Guild Wars 2

Hey Chris,

Well, if you’re still working on that list of things the CDI’s have added to the game, I’ll say the new “Superior Runes of the Trapper” look awfully familiar .

My compliments to the team: I still like my 4/6 bonus better but can see why it might not have been technically possible. Their version of the 6/6 is better than what I came up with – love how it plays off of both classes’ other abilities. Elegant (a word I don’t use lightly).

If you’re in the goodie giving mood, I’d totally take a recipe to make them and maybe a dozen, so I can put them on my ranger and thief and try them out!

I would subtly misalign all the character skeletons so everyone of every race is CONSTANTLY walking around with their feet sunk into the ground up to the ankles, possibly the mid-shin.

What? That’s how DC Universe Online has done things since launch, and it makes them look so Pro…

Blaeys.3102:

We work with these other three guilds in five different ways:

1. When the WvW guild needs support and we arent doing anything as a guild, we have a large number of members hop into their Teamspeak and follow their lead.

2. When members of the primarily APAC guild have to miss their guild mission night, we have a standing arrangement that they can come to ours (and vice versa). Additionally, officers from each guild agree to help out if the other guild is short of people in a given week.

3. The APAC guild and the faimly guild both have permission to use our custom guild pvp arena (which is technically mine, but it is kept running by donations from the guild) – and we set aside one night every other week for fun 3v3 deathmatch tournaments in the courtyard.

4. The family guild leads a “themed” wvw night (all minion master, all asura, etc) one night each week that we like to participate in.

5. Officers of all guilds often whisper back and forth whenever their guild is doing anything that takes larger numbers, so alot of adhoc groups form.

I want to thank you for writing out some concrete examples like this — so much easier than working in a vacuum.

Donari.5237:

Proposal Overview
Make it very hard to leave a guild by accident.

Goal of Proposal
To prevent loss of personal guild banks and their contents, or guild leaders losing control of their guilds to a random member who then wrecks the guild. To prevent the tension involved in every rep swap when hopping to a personal guild for inventory management … “Will this be the moment I click the wrong button and lose it all?”

Proposal Functionality
- Move the Leave Guild button away from other frequently used buttons.
- Make the Leave Guild button obviously dangerous — perhaps make it red and octagonal shaped (though that is more a warning to US players, maybe, as it looks like a Stop Sign for drivers).
- Give a warning popup. If you are the sole member of the guild, “Warning: This will disband the guild and all items in the guild bank will be destroyed. Proceed?” If you are the leader, “Warning: You are stepping down from leadership and may not be able to return to your leader position. Proceed?” If you are a regular member, “Warning: You are leaving (Guild Name). You will no longer have access to guild benefits. Proceed?”

Small and focused as this is, I really do approve/agree.

•stacking in the guild bank should be possible without first moving it to your own inventory.

Not possible for technical reasons – multiple people may be manipulating the guildbank contents at the same time. The current system prevents that from going horribly awry or being purposefully manipulated.

See?

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Yes

Not enough characters blah…

Chris

Forum pro-tip: spaces count towards the fifteen character requirement. You can just bang on your space-bar a few times to leave short replies .

Chris,

Could you maybe explain the pillars of “the guild experience” as ArenaNet views them?

I’ve never understood why the free time of “guild players” is considered so much more valuable that Developers spend coder hours on things that only that sub-set of the player-base will ever experience, while the independent player is expected to either bow down or lump it. Do guild players on average buy more gems or something?

And its not just a binary guild/not guild split. The standard model (which is already plainly manifest in GW2) is to go on and systematical gate smaller “family-sized” guilds from many rewards. There are some distinct break points between what a small guild can get/do, and the activities and rewards that open up for bigger guilds.

I have more specific questions, examples, and a few suggestions (you’re surprised, I know) but understanding the developer perspective would give me a lot better context.

I still just want to know what percentage of the active player-base Arena think’s time spent on guilds-only content serves. Not saying it shouldn’t be done, just would like to have a better grasp of the context and return-on-investment.

I’m pretty sure the bored outnumber all the happy and sad put together… and have simply moved on.

The balance team is positively glacial. I haven’t been excited about builds -> testing -> tackling the content with a new set-up in something close to a year now.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hi All,

We will starting a CDI soon on…….Guilds.

It will be broken down into time boxed discussion sections such as Guild vs. Guild, Guild Activities, Managing Guilds, Guild Content etc.

I will update when I have more details on when we start. I am very much looking forward to it.

Chris

Indeed. I’ll look forward to asking that timeless question, “why in games that have heroism as their driving theme/motivation, do companies keep expending designer-hours gating content behind massing up in larger-than-party-size packs?” There’s a reason the new Destiny’s Edge doesn’t have 43 characters in it: above a very modest group size most of the members are cogs, not protagonists.

I’d dearly love to know what portion of the players are active guild members in guilds larger than let’s say 9 accounts vs. solo/small tribe players who take their adventure where they can get it.

Purple Miku.7032:

There has been nothing but nerfs for the warrior for soloing in PvE since I’ve started GW2 over a year ago.

That should tell you something about how far above the bar they’ve been operating.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hey All,
…
We should also discuss how to improve the process at the end of the next CDI, such as tech, topic choice etc etc.
…
Chris

Here’s a suggestion I’m going to put in the strongest terms the board won’t censor:

Don’t pull a repeat of the gross mis-management that was the entire Ranger CDI.

Somehow a staffer who seemingly knew effectively less than zero about the topic got made the host (firing off placating drivel to the effect of “oh, they just have minor issues” when the overwhelming weight of player concerns fell on this one class…). At best we were left watching a glorified secretary who silently picked suggestions that we were never privy to based on criteria never stated, passing them on to the relevant minds who stayed completely behind the curtain throughout. There was no actual developer input/interaction at all.

The crowning moment of the whole debacle was the host getting sick mid-week and rather than spending 60 seconds to tell us “Hey, feeling icky. I’ve gotta step out for a bit” they just vanished until the following Monday… without asking someone to take over their duties. I’m sorry, that’s the official ArenaNet presence displaying full-blown contempt for the CDI process itself.

Oh, and welcome back Chris.

I’m just annoyed people are buying outfits at all, when those assets could have been built as armor pieces so they work with other gear choices in a mix-&-match fashion.

I’m going with “because someone there at the office has a serious Sylvari fetish”.

It’s an answer that explains a lot of other thing in the game too.

Surely its NOT better for sales or they would do that.

Its a pressure sales. Its not going to change.

I feel like the artist doing the new ’dos has something against bangs.

I’d also pay considerable money just to get the existing styles in mirror image (parted on the other side).

I don’t miss WTS/WTB spam in every chat channel at all…

I’d be interested in/fork over money for samurai themed/inspired ARMOR, but personally I would be happiest if we never saw developer time and effort wasted on OUTFITS ever again.

So… are you claiming you didn’t KNOW all this when you bought a literal mountain of quartz?

I’m just really vague on why you think the rules should be changed for you.

That actually a lot more reasonable/supportable exchange than many I’ve seen proposed.

You still run into two problems when pitching it to the Devs: An ectoplasm is worth a lot more than the 5 silver we know they’re comfortable with (not a deal-killer, just an acknowledgement of scale) and currently no ascended items are salvageable which cuts down a lot on support ticket hassles form accidentally destroyed terminal/BiS gear. Opening up ANY ascended items to salvaging is one of those floodgate/slippery slope decisions they may want to just avoid entirely. It’ll cost them real man-hours on the back end.

It’s crucial to realize that you have so many because they drop very, very easily and because of that, despite the nifty pink color they just aren’t worth that much. Their vendor price tells you exactly how much they’re actually worth in terms of effort: nearly nothing.

No other slot is going to become as trivial to fill with ascended gear, so just put that out of your mind right now.

I want one and only one change/counter to stealth – don’t make me lose target focus.

I have no issue with them being invisible and staying invisible when damaged and my not being able to fling single target attacks while they are in stealth – my problem is it pits me against the worst tab targeting system I have EVER encountered in 12 years of MMOs when they come out of stealth. There is nothing heroic about being focused on a passing giraffe because the other guy dropped a smoke bomb. It’s dumb. It’s annoying. Its unnecessary clicking in a game already burdened with a lot of unnecessary clicking (loot pick up) masquerading as interactivity.

I want my fight to be with the other player, not with a crap UI.

Boneheart.3561:

Every time I see cries for a new playable race(s), it’s for an immediate release, as if no one is taking into account the volume of content that would entail:

• New starter zone

Not strictly required, but it would be nice.

• New Personal Story

I don’t play the one we have now on my alts. I give slightly less than a mouldy skritt’s lopped off tail. Needless make-work to do one if you set up the new races as a thing for veteran players.

• New City

Again optional and largely irrelevant – its not like the cities we have now are anything more than a way to take load off of Lions Arch – a function rendered meaningless by the mega-sharding. A slightly more service oriented village on the starter map would fulfill the need as well as a whole city map would.

• Free pizza

Now, you realize any pizza will have to be bought through the gem store . They gotta make some money somewhere in this process.

• New racial Skills

Which can and even should be as defective/sub-par as the existing ones.

• Re-fitting armors

True, but also why skeleton-based animation exists.

I don’t think its 20%…

The chances they haven’t hyped to the theoretical limit of hype a NEW RACE with less than 14 days left until the patch aren’t just low… they’re perhaps the most mathematically perfect representation of the number 0 you will ever see.

So, do folks feel Warriors would have condition counters more proportionate to the trait cost if Cleansing Ire cleared only one condition regardless of adrenaline ranks when a burst skill is used?

So it would read like~

“Cleansing Ire: Using a burst skill removes 1 condition.”

Just play it.

The problems will speak for themselves.

Auesis.7301:

Nike.2631:

Actually the existence of a build that is ‘optimal’ (as in superior to all other choices) across a large range of encounters is pretty much a sign that it needs to get stepped on/nerfed because that’s the product of bad design .

Looking realistically at how game balance works, there is always going to be SOMETHING about a class/comp or encounter that is the optimal approach. I hope you’re not proposing a feedback loop where we continuously nerf whatever seems to be the best option in a given circumstance until we’re left with…well, pretty much nothing.

Two things damp down the feedback loop you’re describing…

1. I did say optimal across a large range of encounters. there’s nothing wrong with a build being good against thieves or perfect against a specific dungeon boss. Its when a build is good against 6 out of 8 professions or is perfect against 2-3 entire dungeons. Those are both flags for problems and while some of it can be corrected by boosting the other side of the equation, power creep is just as detrimental to a game’s health as circular nerfing.

2. The real question about optimal builds is how far behind is second place? How about third? You can probably ignore up to about 3% variance, but beyond that, out comes the nerf bat. Then nail sticking up gets a gentle tap. Which is why we all love good diversity – it keeps the nerf bat in its case . Really skillful diversity hides the deep dark secret of all player-determined build systems: The designer wants you to feel cool and powerful while being as absolutely AVERAGE as possible .

Josh Davis.6015:

So, here’s a few notes on warrior:

Warrior:
Of the heavy classes, the Warrior is able to balance sustainability and damage. They bring high sustained damage and opponent control.

• Strengths:
  • Sturdy body
  • Able to apply physical or condition damage
  • Sustained melee AoE DPS
  • Melee crowd control

• Weaknesses:
  • Little ability to deal with enemy boons
  • Reliant on adrenaline to use many abilities
  • Can become overwhelmed by conditions if their defenses expire

I think more than anything else you could possibly do to improve the state of the game would be to write these lists up for all 8 profession and post them in a blog. I’ve been asking “what are professions supposed to be bad at?” for a long time. Nice to finally see an answer.

Now the problem you’re running into with this list is classic Hollywood logic – two characters are scuffling and they keep trying to get to the dropped gun. The gun is not what wins the fight – beating your opponent down wins the fight. Stop scrabbling after the gun and punch the other guys in the kidneys – bam, fight over…
NO ONE CARES that warriors cant’ strip boons because being dead its the ultimate boon remover. You gave them a weakness that is completely covered by their high damage and massive CC potential.

Many other classes look at “reliant on Adrenaline” and think “I’d swap my busted class mechanic for adrenaline dependence in heartbeat.” Oh darn, warriors have to endure a class mechanic that actually works.

And weakness three is the same deal as weakness one – it would matter if they had trouble killing you before those defenses expire… but they don’t have that trouble.

You might need to tone down their strengths just a wee bit to allow the weaknesses to actually reveal themselves…

IrishPotato.6327:

Centaurs are a black race, won’t be playable ever. I feel your pain.

After the comedy skit of the Toxic Alliance, I’m pretty sure the very concept of “black race” has been pitched out the airlock. “Villain” races will go anywhere the story leads them .

Centaurs. I have a $100 to hand ArenaNet no questions asked for playable centaurs.

Most boots already work with digitigrade bodytypes (the Charr). If the pants have to just vanish to save the armor designers’ sanity, so be it. The existing hit box works. Their combat animations are largely in place already and they have a couple unique animations that can be used for racial skills. (And before anyone says it, horses are quite capable swimmers.) Racial unique cosmetic feature could be body-painting.

The centaurs are loosing their war against humanity and they are as threatened by the Elder Dragons as anyone. Lets see some tribes that want to put aside their spears and axes long enough to talk.

Stormdancer.4972:

“To Those Who Have Quit This Game” … why are you still on the forums, reading posts like this?

I’m more curious about the mentality that would make someone post a message to people that aren’t there…

Nike.2631:

Still have $100 in my back pocket to hand over 2.31 seconds after Centaurs become a playable race.

Not joking.

Nine months later and this has not changed .

Harper.4173:

Those that are here want GW2 for what it is.

If that were broadly true we wouldn’t need updates at all, because you know, the game would be finished/complete as is…

Auesis.7301:

Everything is viable. Everything is NOT optimal.

Key difference.

My preferred language is ‘competitive’, but yes, ‘viable’ gets thrown around way too much.

To me you achieve viability pretty much at “I can walk out of a city map and the game doesn’t crash”. I get the feeling it’s misused mostly to create false dichotomy – since the word actually indicates the difference between alive and dead, people using it are trying to force the impression that builds are binary in their effectiveness, when in reality there is a whole spectrum of performance levels and any cutoff point is pretty much arbitrarily chosen. “Competitive” promotes the idea that there is a range in levels of effectiveness that all have a reasonable shot at winning. Notice how we don’t generally use the word viable when discussing sports teams (unless they are really, really bad… ).

Actually the existence of a build that is ‘optimal’ (as in superior to all other choices) across a large range of encounters is pretty much a sign that it needs to get stepped on/nerfed because that’s the product of bad design .

Funny you should mention narcissism and “but we’re so special, we miniscule few who post on the forums” in the same breath. “We’re the Players, and you should ask how high when we say ‘jump’.” You’ll find the word “Massively” in that same genre category you pointed to. And if you read what I said you’ll see that I mentioned good designers don’t disregard feedback – they just put it into a much larger context.

I’ve had this exact conversation from your seat in a CDI discussing drop rates and player experience vs. statistically expected behavior. But the first thing most people playing in PvP modes throw out the window is that when the system is working right you should lose a lot. I mean a whole lot. Like 5 times out of every 10 encounters . So when people drop by to complain that they’re losing, unless its part of a Massively Multiplayer trend (the kind that’s easily spotted from the metrics) the sensible Dev just smiles and goes about his business. Assuming they’ve read the post at all. Our last red name post here was what? Almost 3 months ago?

Now, now… Rangers don’t need massive buffs.

The Ranger needs modest buffs.

…Accomplished through a massive infusion of~

• Clear party role/contribution
• Internal ability synergy
• Pruning/combining trash abilities and correcting nonsensical skill placement
• Untraited Pet combat reliability
• …and maybe a total game-wide re-work of the assumptions underlying melee vs. ranged damage coefficients.

They don’t need to be that much stronger, they just need what they already have to WORK RIGHT.

“Balance is Subjective”

What is this? Degenerate game design for people who think tic-tac-toe is DEEP?

Balance is ANYTHING BUT subjective. That’s kind of why its a job. There’s art to it, but there’s also PROCESS. And process is by far the more important element of herding a game system.

Players are subjective, because the sum total of their experience (their sample size) will never amount to anything larger than a rounding error at the scope at which this game operates. And so their input/feedback tends towards the deeply personal rather than addressing the environment as a whole – its not worthless, but man do you have to filter it thoroughly. In fact about the most important things a single player can do are A- find and report an exploit, and B- create a build that so blows the performance curve that it virtually IS an exploit. All this sniveling about other people’s builds/play, that’s pretty much garbage compared to what a Dev can pull directly from the game itself with a half decent set of database queries. Please, do go on wasting your breath doing it though. If it makes you happy wasting your breath.

If you think a build you’ve encountered is OP here’s what you actually need to do to get it nerfed:

PLAY IT.

Put more data into the system about it and draw attention through the metrics gathering that it’s a bit above the line — assuming that in your hands it actually is above the line and you didn’t just get schooled by a better player in the first place.

It’s not. The watchwork pick is equivalent or better in every way and costs the same amount.

ALL picks are defective compared to it.

haviz.1340:

Nike.2631:

And here we see the basic perversity laid bare that this game is so lacking in risk/danger that cannot be completely negated by dodging that the only question being asked of “support” is “How can you help me DPS HARDER?”

I tend to see handing out stacks of might as part of the DPS role, myself…

Oh, so boons like protection and vigour increase dps but regeneration supports others.

Yes, Protection and Aegis are defensive and handing them out contributes to the team’s ability to absorb mistakes. I’m not sure where to put vigor since dodging everything is pretty much a universal requirement – it’s the game’s core demand held above any “role” really. The point made earlier is that those boons don’t scale with any stat, which makes it impossible to gear for them – and if you can’t gear for them we’re back to zerker uber alles. For those boons that do scale, your options are…

haviz.1340:

Only one boon is affected by healing power so how exactly does it make clerics support?

And here we see the basic perversity laid bare that this game is so lacking in risk/danger that cannot be completely negated by dodging that the only question being asked of “support” is “How can you help me DPS HARDER?”

I tend to see handing out stacks of might as part of the DPS role, myself…

haviz.1340:

If zerk is synonymous with DPS, what is synonymous with rampagers, rabid, carrion, Knight, valkyrie, cavaliers and few others. Just keep in mind there are only 3 roles – DPS, support and control.

Support is pretty much Cleric or Zealot.
Control is uninstall and find a game that doesn’t spit on you.
Bunker (a very real role in some modes) is Sentinel or Cleric.

I hope the personality system is just in secret training, waiting to come back faster, tougher, and cooler than ever.

You open 8,000 bags already?

Only if you’ve had a run of 8,000 bags and no luck. For every person that gets one in the first twenty, there’s someone who won’t get one opening 4,000. And odds approach 100% the second guy will come on here to complain .

There have ben large-scale tests of the MF rates for precursors, and in the case of them dropping directly from mobs, one in 2-5 million doesn’t seem at all implausible.

Aidan Savage.2078:

Xae Isareth.1364:

I think for legendaries, it should be pretty accurate though. You don’t get many listed through the day.

For every legendary purchased from a sell order, good odds that 2 were sold to buy orders. And those sales dont show up on spidy’s charts as anything other than “oh, there’s a few less buy orders.”

If the data dumps from John Smith are to be taken as gospel, I’d say that ratio is more like 7:1 sales at buy order price:sell price.

Even for precursors, the velocity of the TP is huge.

basemoan.4702:

This is what I am worried about most. Could we please get some clarification as to whether the droprate and availability of this recipe is currently functioning as intended?

Other than people’s unfulfilled lust for them what possible reason do you have to think it’s not working as intended?

The notion that people are still chasing Legendaries at all is really the funny part.

3:1 the question isn’t are you going to prevail, its how badly can you string them along…?