Both the Norn and the Charr would see it as an insult to ride a mount because it implies they are to weak to use their legs…
Norn have a mount already. It takes up their elite skill slot and its called ‘Become Snow Leopard’. 
Which actually suggest a workable trade-off for mounts that doesn’t completely short-change people who are already built for sustained speed buffs. Go look up the Superior Rune of the Traveler on the Trading Post – people are willing to pay big gold and a hefty opportunity cost for what “mounts” would typically provide…
If mounts were Elite skills that worked like signets that gave an out-of-combat-ONLY passive speed buff (likely no greater than the +33% we know the system can handle now…), you might be able to build a reasonable argument for their inclusion being horizontal. Trade-off is if you get into a fight with a mount slotted, you’re not running an Elite for the duration of that fracas. You could collect/earn mounts and then slot them when you want to use them.
(edited by Nike.2631)
The issue of unsatisfying role balance is something to be laid at the feet of the AI design as much or more than any inequity on the player skill choices side.
I want us to get the role balance paradigm just right providing a solid foundation to interact with before turning up the heat in terms of AI behavior. I believe and know this to be a prerequisite.
I must (politely 
) call this in to question.
We currently play in an environment where the risk/threat posed by highly rewarding encounters is so low that the only axis that needs serious consideration is “We WILL succeed, so how fast can we get it done?” You could multiply healing done by x5 and it wouldn’t make healers any more appealing to the most skilled/efficient players because the “coefficient of relevance” on that type of support is currently zero. People are entirely capable of beating some of the apex challenges strictly relying on self-heals (when they aren’t soloing Lupicus just to drive the point home…).
Likewise its clear crowd control effects are clearly built around their performance in PvP, and when taken out into PvE the existence of “hit me with CC and I gain 25 stacks of defiance” puts an extremely visible “coefficient of relevance” of about 4% .
Improving AI/increasing critter challenge is just one way to approaching the hidden goal – making monsters more like players… and vice versa .
Consider: If all players had Unshakable and gained 2 stacks of Defiant each time they were struck with crowd control effects, you could rebalance our CC skills with that in mind (longer duration, shorter cooldowns, etc) to maintain the desired level of effectiveness in PvP… but as a byproduct you’d see a fraction of the complaints about CC-spam in Orr, and the entire Control role might become strong enough to be significant when fighting bosses who will outright ignore 25 out of 26 applications – at least now when it does work it works longer, and the process of stripping those stacks is faster because you have shorter cooldowns.
I think perfecting your paradigm strictly on the player-side first will just serve to lock-in existing monster mechanics because now you don’t dare alter them for fear of upsetting the player-side balance you’ve worked so hard to achieve…
I can’t really go into much more detail than this.
Chris
Not surprising… Critter AI seems so varied from game to game it probably falls deep into trade secrets territory .
Here is the proposal I believe we are making, please discuss and let me know if anything should be added or removed. Note many of us have read the thread internally and thus there has already been valuable impact.
Our Horizontal Progression Proposal
I’m going to sleep on this and let my subconscious have a crack at it before posting my main response tomorrow, but I do want to get one quick note in…
— Hero Recognition (Reward) is a by product of the above two types of Horizontal Progression leading to Unique Skins, Titles, Rewards, followers and NPC reactions/opportunities based on the players individual feats in the world of Tyria regardless of how he/she chooses to play the game.
I would like for this point to specifically mention character Personality. Personality choices don’t have quite the gravitas of going to and slaying 6 Champions solo, but ultimately I think Personality is one of our most nuanced ways of developing our characters and their view of Tyria to our exact preferences and should be a key point in how “Tyria looks back at us.”
Thank you all so much for your hard work and your passion toward making GW2 awesome. This has been a really good CDI and I want to thank you on behalf of Arena for caring so much about the world we love.
The in-game pay-off of this exercise should be epic .
I have updated the proposal.
Chris
Thank you sir, that’s some speedy interaction .
The problem is not teaching the system, it’s challenging the players. Most of the content in this game consists of very crude opponents, mindless melee monsters who stroll towards the player or imbecilic ranged enemies who stand still while someone bashes them in the face. Likewise, most monsters have one single cooldown skill, a rather pathetic lack of resources.
Quoted for truth.
And really, the dumber monster AI is the more often you get calls to split skills between PvE and PvP behaviors. The effort spent making smarter, nastier, more vicious critters pays off double in the less you have to manage parallel skills between gameplay modes.
City of Heroes (may it soar forever in our hearts) was an EXTREME example of this: healing didn’t generate agro so healers could stand completely naked healing at full-blast in the midst of a mass melee and would be ignored by critters until every other party-member was dead. This lead to Devs ignoring giving healing classes any sort of active defense as part of their class. Now pop them into PvP where the universal battlecry is “KILL THE HEALER FIRST” and let me tell you: playing a healer in PvP in that game sucked donkey hindquarters. And they WOULD NOT FIX IT because ‘hey, healers are fine (in PvE)’…
I spoke with their lead designer about it a few times. He didn’t seem to appreciate my suggestion~
“Have healing cause substantial agro in PvE – then when you get a hundred thousand players screaming that healers are unplayable (or rather as unplayable as they are already in PvP…) maybe you’ll feel empowered to fix the root problem …”
I’d really like to see healing others in GW2 generating massive agro, because if monsters don’t respond to it, the fight’s already over. Similarly some mobs that are justifiably smarter in-game should clearly prioritize taking the weakest player down… and then prioritize ending them. Embers are about the only trash monster in the game I respect in group-play, and that’s because they almost coincidentally finish off downed players with their fire fields.
And this is not a call for the (un)holy trinity. The trinity is also based on BAD agro behavior. There is a reason the MMO-tank doesn’t exist in the real world: it is based on the attacker’s complete stupidity. You don’t attack the lowest threat + highest mitigation target first (without arbitrary mind-control… er, ‘taunts’). Games that rely on tanks as a role end up having to do backflips trying to make them relevant in PvP. Again: dumb monsters prompting dumb classes that fall apart when faced with human opponents.
Instead this is the call for more relevant Support and Control. If Critters were actually dangerous, there would be a place for helping the “priority target” survive either by healing/defensively buffing them (Support) or by debuffing or CCing the attackers (Control).
The issue of unsatisfying role balance is something to be laid at the feet of the AI design as much or more than any inequity on the player skill choices side.
(edited by Nike.2631)
Actually, Devs have mentioned an interest in getting portals into the hands of other classes.
Engineer being pretty easy to justify 
.
Guardians and Thieves also have enough teleportational abilities to make some sort of take people with them (thieves) or pull allies to you (guards) reasonably in-character for them.
Make it any bigger and you end up with Charr turning into dragons.
That’s a vote for them being bigger, right? Right?
Sheesh.. I think this CDI may have reached the end of its usefulness. Not really seeing ideas for horizontal progression being tossed about anymore… just seems to have drifted off. Looking forwards to seeing what Chris has narrowed the field down to soon!
‘The Journey’ was made fair game . Hopefully it’ll get it’s own thread someday, as I’ve seen quite a few interesting takes on what we could be doing along the way to our horizontal goodies.
But I think there’s also gonna be some hard stares directed at this thread’s course when we hit the next Evolution thread. As the community awareness of CDIs grows, I believe the topics will have to get much, much tighter to counteract the sheer volume of text burying people who have less than 5 hours a day to devote to them .
Wilderness Zones
Unlike regular zones in the game, wilderness zones are instanced areas without waypoints and without respawning mobs. These zones exist at the edge of the current map and would serve as an introduction to soon-to-be-released new zones.
In wilderness zones, you and your party venture through the zone in an attempt to hunt down and defeat some sort of boss. Because there are no checkpoints, a full wipe means you have to waypoint out of the instance and start over.
I would refine this by giving you the ability to add/unlock waypoints to the zone – just make the gating more demanding that “walk up to the site” we have now.
There comes a point where I’m not exploring anymore. The zone is old hat, and it should gain convenience over time if the game expects me to keep coming back after the initial shine has worn off. Maybe you have to find a full set of 5-6 Points of Interest to reveal a waypoint in that portion of the map (exploration reward). Maybe you need to succeed in a long string of DEs on par with a Temple Event to reveal a Waypoint (skill reward). Maybe you have to give/spend 100,000 karma at an NPC to reveal the waypoint for that village (karma sink). But eventually the map should be well known to your character rather than as frustrating as most of Orr .
I’m a little more interested, because that makes sense if you think about it and don’t just discard it as “being lazy”. It’s just a code phrase and most of what they reveal isn’t exactly secret information.
I agree, its not laziness, just pointing out some of the flavorful options aren’t as tightly gated as they may appear.
Though a flag check for being Whispers and a reply with some form of “I don’t know what you’re talking about” would have been nice :P
You need to go visit the fisherman outside of the Whispers HQ .
I’d just like to add,
Why shouldn’t the choices you made have an impact? , A choice is not a choice if it doesn’t have a consequence. So you didn’t get 500 Jewelcrafting?/Choose Priory/Charm then you don’t get the special/room/bypass whatever. There will be parts where your roles come into play.
((Cheering sounds))
So long as other choices also have their moment in the sun. Everyone likes having a moment where they shine .
On the “lf1m charming 100wvw thief” , yes you’ll get one or two groups that operate like that but that does not mean we shouldn’t do it anyway. There will always be min maxers and that should not stop the addition of content.
To me seeing LFM messages like that is a huge plus – It’d be nice for min/max optimizers to have more to think about than “Are you zerk/max DPS?” Make speed running multi-dimensional and the most dedicated and focused (a nicer way of describing Elitist) ‘group organizers’ will find joy in rising to the challenge.
If they are such a common part of the player base that we all know of them, its not a bad thing to give them content they can sink their teeth into, especially when doing so through smaller perks that appeal to role-players, crafters, and other player mentalities.
There are people who feel 2 seconds faster in a 12 minute activity is enough to bend over backwards for. I try not to let them cripple my creativity in creating new activities
I’m not talking about that minor a difference, I’m talking about, to take a page from GW1 “if we bring a necro with Traversal we can skip half the mission” as an option. And then finding out that’s all people want to do.
It’s just a concern I start thinking of when it comes to balancing things. Adding something for a flavorful and unusual addition should be included with “now how are players going to use this” as the next step.
Well I certainly agree it needs to be considered, as much as making sure all other choices in the set (other crafts in this case) receive similar attention at some point. You don’t want “Artificing is the best Dungeoning craft” to be an objectively true statement even if someone will undoubtedly crow that to the high heavens because of there preference for the dungeons where it is a factor .
But if you’re taking longer to build a perfect group for shortcuts than the shortcuts reduce the run length, that kind of… precision, yeah, precision doesn’t sound as pejorative as the word the first popped into my mind… is largely self-defeating.
And yet sometimes groups are willing to wait for an hour for the last perfect member when they could have just run it already with a “sub-par member”. I don’t try to fix someone’s social decisions, I just remain aware of them.
I just laugh when fussiness during prep makes you take longer to do something than just getting on with it. On the other hand if we had leaderboards for speed clearing dungeon paths (something I think would be very enjoyable for bragging rights) then there being more depth to setting up the perfect team is actually a plus for people who enjoy such… precision.
Two words about something from GW1: “Mime Battle”.
Sounds terrifying .
I’d rather work with “Personality” first – it’s something in the game which hasn’t been touched on for very much use at all.
Sure. With the same caveat that all personality types in the set (13 choices I believe?)need to provide advantage at some point. Still, it would be funny to see~
“GLF2M. Have Barbaric. Need Militant or Scoundrel.”
Again its an untapped part of the charactersheet, and one fully isolated from choices like profession. It might also be nice to have sidetracks/shortcuts that respect Race. A bit of CoE you can speed up by being an Asura (maybe a console, maybe a disguise) is flavorful in the extreme.
I have to say one of the FUNNIEST bits in this game is the security console for the Inquest Energy Cannon east of Mount Maelstrom – the comment that the panel requires turning two keys simultaneously and they are cleverly placed more than arm’s length apart… Arms length for an Asura… Other races just grab both keys and turn them with no big deal .
(edited by Nike.2631)
“GLF2M, characters with 100+ WvW and/or Jewelry 300+ desired for shortcuts.”
Like this one right here.
I really like the idea of there being options to roleplay your way through things, or use backdoors or secrets if X or Y. I don’t so much like the idea of them being useful enough to where they’re a required thing by groups and filter people they’ll take along.
There are people who feel 2 seconds faster in a 12 minute activity is enough to bend over backwards for. I try not to let them cripple my creativity in creating new activities .
Characters can have 2 crafts. In a party of 5 you can have all crafts represented with redundancy. As long as you put 2-4 small opportunities to speed things up it could be interesting. But if you’re taking longer to build a perfect group for shortcuts than the shortcuts reduce the run length, that kind of… precision, yeah, precision doesn’t sound as pejorative as the word that first popped into my mind… is largely self-defeating.
We were asked about things we liked in other games. When it comes to introducing new and story-driven content, I think one of the best things I’ve seen was in LotRO the introduction of quest steps that required emotes. Go to this vista and ‘e/ look’ out towards the west. This character needs cheering up, so ‘/e dance’ for them. This powerful entity demands you show them the respect that is their due, ‘/e bow’ to them to advance the quest.
The more ways we can interact with the world, the more ways the world can respond to or require our involvement. Crafting ranks are just one of a huge box of un-used/under-used ways the world could be made more engaging. It can’t be a hard gate because we can’t expect every individual or group to have a particular craft but it can add to the experience with side paths be they shortcuts or limited bonus rewards.
(edited by Nike.2631)
“Hold-up guys. We don’t need to fight those. I have enough tailoring to negotiate safe passage with the spiders. Just give me a sec to click something….” or “Stop! I can use that cauldron over there to bribe the Ogres with some home cooking. We can skip this whole fight.”
I like those ideas. I’m thinking of a jumping puzzle with a backdoor. People who can do it, find the hermit through their jumping technique (and experience how awesome jumping puzzles are) while others got a note from their story-npc which tells you that the ogres who guard the backdoor might be bribed with a neat dolyak-steak (craft one yourself or steal it from a troll).
This system could work as a tool to introduce non-linear storytelling as well as a tool for teasing specific activities (jumping puzzles, crafting) so that people would be motivated to try new things.
In some ways its just a matter if looking at all the numbers on your character sheet and all the ways your character can interact with the world and using those to create new gates. Imagine people’ surprise when someone realizes a Warrior Knight guard along a dungeon path will simply bow and stand aside (change to a green nameplate) if the first person to approach him has a WvW level of 100 or higher.
“GLF2M, characters with 100+ WvW and/or Jewelry 300+ desired for shortcuts.”
Speed running would take on a whole new dimension .
(edited by Nike.2631)
Crazy idea
What if wearing Berserker armor changes some of your weapon skills, but only if you want it to? Maybe we can do specialization of classes this way? Honestly I have no idea what rings, backpiece, etc would do in this implementation, maybe they can stay as they are.
Something similar just came up in another thread that would produce much the same effect – giving each class some new Utility Skills that had stat-prerquisites. You could only take “Godawful Smash!” if you had over 1200 power for example. Or “Greater Temple of Light” as a heal skill if you had at least 1200 healing power.
Basically you would have to dedicate a fair amount of gear towards hitting that threshold.
More and more I’m starting to think our gear IS our sub-class. A Thief built around All-Settlers’ gear vs. a Thief wearing All-Valkyrie are clearly playing the game quite differently from each other. Berserker has just become our most popular sub-class for most professions because the content we have is very friendly towards it.
*Extend the level cap to 999.
<snip>
*This is for elitists.
And for people who have to have pure vertical progression no matter how unimaginably grindy
Not necessarily “unimaginably grindy” because I got over 1000 levels (aka skill points) in GW1 with one character just trying to get 50/50 in HoM. I am sure my other characters are around 500-700.
I have 18 character slots. It proposes that for each one of them I need to get another 919 levels to be complete or I’ll be 919 point behind on every stat.
If I obsessed over one main it would still be months of chasing after undifferentiated XP. But add alts to the picture and “unimaginably grindy” is a rather kind description. I think “Kitten this, I’m out.” is probably a lot more likely response for me or any anyone else that would like to have terminal stats and get on with playing WvW on a even mechanical footing.
I don’t make a big fuss over the manifesto, but getting to a point where characters have terminal stat/gear in a tolerable amount of time is something the game does now that appeals to me very much. Especially for alts who, prior to the introduction of the Ascended tier, actually geared up considerably faster than your first/main character did.
You can’t have challening dungeons requiring teamwork without the holy trinity.
You just can’t.
For all the people who don’t want a holy trinity, this is the alternative.
I think believing there is no other solution than to slavishly mimic a pattern born out of crap AI and primitive aggravation/target selection mechanics lacks… imagination .
*Extend the level cap to 999.
<snip>
*This is for elitists.
And for people who have to have pure vertical progression no matter how unimaginably grindy .
@ColinJohanson,
In regards to new weapon skills/unlocks, I think the way it worked in GW1 in terms of obtaining both normal and elite skills using the Signet of Capture was so unique and amazing. It was something I had never seen done before in any other game I had played, whereby you go around the world looking for specific bosses that have the elite that you want, and that boss had a particular glow depending on what profession it was – gold/yellow for warrior, cyan for ritualist, green for necromancer etc. you slayed that boss, and captured its elite when standing near its corpse. I felt like I had truly earnt that skill, and that to me is what it’s all about – true progression.
So something like a Signet of Capture concept where you can purchase, or get via a reward, and go around and collect weapon skills from bosses would be ideal – and would make you feel as though you truly earnt it.
You could even swap in, say, 10-20 skill points for a capture skill (as many have been wanting more ways to use excess skill points, this could be another way to use them up?)
Edit: another idea could be bringing back elite tomes? Just a thought anyway.
Hi Zaoda,
Absolutely, this is a simple and excellent system. Very elegant, and rewarding with a great sense of discovery.
Chris
I think the initial hunt should reveal the skill on the skill panel, and then you unlock it with X number of skill points (where X is 15 or more).
As long as I can ALSO go to a vendor in the WvW citadel and pay 150-250 Badges of Honor to reveal the skill and then pay the same X number of skill points to unlock it, I think we’re golden. This has the added benefit of the WvW vendor serves as a checklist and preview for the skills accessible from inside the game instead of having to trawl the interweb to find out what all is out there. Then it’s a matter of Developer taste if the vendor skill entries also indicate what mob has to be mugged or if the presentation is “spoiler free” so explorative types can check in and know “Ok, this skill is out there, and I want it – now I’m going to go out and FIND IT!”
If I have that Tequatl event tonight that I want to use to test out a new skill, sometimes I just want to get on with it. Other skills I might pursue in a more leisurely fashion. Options serve both different kinds of players and different moods for the same player .
(edited by Nike.2631)
With this being said, I believe there should be other paths towards gaining the Ascended Gear…
You may find this thread of interest, particularly the last 15-20 pages .
Account-wide Agony Resistance
Considering how Fractal Level is now account-wide, it’s logical for Agony Resistance to become account-wide aswell, to allow our characters to consume content at the current account level they’re at.
Like most alt-friendly notions, I’m not adverse.
For example, Agony Infusions could be removed from gear and added to the character panel, so that infusing gear would add 5 Agony Resistance to the account.
The new +1 Agony Resistance Infusions that drop from Fractals could, once merged into a +5 minimum, then be used to add that much AR to the account.
I’m not entirely sure how this system would work for someone who already has several infusion at 6 or greater, particularly for across several characters?
- Ascended Salvaging
Allow us to salvage Ascended items in return for Ascended materials, with the added chance of Globs of Dark Matter, perhaps Globs of Ectoplasm and +1 Agony Resistance Infusions.
Any Ascended salvaging has to be balanced against the fact the rings drop like candy and the added workload for Support when people start (genuinely) reporting “Oh dear, I accidentally salvaged some of my Ascended gear 
!” However I do like the idea of them turning into +1 infusions. That’s a nice way of keeping the reward penned up in the fractals and not overflowing into other aspects of the game.
(At five max-length posts of ideas and me being on flood control, it’ll take me a while to respond to your entire package, but I am looking at it .)
(edited by Nike.2631)
I feel as if there should be a tray of sugar cookies nearby .
The last one makes me nervous – I’d have to think it over a bit more.
Trust me, it can be tweaked.
A vote of ‘nervous’ from me generally indicates “There is something potentially good in here, if we can just avoid the landmines visible or otherwise…”
But it would allow you to get uncommon skins (the stuff on Fine or Masterwork loot in the five regions) without having to jump through hoops or farm areas until it drops.
I don’t anticipate it being allowed for rare/prestige skins like Zenith.
And with clarity the idea grows stronger .
But the first two brought a smile to my face instantly
(You might set up a “sign guestbook, then spend at least 1 minute in the house” requirement to encourage a bit of browsing/sightseeing rather than running down a street ringing doorbells-and-bolting to the next for the goodies.)
I don’t know how well that could be coded as a trigger for it, though.
Signing the guestbook starts a 60 second count-down timer. Leaving the area (instance, tether radius, whatever) before the timer runs out voids the visit. Yes you could AFK it, but if you’re sitting at your keyboard and you can’t leave the house, might as well look around, right?
1. What would you do to help players along to getting visitors to their houses?
Starting on a basic level:
Daily achievement always in cycle like Gatherer; “Daily Visitor: Visit 5 houses”.
Social achievment “Houseguest: Visit W/X/Y/Z Houses; Title: Couch Surfer / Neighborhood / Honored Guest / Toast of the Town”Secondary level:
A guest book, which tracks who came visiting. Interacting with the guest book gives some sort of reward small enough to not be a problem but not a pittance nobody cares about. And not another currency if we can help it. Push comes to shove, make it Essence of Luck or a MF boost for an hour.
A gift system where you can spend 1 copper, 1 silver, or 1 gold to leave a “Gift Box” of varying levels for the house owner.Finally, with more work done:
Interacting with NPCs in the house or neighborhood of a friend (you know, the friends list?) lets you purchase copies of stuff in their model locker. Like you can see your charr buddy’s weaponsmith for a Steam Weapon (I chose this because it IS a lootable skin, not a definite locked version.)
The last one makes me nervous – I’d have to think it over a bit more.
But the first two brought a smile to my face instantly .
(You might set up a “sign guestbook, then spend at least 1 minute in the house” requirement to encourage a bit of browsing/sightseeing rather than running down a street ringing doorbells-and-bolting to the next for the goodies.)
Tobias – I actually agree with you that it is good to be able to make some judgments about the opposition at a glance, but a certain amount of uncertainty is also good. In the case of GW2, you can’t really tell class until they start using skills, but then you can see their weapons and know at least their 1-5, and maybe make educated guesses about the other half of their skills in heal/utility/elite based upon your knowledge of popular skills/builds.
Under the New Masters system Nike initially raised and which I sort of riffed on in the post linked in the quote above, those things would still be in place.
The way I envision Mastery working is that you open up access to a new weapon(s) for your class, and then a handful of new skills that are themed with the area of Mastery. You still have access to all your initial weapons and skills. So you have unlocked the Gladiator mastery for your Warrior, but you are still fundamentally a Warrior with a slightly expanded weapon/skillset.
So you would still be able to tell class/weapon set by looking at someone and their attacks, and the degree of uncertainty over whether they were using any Master utilities/elites/heals is only slightly more uncertainty than you already face. It just adds a handful of potential skills into the mix rather than changing how you evaluate the encounter.
Honestly, I don’t have a personal dislike of the system, it’s just trying to think of it past “yeah that’d be cool” and go “so what would this change after” which we should be considering as much as “here’s this cool idea”.
Indeed, and I welcome that sort of thoughtful/insightful analysis. Ideas that are tested and survive are stronger for it.
Its just in this case I feel the emergent result is a feature, not a bug .
(Specifically, I’m not against flattening the curve between new and veteran PvP players, taking away some of the advantages conferred by experience in being able to ‘read’ an opponent’s build from visual cues. A deep understanding of the meta-environment will still let you predict opponents’ capability/behavior just from their class icon with depressing regularity… But I’m rooting for the oddballs, not the Flavor of the Month cookie-cutters )