Guild Wars 2

I haven’t seen one person in this thread say they “can’t” earn them through SAB.

Several people left mopey responses about throwing their spare baubles away like there was no way that they could collect enough to get by. You can speedrun 1-1 and 1-2 in about six minutes, and it really doesn’t take a ton of skill either. If you really have zero skill at it you can still collect more baubles in a few minutes wandering around 1-1 than you could from open world chest farming, and you can reset the dungeon and do it all again (the only things that are daily locked are the final chest rewards, most of the baubles reset each time). You don’t have to play SAB with the character you want a skin on, they don’t need to be any particular level, so you can use any character that isn’t busy in the world, make a run or two per day, and then get back to open world stuff, it’s really not a big deal. This isn’t like making people run Fractals or Dungeons or doing the clocktower to get a reward.

Keep in mind though, if you try to buy a weapon skin using Baubles instead of Bauble Bubbles, you’ll need to collect 10,000 of them over the period of a month, so I don’t think it was ever actually feasible for players to farm open world chests to get weapon skins.

Seriously guys. Chill. All the “I don’t wanna jump!” stuff has got to stop because it’s not making any sense. Ok, you don’t want to jump, fine, but you don’t have to jump if all you want is the same rewards you could get from the open world boxes. If all you want is standard baubles, you can play in Infantile mode, which doesn’t have any jumping, and get well more Baubles per unit of time than farming open world chests.

You can even play the game on normal mode and get dozens upon dozens of Baubles with minimal to zero jumping (at most a few low risk, low frustration jumps). You might have to hit the space bar a few times, but you’d be at no risk of losing a life for a little bit, and they give you five for free. The only things you need actual jumping skill for is pushing through to later zones, completing the boss battles, or eeking the very most Baubles out of each zone.

1-1 is extremely forgiving., so complaining that it’s impossible to earn Baubles in SAB because you “don’t like jump puzzles” is like saying that the “Ambient Killer” daily is impossible because you “don’t like tough combat.”

Open world chests were their own kind of fun, I will miss them for that, but anyone that could earn Baubles using the open world chests could just as well earn them through the SAB without needing to be a jumping master.

I don’t hugely hate this change, and anyone who can’t get at least dozens of baubles out of world 1-1 just doesn’t deserve them, but it was kind of fun to open the boxes in the open world and go to town on the mobs. It’d be nice if those things tuck around.

If anything, I’d say the rewards for Hard Mode should be increased chances of getting a rare Super skin, more bauble drops, and faster unlocks. As far as unique rewards, I can live with just a title or something cosmetic.

I’m glad you’re so magnanimous as to only ask for better drop rates, a unique title, and maybe something cosmetic for playing the game mode you’d be preferring to play anyways over the existing one. That’s so awfully generous of you towards those that would prefer to stick with normal mode that you didn’t also ask for 100% skin drop rates and that Normal Mode no longer award any Bubbles.

Also, if all you get is double baubles, and theoretically hard mode will take longer to complete, then there will be no real added bonus for doing hard mode.

Only if it ends up taking twice as long to complete. If they make it so that it definitely, no exploit possible, does take that long, then fair enough, but we’ve all see their track records of accurately estimating players’ capabilities.

The other difficulty is that it’s already difficult to balance a “completionist” run on normal against a “speed run” where you only go after the low hanging fruit. If players could also do a “speed run” on hard mode, which might take longer than a normal speed run but would take less time than a normal completion run, then it would basically invalidate the vast majority of the content in the stages.

That is great, but without an incentive to try harder material, people will naturally choose the easiest possible path to get what they want.

And that’s fine by me. To each his own. It’s like in single player games, I just recently beat Bioshock on Normal mode. I could have played it on “easy,” but I felt Normal was a comfortable challenge level for myself. I have no particular interest in playing it on hard, much less 1999 mode, but plenty of people love the idea, and more power to them. The only thing I miss out on by not playing that mode is three potential achievements/trophies, and I can live without those.

Difficulty modes should be about the personal challenge. If you can beat something on hard mode, then you know that you did it, and that’s all that needs to happen. There’s no need for the game to give you extra cookies to do something that you claim to want to do already. If you want to do it, do it. If you don’t, don’t.

PS: There already is a discrepancy between loot on Easy (infantile) Mode and Normal Mode. Do you disagree with this?

No, because “easy” was deliberately designed to be without effort, it’s the sub-default state. Normal mode is difficult enough to be worthy of the reward, anything harder than that doesn’t need extra reward.

Giving it the same reward as normal would be the same situation as giving CoF the same reward as the harder dungeons.

. . .

That is a basic market economy concept. In combination with competition to have the best rewards is what the entire western society revolves around. One can argue that western society is not the best example to follow, but in my opinion it has proven itself to be the best option.

I don’t want to need a motivation to improve, in this case. If I feel like improving, I’ll improve. If I don’t feel like improving, I don’t want to feel that I’m missing out on anything because of it.

SAB is based on the idea of a classic game. Give the classic “hard mode” bonus rewards, “You Win.”

Would you also like to get paid minimum wage for the rest of your life? [No matter how hard you work compared to your coworkers or how long you’ve been in the field]
Does that still sound like a good idea? [It doesn’t sound fair to me.]
Greater risk\effort should always equal greater reward. Always. [In every aspect of life; not just games.]

If you insist that a hard mode must come with an enhanced reward package, then I vote no hard mode at all.

If hard mode was something people genuinely wanted because they wanted additional challenge, then it would be worth implementing, but it’s becoming clear that people don’t want a higher challenge, they just want additional reward, and feel that they would be able to play better than their peers, so they should be getting better rewards than are available to those peons. I do not feel that encouraging that sort of attitude would help anyone.

Let me ask this, let’s say they did put in a hard mode, and let’s say that the chests in hard mode contained double the bauble bubbles, and had double the chance of a rare drop. But let’s say that however “leet” you may believe yourself to be, it turns out that Hard Mode is impossible to complete for you, no matter how hard you try, no matter how much effort you put in, you can’t even come close to beating 1-1 on Hard Mode. There are plenty of other people though that can beat it in their sleep, and speed-run it in no more time than it takes to speedrun the basic version.

Do you feel that these players, who are working no harder than you are, deserve to get double the rewards for their efforts?

The second stage boss fight in the super Adventure box (the one on the top of a tree stump surrounded by poison water) can get some really wonky camera issues, since the outer ring raises and lowers. This causes the camera to constantly zoom into your character’s back, making it impossible to tell where the boss’s head is facing and just generally being confusing.

would it be possible to make it so that when the character is on top of the stump, the camera axis becomes fixed to the center of the stump, so that it does not shift arounf regardless of where the character is on the screen? If you fall off then the camera would have to revert to behind your back, but while up there there’s no need for it to be there.

Why shouldn’t somebody be rewarded for having more skill?

Because then people with less skill are less rewarded. There are always people who want more and more challenge and want everything to be crazy hard. I have no problem with that, let people play how they most enjoy playing. What I do have a problem with is when that playstyle receives greater rewards, because people playing on hard mode because they enjoy it are already being rewarded by the fun they are having playing it the way they like. If that is not reward enough then they shouldn’t play in that mode. People who would prefer to play on normal mode should not feel pressured by the loot tables to play on harder modes just to get the most efficient loot gain.

I just really hate the attitude of "the existing modes are too easy, there should be a harder one that I would enjoy more. . . and also it should give me extra cookies for playing it because who would want a harder mode if they don’t get paid extra for doing it? If they add a hard mode, play it or not, don’t expect them to give you extra cookies for it.

I think it’s fine to add a Hard Mode for people that want such a thing, but I just hope that you don’t include additional rewards or higher drops rates that are only available in hard mode so that other p;layers are encouraged to play it whether they enjoy it or not. Normal mode is plenty tricky for most players (assuming you go for all the optional stuff).

I really hope that they switch this from being 24 hours to being “daily”, because “24 hours” means more like 48 hours, since if you do the same event roughly the same time each day, it won’t work half the time. The only way to get it to be truly 24 hours is to end each event (or start them, I’m not sure which counts) roughly a minute after you did it the night before, and even then you’re going to end up pushed back to sun-up eventually. With “daily” rewards that reset at 8PM, you can at least do it one day at 11pm, then the next at 10:30, and the next at 10:45, whenever.

Stuff you can buy with karma is mostly stuff you can’t buy for any amount of gold, and the few items that you can buy for either like tools are relatively cash cheap. I doubt they’ll lose much money by making the karma vendors more convenient.

Right, I’m saying they don’t need a whole new city, that isn’t the point of what I was looking for. The point was just to make it more convenient to spend Karma on useful items. If they want to create a new city, then that’s cool, but that would be a significant undertaking and I wouldn’t want to hold up the function until they could achieve it.

Just dumping a couple dozen vendor NPCs, maybe setting up a few tent setpieces in one of the emptier areas of the existing maps, like the basement of Rata Sum or the back corners of Divinity’s Reach, would be a far simpler goal, something that they could reasonably complete in a month or two if they put their mind to it.

So yeah, if they really want to make a whole new city for it, and they feel they can do so in a reasonable timeframe, then more power to them, but that really wouldn’t be necessary.

The Kharmah Bazaar can be a totally new town for a future expansion.
Considering there are over 300 karma vendors, this town will be fully populated by NPCs so it needs to be a rather large city.

Well, I was thinking of condensing them. So insted of having a dozen or more vendors that only sell “Orihalcom picks” or “Mithril axes” on an individual basis, you would unlock one vendor that sells all of them. Instead of having six vendors that would sell one piece each of the level 50-60 karma armor (and technically I think there are 9 or more vendors that do), you would unlock one vendor that sells the entire set, like a dungeon armor vendor. I haven’t added them up, but I’m thinking it’d be something like 20-30 vendors tops, perhaps far less.

You do have a point though that the Karma Bazaar could be well suited to the Dominion of Winds, given the Tengu’s reputation as traveling merchants, but that would put this more into the long range planning since they’d have to make up the entire zone. If it were just a matter of adding and linking up the NPCs then it wouldn’t take much more work than they’ve already put into the seasonal events (like placing holiday vendors, Lionguard Lyns, etc.)

They could dump the couple dozen NPCs into Divinity’s Reach or Rata Sum’s lower levels with fairly little effort, but building a whole zone around them takes a whole different team. The only part I have no idea about is the part of linking them to existing heart completion. That might be easy, but it might require completely new code to recognize that you’ve unlocked those hearts. At bare minimum they could key it off of World Completion, if you’ve got that then you’ve got all the hearts.

It seems with each successive release that you guys would like Karma to be viewed as a valuable resource, since Karma drops tend to be the most common “Living Story” rewards, and yet the players are determined to consider Karma as a practically worthless resource, since it’s such a pain in the kitten to spend. There are useful things to buy with Karma, but they are spread all over the place, with travel costs to get there and often event chains that need competing before you can access any of them.

My suggestion would be to open a Karma Bazaar, a single location in the game where most of the desirable karma-based items can be purchased. This could be in LA, although since that city is already packed to the gills I might suggest Rata Sum instead. This place would allow you to buy all the karma-harvesting tools, all the karma cooking ingredients, at least most of the karma clothing pieces, etc.

To some this would cheapen the specialness of unlocking these vendors in the wild. Perhaps if possible it could require that you “unlock” each vendor in the bazaar in order to use them, like for example if you have a vendor that sells every piece of level 50-60 karma armors, to unlock him you would have to first unlock each of the heart vendors that already sell those items, and then maybe have to activate a small quest, which would then unlock that vendor in the Bazaar for all your characters.

I really think that making it easier for players to buy handy items using their Karma would make people have much more value for the currency than they currently do. As it stands, they’re a bit like that gasoline rebate on the tv show where to collect it people had to climb a mountain. Yeah, the reward is nice, but is it really worth the bother?

If you’re using stability as it’s intended, which means when you’ve burned your own CC’s, dodges, mobility skills, run out of kiting room, etc., then you will not have many problems. What I’m seeing here is that you want to farm a bunch of mobs that have knockdown abilities and are disappointed you can’t just overaggro and nuke their brains out without thinking about keeping yourself alive. If you control your aggro, I don’t see this being a problem whatsoever.

Actually, it comes from the fact that in certain events they come in sets of “dozens” by default, no effort on my part necessary, and really survival is not a serious concern, because even from my backside I can usually survive the encounter, it’s just annoying then you literally can’t do anything (becaue all your stunbreakers have been burned and you’d still on your back). That sort of “I can’t do anything” frustration is why most games do implement CC diminishing returns, because “can’t do anything” is not fun.

While yes, some classes only have it available through Elites, it’s something that can be popped as a last resort to not only prevent knockdowns but also allow the knockdown skill to go on cooldown thus giving ample breathing room for various other ways to avoid knockdowns to occur.

Yes, but it’s not something one can use practically on a regular basis, since the cooldowns are excessively long, and in many cases they are tied to locking down your moves to a completely different set. If every class had access to something reasonably similar to Stand Your Ground then I would conced the point, but Thieves getting Stability during Dagger Storm is not really “Thieves have Stability,” and does not solve the problem I’m trying to solve here.

And so it should, Stability really shouldn’t be high uptime due to how powerful it is, combined with other ways to avoid control it’s still a hugely powerful boon that allows specific periods of immunity at crucial times to achieve something big (Breathing room for heals/damage/escape or the ability to stomp someone in PvP thus taking them out of the fight for sure)

Right, which is why I’m not pushing for 50% Stability uptime, I’m pushing for something that is considerably weaker in nature, and would have very little impact except in cases where CC effects are flying all over the place. I agree that people shouldn’t be able to have Stability up most of the time and that it serves a very situational purpose, I’m just saying that there should be a more limited protection that just occurs automatically.

Just as examples – The game is very CC intensive (Due to it trying to become an E-sport, meaning skill based CC to prevent everything being a DPS race)

I’m not saying my implementation is the best way to do it, it was only a starting point. Feel free to suggest alternatives. Taking note of what you’re saying, perhaps instead of keying off 1, 2, or 3 stacks of this buff, then effects would key off of 2, 4, and 6 stacks or something, with weaker CC effects that are meant to be stacked only applying 1 stack of Stubborness, with the stronger ones like Fear or KB applying 2-3 stacks, so that successive KB would trigger the diminishing returns relatively quickly, while multiple dazes or Immobilize would take more effort to trigger it.

If anything, it would add another layer of strategy to CC builds, since you’d need to pace your applications to avoid maxing their stacks.

Implies you’ve pulled too many to handle, also popping Stability at the beginning of the fight will often put all the targets knockdowns on cooldown thus making the rest of the fight CC free (I know, as I do that when AoE farming multiple Centaurs + their Dogs even on classes that have limited access to stability)

When they tend to come in waves their CC effects are all on different cooldowns, and even if you kill the first groups the next wave arrives well before the ability that offers Stability refreshes on all but a handful of classes.

We aren’t talking about “avoiding” CC. Set that aside as a completely different issue. We’re talking about what happens when you ARE hit by several successive CC effects.

1) Not really. Thieves technically have access to it in one of their Elites, but you can’t consider that to be a useful form of it. Likewise Necros only get it during two of their Elite forms, and through one specific trait. Rangers can theoretically get it but only in some very unusual ways. It’s far too few and far between on all but a very few classes, and even when it is active it rarely lasts long enough to avoid more than a couple of attacks. Maintaining anything close to 50% uptime is impossible on any class.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Stability

2) There are already plenty of differences between PvP and PvE rules, plenty of powers that behave differently in each. There’s no reason this couldn’t be one of them, but there’s also little reason why this couldn’t be a part of PvP. Keep in mind that it only really applies to chain CCing, if you’re only CCing a character every ten to fifteen seconds then the effect of this change would be minor to nothing. Very few builds even have the option of CCing opponents fast enough to hit even the minor effects discussed here.

3)Yes, many can be avoided, if you care to do so, but in many cases of chain CCing you can get hit by several of them before you even fully recover from the first, making avoidance impossible if you failed to avoid the first move. Factor in enemy culling that often removes the telegraphing of their movements, or how some enemies do not telegraph their movements, and it’s a significant issue sometimes. In cases where you can easilly see a KD coming, like when facing a lone Ettin or something, it’s a non-issue, they can’t chain CC you anyways, and this proposal would do little to change such an encounter, but in a situation where you’re facing a half dozen Centaurs and three dogs, and they all start using KD attacks in rounds, then it could be a serious help.

Some classes don’t have stability, and of those that do they usually have long cooldowns so you can’t keep them up even 25% of the time during a fight. Stability has a perfectly good function, which is to make you immune to CC at a time of your choosing when you absolutely need to stay up, but a more passive, universal effect like this would be better for general circumstances.

Ok, clearly not the full version bosses get, but I’d like to see some form of diminishing returns on CC. I don’t see it as a huge deal in PvP, and may not even be necessary there, but having spent a lot of time fighting Centaurs and their dogs, I’m tired of getting chain KDed. Many other games have a system of diminishing returns on CC effects, in which you can CC a player once, but each attempt after that within a short period of time has less and less effect to it.

Exactly how this is implemented is up to you, but I do have a suggestion. Have it so that each time a player is CCed, they get one stack of a buff, call it “Stubborn,” which would last about fifteen seconds. The first stack would only reduce the duration of the next CC attack, so they get up faster, break stun faster, etc. The second stack would additionally substitute strong CC with weaker ones, turning KB or Fear into KD, KD into stun, stun into daze, immobilize into cripple, etc. The third stack would completely negate the next CC attempt.

Now, when a player burns that third stack, it clears all stacks and he starts over again, and of course if they only get CCed occasionally it would never build above one stack, but it would basically prevent chain stunning, while fully allowing some reasonable level of CCing within a given period of time.

How do you support small guilds but allow for guild hopping and try prevent exploitation?

I think the answer has to be alliances of small guilds to get merit. And time limits on accounts.

Allow the guilds to activate the mission but set a limit on rewards the player gets. Similar to the way they have chest and map bosses. You can get it only once a day.

Currently you can only get the Guild Chest once per week. I see no reason for that to change. What should change is that everyone that participates gets a chest. So say I’m in a mega-guild. My guild has plenty of resources and manpower to start a mission, we do, everyone chips in, everyone gets their chest, everyone’s happy. If I think helped out in someone else’s guild mission within that same week, I shouldn’t get an additional chest.

Now on the other hand, say I’m not in a mega-guild, and for whatever reasons my guild doesn’t have the resources to launch a guild mission. I should still be able to find, over the course of a week, at least one active guild mission, one where maybe they have the resources to launch it but not to complete it on their own. I jump in and help, I get a chest for my efforts, but then if I do the same later in the week I get nothing.

Now, alliances are good, if only for coordination. I made a suggestion on that forum as to how I thought they could work, but any sort of system would be good for helping multiple small guilds to join up, but an alliance system is not strictly necessary to resolve this, nor would an alliance system alone be the solution for this. The core solution is to give full participation credit to all who participate, regardless of guild affiliation.

But they have unique dungeon skins already and I know a lot of RPers who don’t do dungeons. Having a unique skin is not game-breaking.

The distinction is that while you may not choose to go for a dungeon skin, getting enough tokens to earn them is relatively trivial. You can just join up with a few pugs and run some dungeons and you’re fine. You can’t “pug” Guild Missions. They require that you form or hook up with a guild that has a significant investment of resources, and then run weeks of missions with that same group.

Just imagine for a second the complete kittenstorm that would erupt if they changed the way dungeons worked such that A. You could only get full token rewards for a dungeon once per week (meaning 180 tokens per dungeon, per week, tops), and B. You could ONLY run the dungeon with a group of your own Guild members, not PUGs, and only after that guild has reached Politics 5, AND each dungeon run requires buying a “dungeon key” for influence and “crafting” time.

Or imagine the converse, if they decided that dungeon runs should be exclusively the domain of the PUG, and therefore you would NOT be allowed to run any dungeons with anyone in your guild (because that would somehow be unfair to people who like to PUG).

Nobody’s complaining about them giving players something that a guild can do together, the complaints are from how they’ve designed it so that ONLY guild can do them, where no other activity in the game does.

People flock to events specifically for “vanilla” credit as well.

Well, I think you’re confusing “flocking” for “doing.” Harathi Highlands is a good example that most people should be familiar with. If you shout “Modnir is up!” over the map, meaning that the quest chain is starting up, you can suddenly go from having just you in the northern camps, to within a couple minutes having at least 4-5, and several more will flock in as it goes, a couple dozen by the end of it even during low-load times. Most players that are in the zone will be there, because you get access to a chest, lots of kill XP and loot, and several distinct events, meaning 2-3 dollops of XP/cash/Influence/karma in a row. Now, there are plenty of other events in that zone, and if you start one then maybe by the time you finish another few people will wander by and decide to participate, but nobody’s going to WP across the map, or run across the map for that matter just to get there.

If someone today said “we’re doing a Guild Mission that’s [halfway across the zone]!” I wouldn’t even consider the trip and just keep doing stuff in my own area. If, on the other hand, they were able to say “we’re doing a Guild Mission that’s [halfway across the zone], and you’ll get 50s, two rares, and commendations for completing it with us!” then not only would I be willing to WP over and join in immediately, but I’d also be willing to help scout out where the bounty target is, making them much easier to track down.

Rewards that you need to do WHAT, exactly. You can get earrings and amulets from dailies. You can get rings from running fractals.

Have you ever heard the term storm in a teacup? The only people who care, are people who have convinced themselves they need this stuff to play the game. 100% untrue. You don’t even need this stuff to do fractals until you get to a ridiculously high level. Because if you’re that into fractals, you’ll end up with ascended rings an ascended back piece.

A difference that makes no difference, is no difference. These rewards that you’re so gaga about don’t change the game significantly enough for people to make such a big deal about them.

So that’s another vote for “shut down the commendation store entire?” I mean, if the loot it contains is not important enough that people should care about not having access to it, then it shouldn’t be important enough to care if mega-guilds don’t have access to it either, right?

If precursors are account bound on aquire, the “poor sap” that gets the wrong one for his characters would truely be a poor sap. Now at least they can sell the wrong one and purchase the one they want.

It could work.

So long as Precursors are RNG, they should definitely NEVER be Bind on Pick-up. I would truly hate to be “lucky” enough to pick u a precursor for a weapon I’d never use. If, on the other hand, there were any sort of alternate method of gaining them, one in which you could pick whichever precursor you wanted, then I could definitely see them as being BoP, to prevent people farming the method of gaining them and then reselling them for cash.

If they implemented a system where you could gain special tokens somehow, and then trade them in for a specific precursor, then that could work.

One player makes not a guild. Your just a dude with a guild tag. You fild out all the paperwork now time to start recruiting

I have a guild of 8, they’re just never seen in the same place at the same time, like Clark Kent. They pool their resources and have earned a guild bank and armorer, but as it stands any sort of participation in Guild Missions seems unlikely. I’m fine with that though, so long as I still have access to the 50s, two rares, and commendations that larger guild members have access to.

I see a lot of people here whining “there is no personal reward, no one in my guild will join!” Holy hells. Do you really need a shiny trinket dangling every. single. step. of the way to motivate your guildies? No one ever understands long-term planning or working together towards something? You don’t know how to make it fun?

Good point. Remove all the personal rewards that the existing Guild Missions have, the cash, the rares, the commendation vendors, and we can call it a day. So long as they balance it, they can buff the light side or nerf the heavy side, it doesn’t really matter.

I think the issue here is a simple one.

This entire game, with the exception of WvW, is made for 5 man teams. Small guilds. What was missing, what has always been missing, is stuff for larger guilds to do.

Our guild has dungeon runs, 7 guys want to participate and two are always left out. Until now we’ve had to make our own guild events, which is great for some people but for other guilds, it’s not that easy. And it takes more work and creativity to keep thinking of stuff for the guild to do as a whole.

I mean we could run Orr together, but we can’t even be in the same party.

This stuff was created to fill a void. Small guilds have tons of stuff to do. Big guilds, not so much. Particularly if you’re not a PvP guild.

I agree that it’s nice for things for large guilds to do, the problem is how exclusionary it is. If these Guild Missions were open to all comers, then they would be something for large guilds to do AND they would be somethign everyone else can participate in. There should be ZERO activities in the game that ONLY large guilds can participate in. Oh, there can be activities that require a large amount of players, but these players should never have to all be part of a single guild. They might be 2-3 medium guilds, or a half-dozen smaller guilds, or even a single small guild and a ton of people who’ve never met prior to the event.

Having lots of people involved should not mean that they should have to be part of a large guild, any more than putting five people together to run a dungeon means that they have to be members of the same guild.

Have you guys tried asking players on the map to join in your guild missions?

Why would they? They wouldn’t get 50s, they wouldn’t get two rares, they wouldn’t get any commendations, they’d only get standard event credit, it wouldn’t even be worth the travel costs unless they happened to be right on top of the event when it started.

If they want non-guildies to participate then they need to provide equal rewards.

That’s why people tell in map chat that there’s an event going on at X location, and then players come flocking to it. I don’t see why a guild mission would be any different with its event rewards.

The only events people “flock” to are those that are worth the effort, namely those that offer full chests, and usually are part of a chain, meaning multiple doses of event rewards. Try picking a random “vanilla” event and drum up a party over map-chat, like trying to take out the Champ Troll in Sparkfly. Good luck.

If guild missions gave full rewards to all participants, people would flock to help. So long as they only give vanilla event credit, you’d have to personally bribe each of them.

If your guild has only 1 person, you should be able to do it too?

Sure, why not? I’m not saying I should be able to solo the entire thing, but I should have a reasonable capability to start it, and if I can convince dozens of people to jump in for just a few minutes to help out, then we should be able to complete it together. And people should want to jump in, because they’d get the FULL rewards for doing so. It’s like if you’re on Wayfarers, and the Maw starts up and you’re the only one in eyeshot, do you have to solo that? No, you shout “Maw!” and people flock to your position and help out, and then you get to complete it, and they do too, and everyone gets a chest. Win win win.

Now, I’d be fine if a small guild or “guild of one” could never reasonably start any guild missions, like they can be crazy expensive for such a small number of players to afford, but they should be able to fully participate and be fully rewarded. If I’m just doing whatever in some zone, I should hear something like “Bounty at Eukaryan Caves!” over map chat, and suddenly everybody comes WPing in, has a fun little event, courtesy of the Knights of Good or whomever, the Knights all get their rewards, and everyone else who showed up and participated also gets the full rewards, not just the same pittance they would get for doing the bridge event for the umpteenth time.

It would be a gift to the community, from the guild in question, and they would of course also benefit equally so it’s not like it’s costing them anything that they weren’t paying anyways. It’s basically like if you could go to a restaurant, order your fancy meal, and then, without paying anything extra, the whole place gets free meals too. Why should you find that upsetting? Your food is just as good as it would be if you were only getting your own, and you aren’t out a penny more for it.

We could fix the rewards so they reward everyone equally proportionally to the amount of effort poured in. But let’s put this in the perspective of the big guilds. There should be an incentive for guild building, that is, bigger rewards as your guild grows bigger, or else everyone would be in small guilds as there will be no obvious advantage to being in a big one.

No.

Everyone should be in the guild size they like. There should be no incentive to join bigger guilds than you prefer. The advantage to large guilds is having a larger roster to pull from when needed, and being more active in keep claiming, and the sense of community and that sort of thing, but the individual level perks, the things that each member of the guild gets should not be based on the scale of the guild. Small guild players should have equal access to fancy gear, equal access to rare drops, equal access to bonus gold and currency with which you can buy fancy new individual rewards.

If they want to have systems that reward large guilds for being large, those rewards need to be entirely community-based, things that the whole guild shares as a guild, like a hall or something, they should not be a whole tier of personal rewards that each individual member gets for being a part of that guild. Individual rewards should be awarded on an individual level (or at most a small pick-up group).

That also includes rewarding people who aren’t in the guild. If you get the same rewards not being in a guild, what’s the point in being in one then?

If people outside the guild can use a karma banner, what’s the point of spawning one? If people outside the guild can get claiming buffs from a keep then what’s the point of having them? It’s a public service, it’s something the guild does to show how awesome they are to everyone. And of course everyone in the guild has a leg-up on acquiring them, since they would have advanced warning as to when the event is going down, so certainly more members of the guild would be participating than any bystanders.

And of course other people getting rewarded doesn’t mean that the guild is rewarded any less.

More so, I don’t know why people are seeing this as bad news. It’s an obvious step BACK into the right direction.

It is a step in the right direction, but it’s a smaller step than was necessary and the impression is that they think they’ve got this solved now, small guilds are no problem with this “fix.” All we’re doing is making it clear that this change alone is not nearly enough to set things right and more work will be needed to make the system fair to all.

That is not a fact.

I disagree. I have no legendary. I have not cornered the precursor market (never owned one).

Your opinion (not fact) is that the price of some precursors are ridiculous. I do not share that opinion. It is only about vanity. It is like buying expensive clothes in real life. You can buy a designer jeans for 2.000 Euro. But here is the kicker: You can cover your legs also with a jeans for 50 Euro or below. And it warms and protect your valuable lower body parts as well as the expensive one.

That said: there are skins for weapons out there which are not that expensive and also quite beautiful. For greatswords: the corrupted skins, vision of the mists, volcanus… And they have the additional advantage, that they don’t produce these ridiculous foot steps which reminds me of worm egg yolk.

Now you’re just being contrary. Can we all just agree that a lot more players would like to have precursors than that currently have them?

What would be your plan for implementing a reward system that would achieve what you desire, given the constraint that you may not get rid of the trading post?

I don’t think there’s a good way to change the reward system without breaking stuff. I DO think that better controls could be added to the TP to reduce the profit potential. The same sort of things that have been suggested for the real stock market but would never be implemented for political reasons. Have additional taxes for certain goods. Have additional taxes for high volume trading. Have additional taxes for higher value trades.

Basically, you’re the economist. Look into the way that people are currently making money through no activity other than trading, converting gold into more gold, Make those practices distinctly less profitable by adding taxes that negate the existing profit margins.

Haven’t missed it. I’m fully aware of this perspective, however, we have always said that these guilds who are extremely limited in number will have to work together to attain these goals. That’s what this content is about. That’s WHAT these rewards are about.

There’s a huge variety of content and rewards available in the game. And while some rewards can be attained several ways, others are reserved as merit for specific tasks. This is no different from dungeon armor, achievement titles, or the map-completion badge. Certainly we would never give you those things for completing guild content.

Except that world completion can be soloed, and dungeons require no more than a few minutes pick-up group of five people. A Guild mission requires a GUILD, a long term collection of people, and furthermore it requires one consisting of dozens of members, minimum.

I was hugely disappointed when Guild Missions were fully detailed. The initial pitch was “it takes a Guild to start it, but then anyone can join in and have fun.” That turned out to be a lie. Yes, players can “join in” but they’ll only get a scrub reward for their efforts, while the active guild members get a chest full of treasure, a ton of silver, and credits towards a bunch of unique rewards. Yay if you’re in a mega-guild, or have any interest in being in a megaguild, but a total bummer if you do not.

The solution to this problem should be entirely obvious, fix the rewards. Make it so that anyone who helps with the bounty event gets FULL credit, whether in the guild or not. That means full chest, silver, commendations, etc., and giving them full access to all the guild mission rewards. That way, players who are not part of mega-guilds can at least jump in on the guild missions around them, and while it would take someone longer to earn those unique weapons and other items, they would at least be on a path towards them. Guild Missions should become as they were originally advertised, a Dynamic Event that a guild can “drop” on the field, just like a karma banner or a keep claim, but that once dropped, EVERY player can benefit from.

You’re looking at this entirely from the perspective of someone who’s already in a megaguild. Look at it from the perspective of someone who isn’t in a guild (or is in a very small one), doesn’t want to be, and yet wants to have just as much reward from the game. You’ve added a system that gives you all these bonus perks for being in a megaguild, but where are the balancing perks for NOT being in such a guild?

Most other elements of the game are about not being evil or exclusionary. Guilds drop banners which benefit everyone. Guild Claim keeps which benefit everyone. Now guilds drop missions which only benefit themselves, making those guilds well off enough already to start them even MORE well off, while leaving everyone else in the dust. This is a step towards the dark side guys.

So store the item until you have the money to list it . If you get scammed using the mail system its no ones fault but your own .

That’s not a solution, that’s how it currently works, and how it currently works is not well enough.

This is a concern. The listing fee encourages sellers to set reasonable prices, because they stand to lose a lot of money if they are forced to repeatedly relist an item at successively lower prices.

If you allow sellers to defer the fee, and reclaim/relist items without actually paying the bulk of the fee, then we’ll see prices rise on some high-demand items (e.g. precursors). We’ll probably also see increased load/stress on the Trading Post system itself, as people will be more likely to “babysit” their sell orders and make frequent changes.

There have to be ways of fixing that though. For one thing, the system could “eat” a significant fee. I mean, I think that a 10 gold fee on trying to relist a 200 gold item is a bit ridiculously punitive. Ideally the system would involve a sliding scale that would gradually reduce the listing fee to as low as 0.5% on a 100 gold item (50s), while raising the “closing fee” at the same rate so that you’d still end up paying 15% total on the transaction. Maybe even raise the closing fee at a faster rate, to act as a sort of “high end tax.”

If relisting the item cost 50s, or even 10s each time, then it would stabilize reasonably quickly, because you wouldn’t want to relist at anything less than that large a difference, or relist it too often. If you relisted a 200 gold item ten times, then even if the fee were only 50s each time that would mean you were out 5g before you’d even sold the thing, on top of whatever the closing fee would end up being.

There’s no reason for punishing people for making a genuine pricing error or not being fully aware of the vagaries of the market.

If excessive re-listing were an issue, they could employ the same time-based caps that they use in other aspects of the game. Maybe have “DR” for trading. Your first trade of the day would have the minimal level of fee, but each successive trade raises the level of the fee. It could even cycle on a longer basis, so that if you make several relistings in a single day then it might take weeks to cool back down to the minimal level.

That feature in and of itself might be a good thing to have, to limit the effectiveness of high-volume traders in the game. If TP-players suddenly faced doubled or even trippled TP fees after making too many trades within a given period of time, it might discourage such activities.

Finally, if absolutely necessary to the health of the game, they could require full payment of the existing listing fee to retrieve the item. So if you’re a cash poor newb level 80 who lucked into a Dawn but with only a dozen or so gold to your name, your only options would be to save up for weeks or more of cash grinding to afford a 25 gold listing fee, OR trust the lawless world of chatbox trading where someone could take your item and run, OR sell off the item at less than half the gold rate, losing out on more money than you may otherwise earn in half a year.

Instead, even if it does require full eventual payment, you list the item at around 550 or so, paying nothing to do that up front, but if the item doesn’t sell at 550, and he wants to take his chances at 530, then he’d have to earn that 25 gold and pay it to the TP to get the sword back. If it does sell though, he’d just have the full 15% taken before he collects the profits.

People keep spamming sale offers on chat. This often leads to scamming on one, or presumably in some cases, both sides, and is annoying to everyone else. A commonly offered reason for this is because the listing fee for an item on the TP is a fraction of the final sale price, so if you get a really good item, one you know sells regularly for over 100 gold, the listing fee might be well more than you own.

Why can’t this listing fee be deferred until there is a sale?

There can be limitations to this, obviously, perhaps it would only apply to items that regularly sell at very high prices, so that people couldn’t just list copper ore at 50 gold a pop for no apparent reason, but I think it would be very useful for anything that sells for more than, say, ten gold.

Just make it so that it asks for a listing fee, but if you don’t have it then it asks if you’d like to defer the listing fee until after the purchase. If you say “yes,” then that’s what ti does, you may still need to make a nominal fixed payment of maybe a few silver or something, but the bulk of the listing fee would not need to be paid until the item sells, in which case it would just be deducted from the profits, or if you wanted to retrieve the item unsold, in which case you’d have to pay at least a portion of the original fee to recover it (although certainly not the tens of gold you’d originally need to).

This is about the enemies AI, not the pets. I’ve notices that turrets seem to get a solid amount of agro, considering that they are ill-equipped to do anything about it, especially rifle turrets which last about five seconds if there are strong enemies around. My suggestions to resolve this are twofold:

1. Make turrets and non-tanking pets very low on the agro list, well below most players.

2. There needs to be an effects change for enemies with “insta-gibb” type attacks, the ones that charge up, give you plenty of warning, but deal 80%+ damage to you if they land, like Ettin power swings, as an example. They are fine for humans, but terrible for pets who don’t dodge, or turrets that can’t. The damage these types of attacks deal to pets and turrets needs to be reduced drastically, to at most slightly more then normal attacks. If this necessitates raising the damage they take from the standard attacks then fair enough, but too often a turret drops in a single swing, or a pet falls to a single Risen Carrier.

One thing strikes me in the discussion, yes, it’s kind of silly to cause more damage to people using defensive buffs like Protection or Regeneration, but what about mechanisms designed to punish offense?

Why if there were a trait or ability that caused you to have +20% crit chance against enemies with Fury? Or what if a trait or ability gave you increased damage equivalent to the number of Might stacks a target had? Basically an “anything you can do, I can do to you” sort of bonus. I don’t know what combination of these effects would be necessary to make it worth slotting, or how much would be too much, but it might be an interesting idea.

Talk to someone that manages rewards so we can get something other than a Jug Of Karma. These events have been pretty tedious (fedex quests). You probably be able to get alot more people to suck it up and play Frost and Flame: The Fetch Quest if they got something.

It doesn’t even have to be something worth anything. A pos mini/townclothes, hell even a laurel.

True. Whoever decides what reward each activity provides, they seem to value karma as a resource far more than any player in the entire game does. Karma used to be worthwhile back when you could trade karma items in for cash money, but so long as karma items are soulbound and non-sellable, even to vendors, it’s a fairly valueless currency. I did buy two cool cultural3 daggers the other day with karma, but that only cost a tiny fraction of the karma jugs I had filling up my bank.

Has the potential to be extremely OP against classes taht are supposed to be “booned up” to be effective. Plus what the hell is with Anet? Why are Thiefs getting more work again?

Keep in mind that they’re nerfing Thief stealth in WvW, which is perfectly fair, but will probably leave them less powerful than people are used to, so a balancing buff to even them out may not be out of line. It’s hard to judge from the outside until we get a good idea of the total changes they are working with.

Hopefully not, because that would be a horribly crappy trait. The most you can do with this trait is 8% extra damage since there are only 8 types of boons (technically 9 but Aegis will simply nullify the attack). 8% extra damage to a target running every boon is so pitiful you might as well not bother.

There are lamer traits already, but ok, fine, 2% per buff, 3%, whatever the hardcore players might consider worth running. Either way, the point is that there shouldn’t be that sort of trait, it should be more active and direct.

How much capital (in millions) would you need to successfully do that? We’re talking about large gains over a short period of time, most of these traders aren’t going to be satisfied with long term investments when they can get an ego trip by clicking a few buttons in a game.

Then it falls to ANet to kill their buzz.

And no, I am not a no-lifer (family, full job and even other hobbies). I don’t know how you were not able to get that money since launch. I got it basically with dailies and cof path 1 three times a day…

Ahem.

That’s because you obviously don’t know the best ways to make money.

Cof farm I hear is a big money maker though I personally don’t use it

Until the february patch I could get 5g/h at shelt/pen farm. That was 20g per weekday and about 50g per weekend. That’s how I can afford all my kitten.

But that’s my point, the people who “know the best ways to make money” should not be that advantaged over those who “play the kitten game.” The solution should never be a more effective trick to make money, the money should flow fairly evenly from whatever activities you WANT to engage in. If that can’t be established then it ruins the whole point of having a player economy and they should just offer all items from NPCs at a flat rate, and offer to buy said items at a similar rate, because if they allow “money farmers” to set the prices then they’ll always be out of synch with standard players.

Takes forever to find the npcs before we start the mission, we are constantly having guildies saying not doing this mission again because of looking for the npcs first and if you fail it no reward, they prefer to do something else than waste there time on it.

If they made it so that non guildies got full rewards, it would be pretty easy to find each one, as you could mobilize the entire zone to seek them out. As it stands though, there’s just no motivation to bother.

All I ask from Guild Missions is this: give FULL participation rewards to ALL players who participate, whether they are in the Guild or not.

Simple as that. If a guild bounty is going on, and a non-aligned player helps take down the bounty target, they should get the full reward that a guildy gets. That means 2 pieces of rare+ gear, 50s, 2 Commendations for whichever guild they are repping (if applicable), the Merits aren’t really necessary (but would be nice), but all the individual rewards should go to everyone who participates, whether they are in the guild or not.

You should need to be a Guild member to start these things off, but you should NOT have to be a guild member to gain these fancy individual rewards. It’s insane that ANYTHING in this game would be so rewarding and yet so locked off from the average player. It would also bring a nice sense of community, much like Guilds dropping various banners in high traffic areas to benefit all, Guilds, could start off missions that everyone can participate in and enjoy.

Don’t even try to pretend that the second class rewards of a standard event come even close to being worth caring about for non-members.

There definitely shouldn’t be a trait that causes consistent bonus damage against boons, like “+1% damage for each boon on the target” or something. That would be lame. There is definitely, however, room for boon stealing and stripping (keep in mind that some classes already can steal boons, including the Thief), and also I think for a “boon punishing” move, individual weapon or utility skills that do deal bonus damage based on boons, just as Fire Grab deals damage based on Burning.

If I’m reading this correctly, the bumps along the x-axis are actual sellers.

This means the top seller sold 350 Ectos, followed by a 2nd seller with 300 ectos.

The bump at 250 ectos is higher, meaning there’s more than 1 unique seller who pushed 250 ectos during a given day.

It would be better if you could shorten the Y axis to around 10-50 max and apply a low pass filter to remove all the data points before 100 ectos. (A single day of farming can nett you around 50 ectos, so 100 ectos should be where sellers start to play the market)

It does look like there are around 50-100 players in the >100 ecto market. Which is quite healthy.

Actually, it’s probably more than that. It would make no sense for the chart to go up higher than the number actually being sold, so we have to assume that at least one person sold the maximum number on the chart of 2544, and that all other numbers were based on that maximum, otherwise why not just end the chart at 350, or use a more generic number like 500 or 1000 as the maximum?

Further, the bottom row consists of 0-200 sellers, meaning that an individual seller would be imperceptibly small at that scale. The blip you see at 250 likely doesn’t represent 1 person, but more likely 5-10, a small number, but more than a few, the smaller blips likely represent 3-5 people, while single individuals could be selling at any seemingly “flat” point on the line without moving it a single pixel upwards.

All we can really tell is that within the period shown in the chart, less than around 40-50 people sold exactly 31 ectos, and the vast majority of players who sold any, sold ten or less, but at least one likely did sell at 2544, and it would appear that dozens, if not hundreds of players probably sold dozens, if not hundreds of ectos over that period.

All I know is, I’ve only ever accumulated a few dozen of my own, and having tried selling them on the market because I’m not a day-trader and therefore and ill equipped for the market games that controls this game’s player economy. All I wish is that players who did enjoy playing with the markets would just play the real stock markets and make a fortune, and leave the in-game markets alone so that the economy would work for the players and not the market-players, or the ANet would step in and prevent them from distorting the markets like that.

I honestly like the concept and am looking forward to where it goes. I love the fact that you are trying to re-emerge the player with the lore and beauty of the open world. But I have to disagree with the roll out process which overly hyped lackluster content resulting in unsatisfied customers. And frankly with the bad taste that living story has left in many players mouths, I am not overly optimistic that people will actually check out the next release without just writing it off as another lackluster teaser.

Yeah, I have to agree, Jan and Feb should not have been hyped up because practically nothing happened there. It did give me reason to send a few of my alts into Wayfarers and Diessa a few times, for what’s that worth, but each bi-weekly phase only takes an hour or less to complete and most of them are scavengers hunts that would be massively frustrating without online guides, and pointlessly uninteresting with them. No more needles in haystacks, if you’re going to hide something then you can’t just drop it in a random location somewhere on a map and ask players to wander the map until they trip over it, you need to give them clues so that they can figure out exactly where to find it.

The only truly interesting elements about the Living Story so far have been the invasion portals, the map changes to Wayfarers, and the little snippets of dialogue with the refugees, but it’s all spread a bit thin.

I think it would be fine to have an extended build-up to later events, once you’ve assured us in practice that there are bigger and better things that will happen, but in the case of the first “Living Story” I think it would have been better to hit hard and fast, a full story-mission/dungeon/massive event sort of adventure thing right out of the gate, so that people know that it won’t always be this sort of weak sauce.

And of course the Guild Missions don’t count because most people can’t do them at all and they totally fail on the promises of “anyone can participate” because anyone not in the starting guild only gets a worthless fraction of the reward.

~1000 ectos = ~300g
300g is not a lot of money for one person to have :/

It’s more than three times what I’ve managed to earn between eight characters since launch. It is a lot if you aren’t a market fat cat.

This fixation on “tricking” people with downed state to avoid a stomp is why I never bother stomping in PvP. Instead I just AoE you down, and if someone tries a Mesmer clone they’ll probably still be within AoE radius of the clone, so still dead.

Storing money in the bank is set for a specific purpose, it’s supposed to be stored money for transferring or saving. I would make the argument that if we were to change that, we should just make all gold account shared all the time.

Sure why not? Personally though, I like the separation between characters, only because it gives me some idea of what each character is making on his own. It would be nice if any one of them could make TP purchases using a common pool though. I mean, I sometimes have low level characters collecting a couple of gold from TP purchases, but then I deposit that money into the bank so as to not screw up their “natural” income balance. It’d be nice if you could deposit TP funds directly into the bank.

Thieves have that, I prefer my stealth + clone over the controlled port, sorry. I feel sorry for Thieves with their weak #2, actually. Not that Thieves are weak as a whole at all.

Playing both, I definitely 120% prefer the Thief’s downed state to any other class’s. Their #3 sucks, the half-second stealth is entirely pointless, but their #2 is awesome, and every class deserves something exactly like it.

The reason it is awesome is not because it lets you get away from an enemy that is fixated on you (let’s face it, very few classes can recover from being downed by a healthy and determined enemy), but because it allows you to reposition. This is vital when downed. If you’re too close to a deadly mob so that other players don’t want to get that close to rez, you can move away. If you drop inside a persistent damage field, you can teleport out of it. It’s brilliant. The Mesmer downed state is one of the least effective out there. Unless there are some very weak enemies nearby to kill you aren’t making it out alive. A better teleport would help.

Now of course I’m mostly talking from a PvE perspective, where “stomping” is not an issue. Stomp dodging is an entirely different element of a class.

How would an Underflow work?
There are less than a minimum number of people in the zone. Someone tries to enter the zone but is shunted to a new zone full of people. No new people enter their home zone because they’re all moved to Underflow which is now over capacity and moving people to an Overflow of the Underflow. It doesn’t break the value for minimum people. Now what?

There are different ways to do it, but I described by plan for it a bit above. Basically, a sever resets, obviously is starts with zero people in it so it wouldn’t automatically start shunting people right away, but they could take population density averages over time, and if a zone still has few people in it a half-hour after a reboot, and it has a track record from the past few days of having few people in it, then this could trigger an underflow server. A this point, while incoming players would default to the underflow, they would get a pop-up just like on an overflow, and if they really preferred not to be there, they could opt out and be transported to their own server’s version.

Based on their comments in the past they seem to already have the metrics tools to get the numbers needed to make these decisions, and it would be fairly simple to write a program that could decide whether an underflow was warranted based on recent zone performance.

One thing that would definitely help would be if they could also display to the player what the population numbers would be like, for example it could say “You have been transported to Brisban Wildlands Underflow, which contains 100 players, would you prefer to move to Brisban Wildlands Yaksbend, which contains 3 players?”

As for “Overflow of the underflow”, there would be hard numbers for that too, which I can’t really guess at without a complete understanding of their systems but they know these things fairly well. Basically, yes, you would have “overflows of the underflows,” which is that after the underflows reach a certain level (which I would actually put at a bit bellow what would trigger a traditional overflow), then a second Underflow would be triggered, just as a massive event can cause multiple overflows of a given zone. If there are enough underflows filled that they contain enough players to well-populate the home zones, then perhaps another alert could pop up offering players the option of returning home, saying that a critical mass had been reached.

Really that option shouldn’t be fairly common though, if a zone is so poorly populated over so long a time that it would trigger an underflow zone in the first place, then it isn’t likely to ever reach the level where returning to the home server would be a good option. The zones that are likely to trigger an underflow will probably be in permanent Underflow mode until such time as they add some new events to the zone that attract some temporary attention, which really isn’t a problem since if you think about it that’s basically how dungeons work right now with more players using gw3lfg to partner up cross-server than just shouting in general chat to group with people on their own servers.

My guess would be that zones like the starters, cities, Kessex, Gendarian, Harathi, Sparkfly, Blazeridge Steppes, and Cursed Shore would probably be immune to this. Many of the other zones would likely be much better populated if they used Underflow servers.

And that is all very complicated and technical and not at all simple to design or implement, thus proving my initial point.

It’s not simple-simple, but in the grand scheme of MMO design it’s not insanely complex either. If I had access to their metrics data and could figure out what they considered the ideal zone populations (it’s hard to tell how many people are in your zone when they are so spread out), and what they currently use for overflows, I could probably work out a formula that would result in a pretty good method for implementing this, which would then require some testing but they could always tweak those cut-offs.

Maybe instead of adding underflow servers, merge the PvE maps for EU and American servers. They’re hosted in the same room anyways, I

They could, but then the popular zones would ALWAYS be overflow servers all the time, and as Guesting shows, that’s always a huge hassle, especially with the big chain events. I think Underflow gives a good compromise, allowing players to stay on their home servers whenever in zones that are well populated, but also allowing you access to more populous zones when you don’t want to be running an entire zone solo.

I don’t know why it wouldn’t be technically possible if they chose to do it. If they didn’t already have the overflow servers then yeah, it’d be a huge lift to create, but the technology to create these should be almost identical to the overflows, just applied differently.

The idea occurred to me because in a previous MMO they had issues with their open world becoming empty, so they merged all the servers and then had the open world areas fill up entirely based on need, sort of like having only “overflow servers.” I don’t think that’s the right way to go for GW2, but it’d be nice if they could manage some sort of compromise to make the less populated zones more “lively.” The living world and some daily achievements help to some degree, but even if they were pumping them out way faster than they do it wouldn’t really be enough to attain solid populations in every game zone on every server.

I had a thought, would it be possible to add the idea of “underflow servers” to the game? What I mean by that is that you have overflow servers where you dump people when the existing area is too crowded, right? Would it be possible to dump players into a shared server if a given area is too empty though?

There are some areas of this game that are plenty crowded right now, sure, but many regions have very few players, since the only real point to going there is to maybe complete 1-2 story steps, or world clear, and once you’ve done that there’s no reason to go back so most players don’t, but there’s always a few who still need those completion points and it’d be nice to have some company.

Here’s how I’d see it working, you keep track of the population of each zone. If it falls below a certain threshold and stays that way for X amount of time (both of which you’d have to figure out as to what worked best), then an “underflow server” would be generated for that zone, just like the overflows. Any new incoming players would be automatically shuffled to that zone and could choose to stay or go to their own server’s version. Any players who are already playing on their own servers (and are presumably hearing crickets and echos) would get a pop-up when out of combat that would inform them that an underflow server was available and give them the option of using it, or staying.

I think that the inclusion of this sort of feature could be very helpful to the feeling of vitality that the game had in earlier months when every zone was packed with people on their way to 80.

This isn’t actual news, it is something we have mentioned multiple times before. As the original interview says, and I quote:
“Expansions are definitely something that we’ll potentially look at in the future,” he explained. “We don’t have a timetable on it. We’re open to it, but I think our major focus as a studio is making the living world concept as strong as possibly can for the players that we’ve got.”

No one said we will never do an expansion, all Colin says (again) is that we are currently focusing on Living Story and other ongoing to the live game.

That actually is news though. I, like many other players, assumed that at least some people were already working on an expansion for the game. The Living Story may well become interesting (it hasn’t yet, of course), but there are a lot of people waiting for the game to take some big strides, not just baby steps.

We want to see a new Elder Dragon become available, Jormag or Kralkatorrik, we want more expansion of the map, into places like Elona or Cantha, not just in small zones, but in whole regions of zones. These are unreasonable expectations for a free update, but they are perfectly reasonable for a paid one, and we want to pay you for them.

It was the community’s assumption that there was a plan for the first expansion before launch, and that before launch, or soon after, work had begun on making it happen, so that hopefully by summer, or late fall at the latest, we’d have something truly epic added to the game. The Living World content is all well and good, keep that up if you like, but a significant expansion of the game would be worth a thousand times more than all the “Living World” content so far, and so far the only hope you guys have given us is in our own assumptions, so please don’t take those assumptions away.

Would it be possible to train pets to dodge effectively? By that I mean that with a red ring attack, the ring has a radius and a center, can’t their AI be told to dodge to the outside of that radius when they are within a circle? Likewise, any time they are in the target radius of a melee “wind-up” attack (like Ettins use), they should dodge away.

I do also second the idea that the “pet survivability fix” should be focused more on a passive effect than an active one. Players should not have to manually dodge their pets, as well as themselves, as well as using their abilities as they become available. There are already too many factors to juggle to require player involvement every time they want to pets to avoid damage.

If players want to Micromange their pets then there are pet utilities for that, but micromanaging should not be seen as the solution to the existing problem of pets being too squishy. Basically, if a player takes a relatively hands off approach to their pets then the pets should be reasonably survivable, about equivalent to a DPS player that knows how to dodge big hits. If they then choose to, on top of that, micromanage the pets defenses, then the pet would be survivable equivalent to a tanky player, pretty much unkillable so long as the player is on top of his game (but of course requiring a lot more attention and drawing resources away from the Ranger’s DPS options) .

What if we made f3 use a defensive dodge skill instead of returning to the player, and we re-did the “Guard” and “Avoid Combat” button to better serve the function of “return and Heel” and “Attack and be aggro”

Better than what we’ve got, but jamming F3 whenever I see the pet in trouble would be a lot of micromanaging, way more than on any other class. Many only have one button up there.

The entire rest of the game already caters to players in general. I don’t think anyone will argue against the fact that Open World PvE is largely accessible to the majority of players, and Open World PvE comprises the majority of the PvE in this game in terms of amount of content.

Anet ALREADY STATED that Explorable Mode dungeons were meant to challenge organized groups of 5 players. In fact, they’ve actually done the opposite with Story Mode dungeons and toned down the difficulty to make them accessible to most players. Thus, I don’t really see what the problem is.

But Dungeons are a major part of end-game play, they can’t wall them off to only hardcore players. Story Mode dungeons are actually harder and more time consuming in some cases than Exploration mode, but offer drastically lower rewards. If they want to have “hard mode” exploration dungeons in addition to the existing versions then that’s fine, so long as they don’t offer higher levels of reward, but the base experience should not be made excessively difficult.

Condition damage is “horrible for dungeons?” Really? Then I must be playing my conditions elementalist “wrong.” I also must not have been nearly as effective as I thought I was in a level 42 fractal run last night either.

Yes, but that’s ok. The important thing is that you’re having fun, even if you are dragging down the rest of the group. A Condition Ele isn’t nearly as badly hurt by condition capping as a Necro or Thief, but they certainly aren’t as good as a direct damage Ele, and if you end up grouped with any other Condition player then you end up nullifying each other, so that if you have a group in which each player is assumed to be bringing 100 “worth” out of a total 500 for the team, then even if two Condition characters would be 100 each on their own, they would combine to add up to only 130 or so instead of 200, because Condition capping and overlap means that most of their potential damage just isn’t counted.

I do run a Condition-based Thief in dungeons, but I certainly don’t consider myself a DPS character when doing so, I’m definitely a support type, and for that my lack of direct damage is not crippling, but I think it would be shameful if I tried to promote myself as being a damage dealer.