 4+ cores (very few do that), I’d hold back with that upgrade for now.
Agree with Byron. Reign in on those runaway damage modifiers. Reduce the damage delta between a full damage build and a support/versatile build. Not remove, just reduce. Do the same for passive survivability.
Still, without a change in NPC combat behaviour, Wethospu is right. If NPCs don’t require more than beating a certain damage threshold to stomp them, why should anyone bother to learn anything else?
Either the way to unlock the traits is interesting in itself, in which case it wouldn’t matter what the gold cost is since you’ll want to do the unlock anyway, or it’s not interesting, which means putting it behind a larger gold barrier would inevitably be interpreted as trying to push gem purchases, and cause another ruckus in the player base.
So it mostly depends on how good the actual unlock designs are.
My dad is a casual gamer, but is normally too busy to play these kinds of games.
GW2 is one of the very few MMOs that someone with time constraints can reasonable play and not fall behind or be locked out of parts of the game. In that regard, I don’t think there is a better choice for him. If he still feels like he doesn’t have enough time, then you’ll need for something else than an MMO.
Or you people are the vocal minority and the rest of the players really wants dueling.
The number of people crying to not add dueling vs. people wanting to duel does not matter.
Correct. What matters is people who want to duel can go to PVP and duel. There’s no need to add another feature when the neccessary framework is already there.
I was playing around with this option for a bit, because with it you can almost emulate the Combat Mod functionality. In the end it’s just not very feasible to have another button to press on top of everything else. If you used a foot paddle maybe …
I also tried rebinding keys in Windows so I can map an additional key to the right mouse button and assign it to the soft lock. Worked partially, but still not too great.
I’d rather have a checkbox in the target options that makes my skills automatically use the soft target if no other target is hard-locked. That would be a dream to play.
But, finally I found that I had to start the client and play before turning on Mumble, which my guild uses for voice communication.
So try turning that off, or other programs you might have running, before starting the client, and see if it helps. Having Mumble on was somehow causing a Cider error.
This is a known issue with mumble, related to the overlay plugin. Have you tried disabling the overlay? Also, are you using the latest version of Mumble?
Have a look at the very top thread in here, ‘Basic Mac troubleshooting’, and specifically point 5)
That your Mac is having issues with other apps now that might be related to overheating could be caused by a faulty SMC setting.
In 17 days an alternative is coming that is Native to Mac and we’re all looking at it with eagerness. We spend more than the Windows users do on things and we’ll gladly jump ship to escape being marginalized for choosing a more rock solid computer.
If you’re talking about the game I think of, I just spend this weekend with that native OSX client crashing every 15 minutes. In comparison the GW2 OSX client barely crashes at all for me. Native client is not a guarantee for better stability or performance.
Back on topic: For a native OSX client to happen, the game has to be ported to OpenGL entirely, or needs a better translation solution. We might see that soon if Valve can get SteamOS off the ground, and developers have more incentive to support multiplattform development.
It’s not going to happen just for the few Mac users in GW2.
There are many top tier MMORPGs coming out this year
1. EverQuest Next
2. Wildstar
3. The Elder Scrolls Online
etc
Does Guild wars 2 even stand a chance ? What do you think Arenanet should do to retaliate ?
EQN is the only real direct competitor to GW2, it’s not coming out for at least another year, and still needs to prove the design and tech it uses really works in a live MMO environment. I hope it does.
Wildstar and ESO are for a target audience that already left GW2 a year ago.
Instead now the player is continously rushing through events and POIs without even looking at what he is doing. That cannot be the right way to play this beautiful game. Give players another reason (besides the beautiful artwork) to have a closer look at what you created here.
The reason for that behavior isn’t how events are designed, but that many players still play for rewards rather than for the experience of playing. Which is pretty natural given the reward models the game offers.
Making more intricate, hidden quests doesn’t really help that. Either they don’t have worthwhile rewards, then hardly anyone will do them, or they do have worthwhile rewards, and don’t stay hidden for long.
The ideas in those videos are nice dreams, but they don’t scale up nicely with the actual player base of an MMO like GW2. That’s a core problem with this quest model in MMOs. They always seem cool for one player, but once you consider they need to facilitate millions of people, they just don’t make a lot of sense anymore.
I really wanted to buy a Mac. But I also play GW2 on a daily basis and I’d like to play it with a good performance.
Then you’ll be playing on Windows anyway, and you might as well buy a real gaming machine for it. None of the entry-level Macs is configured in a way to provide good gaming performance. You’d need to pick the high-end models, and those are ridiculously expensive.
One of the reasons I specifically bought this game is that it was advertised as having no end game.
Seconded, though I have to say I thought they figured out something else in it’s place that keeps the game interesting, and on that they haven’t quite delivered the way I expected
If you think about what loot was for in other MMOs, you get more loot to get stronger to get more loot, so, there really wasn’t much of a point either.
Well, in most previous MMOs, you needed the gear progression to get access to new content. That was the point of gear. That logic doesn’t translate to GW2 though (and I don’t miss it tbh.)
The problem is both systems were implemented horribly.
You need to give player’s a reason to keep playing. Anet has yet to accomplish that goal and people are stating to see that more and more now.
Well, it has progression for about a month. Maybe two if you count Ascendent for fractals, or people who like lots of alts. I don’t think that part of the game is what’s discussed here, is it?
As you noted, it’s about reasons to keep playing. A better loot system doesn’t work in my opinion, because no matter how great the loot distribution is, after 2 months there’s just no reason to care about loot anymore.
Also I think discussing this issue with you across two threads is confusing as kitten
The problem is though, what would you call rewarding loot?
Personally I wouldn’t call loot rewarding at all, period. I don’t think you can make loot rewarding in the long term in this game due to how it is designed, because there’s just no real need to have it the way there used to be in previous MMOs.
That’s the big problem for Arenanet to solve. Players notice there’s something lacking to do once character progression is finished. They’ve learned in other MMOs that the the thing to do now is to get more loot, so that’s what they ask for. But do you really need it for anything? How satisfying is it really to get exotic drops for a character who is already halfway geared in ascendent? Yeah, you can always sell them, but for what? To get more gold to buy … what exactly?
Here we go again. Let’s declare the lack of longterm motivation a feature!
Not at all. GW2 is absolutely lacking longterm motivation, no question.
The point is: loot rewards are a horrible design for longterm motivation. They work by addressing the basic needs of hoarding and collecting, but they are terrible for a game that doesn’t have a linear, finite structure, but is open-ended like an MMO.
No offense, but in the game GW2 tries to be, endgame rewards should be:
No offense, but in the game GW2 tries to be, there is no endgame. MMOs don’t have an end. Your character progression has an end, because progression needs an end to work. To keep players motivated, there needs to be something to do after your characters has finished progression. PvP is one option, but not to everyones taste. The Living Story can’t fill that function either because it is entirely out of the hands of the players. DE’s could have been that motivation if they were much, MUCH larger in scope and effect, but it seems that design has been abandoned.
GW2 needs to move from an RNG reward system to a token system + RNG systems.
So if you do lvl 50 fractals and want your greatsword, they can make it cost 30 tokens and reward you with 1 each successful run, while still maintaining a rare drop rate of greatswords.
That doesn’t really solve the problem that GW2 is a game where loot is unrewarding by design. It just means you get useless loot more reliably.
Without the grind in this game – there is little to no content to do for a level 80.
But, The issue isn’t the grind even – it’s the complete lack of viable reward’s for said grind.
The RNG system in this game is a slap in the face to player’s.
It basically boils down to this imo: Here are some real niffty items or mats we know you want / need. Here is some DR and .076 chances of getting them.
HAVE FUN !
Bleh.
What makes a reward viable? Bigger numbers? Obviously doesn’t work in this game without perpetuating gear tiers. More gold? Yeah, that’ll help the economy a lot in the long run. What’s so nifty about those items that you want them so bad? Is there anything you currently can’t do in the game because you don’t have them?
The basic design of GW2 makes the traditional MMO loot scheme kinda useless, since it has no gated content.
Some donkeys are still chasing the carrot out of habit, because they always do, but more and more are realising they aren’t hungry anymore, and they’d rather stop pulling the carriage and go play on the fields.
MMORPG shouldn’t be casual games. Their playstyle is not revolutionary or interesting enough to log in just for the sake of it – not after several houndred hours and years of copy-paste.
Glancing over MMO conversations, you’re obviously not alone with that thought, and that makes me so sad. Should we just accept that no developer will ever dare to stop the copy/paste design? That certainly isn’t going to incentivise them to try.
The devs have developed a fix that should address certain performance issues you have been posting about, and that fix will be rolled out after testing is completed.
That’s not months from now, by the way. Testing is underway!
If it’s fixed, why isn’t it mentioned in the patch notes?
This is bigger news then getting 20 new elite skills + guaranteed percusor drops from end bosses in instances (no it’s not added, just an illustration).
In bug fix section of patch notes only some lame stuff is added not this which isn’t an inconvenience and not game breaking for a full segment of players!
Changes/fixes that are very short notice often don’t make it into the patch notes. Not to mention the patchnotes in GW2 aren’t remotely comprehensive.
Judging by the delay of deploying the patch, I’d also wager they had more important problems to fix than making sure their patchnotes were complete.
You still need an extra button to use the soft targeting for a skill. The option would remove that and automatically use the soft target (if you don’t have a hard-locked target already). 
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