Guild Wars 2

We’ve all heard the QQ’ing about the Living Story and how the content is limited time only.

• Players who can’t log on consistently or new players end up missing a lot of good content.
• Furthermore, they may be dropped into the middle of a narrative they never had the opportunity to begin.
• Lastly, some of the content like dungeons takes a lot of work to create and balance, just to have it disappear in a month – this may not be most efficient use of resources and creative talent.

However, limited time content also has it’s positives.

• It presents the world as living, breathing, and evolving rather than static.
• It encourages players who can log on consistently to do so – this keeps the persistent world alive and populated.
• And finally, it helps the gem store sales by increasing demand for items that are unique to the event while also giving them a context.

I propose the Historian as a compromise toward the first 3 points, without stealing the luster from the last 3 points.

The Historian is an NPC who records and offers to players his account of the past events in the Living Story.

The Historian’s account should include:

1. Story
The story is simply the Historian telling (voiced or written) in his own words the story that took place. This includes what happened in the dialogs, cutscenes, the open world activity, and the instanced parts. Concept art and screen shots should supplement the story. The story driven cutscenes may or may not be included.

2. “Flashback” Instanced Missions
This includes the very same dungeons and instanced story missions that ran during the event. These instances are arguably where the quality gameplay is in the Living Story. Though I won’t presume that it takes more developer resources than the open world activities, instanced content is the typically more fine tuned and replayable.

Because it is completely instanced it does not threaten the new state of the world for people who participated in the actual Living Story event, nor does it require participation of the world. For all intents and purposes, it is simply a playable “flashback”. But for those who missed it, this is a chance to experience without disrupting the world continuity for others.

The Historian’s account should NOT include:

1. Open World Activities
What can be considered the “Living” part of the Living Story – the activities that took place in cities and explorable areas. For example: killing the dredge sonars, helping the refugees, collecting southsun samples, and smacking piñatas.

These open world activities definitely have a place in the event making it feel like the story was really having an impact on the world. However, these activities didn’t really offer anything unique or challenging to the gameplay, rather most of it depended on community coming together to be meaningful. Even the boss events were just the same old damage spam for an hour.

Also, re-implementing open world activities that were supposed to have been in the past presents serious technical and continuity challenges in itself. Attempting to bring open world activities back to the world could destroy the permanence of the changed world that the developers were trying so hard to create, or split the playerbase more than necessary between shards.

2. Achievements, drops, cosmetics, and other exclusive items

One of the goals of the Living Story is to reward players with that prestige “I was there when it happened” titles, and exclusive cosmetics. Allowing others who weren’t there to easily pick them up later through the Historian would diminish that sense of pride. It would also decrease demand for the cash shop exclusives during the event, which doesn’t benefit the company financially.

I’m not saying certain rewards should never be offered again in the future, but that it should not be the purpose of the Historian.
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=== TL;DR ===
The Historian is intended as a compromise for new players or those who can’t make it to the live events, while remaining in line with the original purpose of the Living Story – a one time event with a permanent effect on the world.

Players will be able to read/listen to an account of the Living Story events and play the instanced missions/dungeons as flashbacks. Players will not be able to engage in the open world activities from the event (they will be summarized in the story) nor can any of the achievements or exclusive items from the event be earned through the Historian.

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The Historian is primarily aimed at the story related content, not exclusive drops and rewards.
If you wish to discuss ideas about bringing back previously exclusive items or achievements, PLEASE START A NEW TOPIC ! ! !

“but it would create a new problem for players that are not good at dealing with these less straightforward situations”

Based on the context, I think he meant to say “professions” that don’t have the tools to deal with the new proposed situations. Meaning the flipside would occur where no one would want warriors and guards in their groups.

Cost of implementation aside, is there any reason not to rotate colors/sides? Will this hurt anybody?

In WvW, zerg trains play an endless game of keep swapping for gold/karma and only occasionally meet each other in battle. I’m pretty sure this does not reflect Medieval warfare.

Kaaboose.3897:

Because most events reset to fast I didn’t even consider that an issue. And for the larger ones that are (like the world bosses or statues) the algorithm could put you in a server that had compelted them. I breifly mention this at 20:52.

Does that mean each player kills the world bosses once in their character’s lifetime unless they guest on a newer player’s overflow?

Kaaboose.3897:

I also threw up the idea of “Magic Find Skills” you could equip that would have obvious animations for groups that wanted more magic find.

Can you elaborate on what magic find skills are? Like poach from final fantasy games? Or low powered duplicates of existing skills?

Number 5: Guesting and Realms

I was sad about guesting and realms ever since Anet announced players would be bound to separate worlds. Anet was trying really hard to push the whole ‘server pride’ thing in PvE, but I think most people naturally relate to their guild or group of friends more than their server.
Guild wars 1 had districts which were basically the same as stacking overflow servers for each zone. This system of districts allowed Anet to dynamically adjust according to the the popularity of the town, so that no town would be completely desolate or unbearably crowded.
Especially before guesting was implemented (but even after it to an extent), the fact that your PvE world inseparable to your WvW world helped create the population imbalance. Many people wanted to go to the low-medium worlds for lower queue times, but that meant purpetually empty PvE zones. So if you or your guild was PvX that was a pretty bad deal.

I have also come across some counter arguments.

Because dynamic events have a persisting effect on the world (ok they really don’t, but they’re supposed to), each overflow will have their own different little world. Every time the player re-enters the zone and gets put into another overflow, everything is different, the village he saved against the centaurs in the previous overflow is burned down, etc.

Number 8: Loot and Magic Find
Definitely agree. Either MF benefits need to extend to everyone in your party (for an instance), or it needs to be scrapped for a better self imposed difficulty system that doesn’t hurt your team. GW1 had hard mode. Other MMOs have instances that let players scale the difficulty for increased rewards.

Number 4, 6, 10
These things are limited by available resources and developer time more than anything else. WoW excels in these areas over Anet because Blizzard has these resources to polish their game until it shines.

All keeps, towers, and supply camps (just “keeps”) turn sides on a common interval…say…20 or 30 minutes, rather than the moment you kill the Lord and capture the control zone. All credit and karma/gold is awarded on this interval as well.

Capturing the cap point as the attacker will not immediately make the keep yours, ownership will turn to whoever holds it when the interval passes.

During the meantime whoever holds the cap point determines a few things:

• 1. If the attacker continues to hold the cap point or the point is in contest, NPC’s will not respawn. If the defender retakes the control point the NPCs will respawn (gradually, not all at once).
• 2. The gate and other aspects of the keep can be manually rebuilt/repaired if the defender retakes the cap point. This is prevented as long as the attacker holds it or the point is in contest.
• 3. Supply cannot be picked up by anyone if the attacker controls the point or it is in contest. If the defender retakes the point they can pick up the supply.

Other details:

• If the point is in contest when the interval passes, the next side to fully control the point will take the keep.
• Rewards at the interval are NOT given to the attacker if the keep was retaken, even if you had capped the control zone at some point. You will only be given credit for assisting in the capture of keeps that turned to your side.
• Any upgrades that were not destroyed will be retained by the defender if he retakes the keep.

I believe this will have some positive impacts on WvW:
- Zergs can no longer be efficient karma trains if they cannot properly hold everything they raze over.
- Point defense becomes a bigger priority in the game without increasing the PvDoor nonsense.
- Supply camps cannot be rushed down for instant supply. Like everything else it must be held until you own it if you want to benefit from it.

My suggestion does not get rid of the Zerg, but instead forces big groups to prioritize what they want to capture. Retaking a recently conquered but undefended keep becomes much easier with this change. This, combined with the timer, does two things:
1. Zerg train A who has been plowing through enemy keeps in a linear fashion now has reason to turn around and backtrack to defend their holdings as the timer runs down, since they will get no credit if they are retaken.
2. Zerg train B on the opposing side may see greater value in retaking keeps than attacking new ones – after all they have to worry about less gates and NPCs to burn down.

This ultimately brings people together to massacre each other. It also frees up space for smaller groups to take advantage of undefended keeps should the zerg decide to keep going forward.

Red is much easier to make out on the terrain, if anything the 1st place should be red, not last place. But a rotation or randomization would be best.

Get a Ranger, buy a Longbow, and tame a Bear pet.

Sort of an “safe” but effective strat to fall back on if you are getting it handed to you. It also gives you the breathing space to get used to the mechanics of the game.
Don’t worry, as you level up and get better at the game you will diversify (playing 1 setup will eventually get boring), try different weapons/pets etc. but I recommend this starting setup for the new player.

Your race doesn’t matter as much, pick which ever race interests you. If all (or none) specifically speak out to you then I recommend Norn, they are the best race/area to get introduced to the game imo.

There are many people who enjoy both PvE and PvP. Assuming like normal working people they only have limited time to play each day, they must split that time between the two formats to enjoy them both. The problem is that the daily and pvp daily require roughly the same amount of time spent in only one mode. So if I want a daily but with limited on my hands, time I gotta pick either PvP or PvE and go all in with it.

A solution could be to split the daily into two tiers:
Completing Tier 2 Daily gives same rewards as now – gold, karma, laurel etc.
Completing Tier 2 PvP Daily gives same reward as now – booster and ticket.
Completing Tier 1 of both Daily and PvP Daily gives mixed reward – laurel and ticket.
(cannot double dip laurel/ticket with mixed reward and tier 2 reward)

What if they introduced knobs and levers to the queuing process?

Like if you’re a solo player and you don’t want to play against 3+ premade teams you can set that as your matchmaking search parameters. It might take longer to get into a match but it’s your choice.
Players who want their match more quickly can enter unrestricted – they will be matched with anyone against anyone premade or not. That might be a good option for a high elo solo player who wants to get noticed by the premade teams.

In addition, MMR will change depending on the similarities between the teams. Like a 5 man pug vs a 5 man premade will only gain/lose 20% of the MMR that equivalent teams would get.

I’d much rather follow someone who is consistently popular with the WvW crowd than someone who can farm PvE for achievements/100g.

The problem with the current system is the casual player dipping into WvW doesn’t know who earned their Icon with good leadership and who farmed their Icon. So these lousy commanders end up sucking a large amount of manpower simply for having the icon turned on.

As I said in the other thread if you move here, then move here for WvW. PvE is still a ghost town wherever the holiday events aren’t going on. Maybe guesting will fix this if you have friends on a more populated server who let you join them.

Really this is not a suggestion to defend camps, but to take camps right before the tick.

The existence of exotics alone a sidestep from their original philosophy. Ascended gear and beyond is just a discussion of magnitude.

Hey, we captured most of the map. Lets suicide over and over so we get our points!

+1

I can see in large servers with big queues how they need to encourage people who die alot to switch out and pve so others can get in. But for low populated and outnumbered servers don’t need this penalty.

I haven’t worn armor since level 20. Even though they cut through you like paper, it’s so much more fun to take chances roaming enemy territory and not have to worry about a giant repair bill. I’d much rather they use something like Death Penalty from GW1 to punish death because that is not permanent.

It’s only fair to note that the low population extends to the PvE world. If you move to Kaineng, expect near-empty PvE zones beyond the starter areas. My guild wanted to move here for the WvW but the deserted PvE was the reason they decided not to. Currently I’m roughing it out here and there have been some really great moments in WvW, but I honestly can’t recommend this world if your interested in PvE (unless you like playing alone).

“Free transfers has permanently ruined WvW”

No, free transfers to the highest population servers has ruined it.

They need to make transfers free (no $$ cost, no losing guild perks) to medium and low servers, and restrict xfers to high pop ones. Maybe even give incentives to players to transfer to these less populated servers (lower queue times obviously isn’t enough). Getting guesting implemented needs to be first priority aside from keeping the servers running.

Transfer to lowest pop server needs remain free. Completely free. Otherwise there will never be any reason for anyone to go there and fill it up.

Hsinimod.5784:

Once a tool is added, it becomes the only way to find a group. You can’t do “LFG for X” because it’ll just be ignored or people say “just use the tool”. It becomes the standard, and any other way falls to the wayside.

You know why most things become the standard?
Because they are better.

What’s wrong trading potential effectiveness to get a group quicker? It’s not like anyone is forcing you to use a DF. If you want a quality group, get your guild or create your own selective team. Half of what I see in /map is “LFG” spam that ends up with the same quality pug groups that a random DF would have gotten them. Except the DF would have been much faster and saved the rest of us from chat spam.

Damage over time skills are balanced to cause more overall health loss than direct damage skills. This is to compensate for the fact that the damage comes slower, giving the opponent more time to deal his own damage or heal up. Two or three players who can stack the dots up really high negate this disadvantage because the opponent gets bursted down like it’s direct damage but much greater potential health loss than normal direct damage.
Hence a cap of some sort needs to exist.

One solution is to both lower the original bleed cap and allow reduced bleed damage on all stacks beyond that cap. The purpose is to equalize the overall health loss of DoT skills with typical direct damage skills when the bleed cap has been exceeded. This solution might require some of re-balancing.