Guild Wars 2

Budg.3064:

My guess would be there’s no WXP reward for capturing a point to avoid rank boosting.

Imagine it’s late at night/early morning, very little people online on lower tier servers. Person A and Person B are on opposing servers. Person A stands in the point and captures it, then moves out of the point. Person B stand in the point and captures it, then moves out of the point. Repeat until their hands bleed from excessive cross server high-fiving and they both walk away with lots of WXP earned from doing almost nothing.

Make it the same as players: the wxp increases the longer the opposing server has held the point. Have a cap at, say, the same as a supply camp.

TheAmpca.1753:

What I see the problem is, is that sticking in a ball will provide superior individual loot for players and wont really hurt the server because PPT is quite meaningless. I think an appropriate response to this would be to increase rewards for having superior PPT since a mass of people at one spot can only contest one position and thus provide inferior PPT control.

Will be happening starting with League Season 1.

Chris.3290:

One thing you should note, however. WvW remains the best place to get Empyreals. A whole JP for 3, or you can run a karma train and get 3-4 per a camp and 5-8 for towers.

Except for the whole ‘20 per dungeon run’ thing.

I didn’t say it was bad. Draw your own conclusions.

Oh, and don’t forget: there are siege weapons built in to these cap points. A cannon you can build with 10 supply at each one. Not to mention whatever ACs or whatever people decide to build, if it does come down to large scale combat on the point.

No, if any of the buffs are global (across all maps). Still no, but to a lesser extent, if there are stat buffs at all. Qualified yes to a point on stomp on that map alone.

I largely agree. My own prediction is that the large, organised guilds, who already station scouts in keeps and towers, will simply designate 3 more people to sit in the cap points to stop them neutralising, and to shout out for assistance from the main force if they’re attacked by more than they can handle.

A simple solution to the snowballing problem is to make bloodlust map-specific. Ie. If you hold the bloodlust buff on Green Borderlands, only your players on Green Borderlands get +stats or points on stomp. The fact that another server has the buff on Blue Borderlands would make no difference, except on Blue Borderlands.

The reason for this is obvious: when there’s a considerable disparity in coverage, the server with fewer numbers will generally try and concentrate their forces on 1 or 2 maps, so they can at least have a fighting chance there. Maybe you’re going to lose the week’s matchup, but at least you can have fun in a relatively equal environment while you play, because (of course) each server can only fit X amount of players per map. With Bloodlust stacks being global, not contesting one borderlands means you already have a disadvantage on every other map. If it were map specific, you’d be able to to at least have some control over what buffs your enemy gets (even if you don’t have it yourself, you have the chance to).

Recall that the server(s) with the greater coverage will be getting their usual ppt from the maps not contested by the smaller server. But at least the larger servers wouldn’t get global stat buffs in addition to that.

Yeah, I agree. Underwater combat doesn’t get nearly enough love.

Needn’t have been a pizza-slice of the Pavilion. Maybe one or two bosses in the Gauntlet. After all, they went to all the trouble of putting walls and roofs on the gauntlet areas, so they’re probably watertight.

Quilted Sleepwear.

An terrifying new update where the Jubilee celebrations are attacked by a voracious army of watchknights…. dressed in onesies.

Don’t scale the champions; those are ok. Just scale the rewards: the champion oak in Q’dale should have a very basic loot table, while the Champion Risen King in Cursed shore should have a high chance to drop the really desirable items. But then also scale based on the number of players hitting it – lower chance of getting the good stuff, the more players are involved (above, say, 5 players, anyway).

This last is especially important, since non-event champions do not scale in difficulty.

If Evon doesn’t win at the last minute? No, we probably won’t have a chance to see Abaddon again.

Other human gods? Potentially. If they expand on Orr in an ‘after Zhaitan’s death’ period, or do any number of things about human lore in the LS, we could have involvement from them. This will not be affected by which fractal is made.

Thaumanova is the same, really. Anet could make it more important in the LS later, but again, whether they do or not will not be affected by which fractal is made.

Neither, if you don’t use sword or mace very much. Legendaries (as you’ve discovered) are a massive time and money investment… so what you really want is something you’ll use most of the time. Being forced into a specific (or bad) playstyle because of a legendary is just going to ruin the pay-off for all your work.

Start from what toons you play most, narrow down to what weapons they primarily use, then pick the one you most like the look of. If that turns out to be a gs or staff, you’ll have to save even more money… but at least once you get it, it’ll be awesome, instead of annoying/lame.

Magnus told her to.

Romek.4201:

ghostform is very frustrating when the people sit in bushes with 8rations and hide like lil girls

Reason people hide and camp is because there’s no incentive to do anything else. If you’re not one of the first to die, you miss out on most of the revenge motes. If you’re one of the later ones alive, you know there are half a dozen ghosts hanging around you, who will drop a million traps on you the moment you move. And you know that it’s ghosts that decide the game. So the best bet is to stand still (it’s less likely there’s someone who can spawn a karka than traps, and traps don’t hit you if you don’t move) and hope the ghosts are able to kill the other survivors first.

As the game stands, it’s impossible for one of the last few survivors to even travel to one of the others without being killed by ghosts, so why would anyone bother to try?

Esplen.3940:

Supposedly…..

Well, there’s a lot better chance than Ellen “funded by Magnus” Kiel

On the TP, you mean? The Black Lion Trading Post? The thing owned and run by one Evon Gnashblade?

He takes a cut of transactions he facilitates. Wealth that, when he is elected, will be used for the benefit of Lion’s Arch.

Lion’s Arch taxes people now? I had no idea.

How much tax did you pay? :P

Blackwolfe.5649:

Sure, Kiel might seem like Trahearne 2.0 right now, but we have no idea how she will evolve. For all we know, anet might as well mess up Gnashblade and turn him into Trahearne 2.0 after the election is over.

“For all we know” may as well be the catchphrase of every post about the election.

But anyway… these characters both existed before the election, and will continue to exist. Kiel being voted onto the council might mean she has less of a role in future Living Story updates, since she’s busy governing rather than being the Lionguard who runs around letting us fix problems for her. If she’s not voted in, she might do a lot more stuff, and therefore be likely to evolve more. Evon might suffer a huge lack of confidence in losing the election and start questing again to regain it, or whatever. Who knows?

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

being killed is not failed.

It really is, though. “Survival” pretty much exactly means “not being killed.”

Orpheal.8263:

Rangers should get no stealth at all, its the thiefs main feature and should stay so..

No. That would be initiative. Thieves have a lot of access to stealth, but it is not their unique class ability.

Onshidesigns.1069:

Most players will only play Abaddon a few times for the story. Then it’s all speed runs to the final boss. Because the LOOT is the only thing they care about in the dungeon.

Thaumanova Reactor will have this too. But the difference is the chaos rift is still active in the open game world. Who knows but Anet what the outcome of this is. I want to find out what the chaos rip is doing or going to do to reality.

Well done for defeating the entire point of your argument. Whatever fractal is added, be it Abaddon or Thaumanova or a quaggan birthday party, will be played in this way once people learn the path.

As for “still active in the current world”… so is Abaddon’s temple.

In fact, I’d say it’s more likely that a Living Story or other open world update will explore the current effects of the Thaumanova Reactor if it’s not put in FotM. If it’s a fractal, the devs can quite happily say “we’ve dealt with that mystery already, let’s do something new.” If it doesn’t become a fractal, then there’s a far grater chance it’ll have to be revealed in another way in a future update.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

ghosts are meant to kill the survivors.

Which is what incentivises the boring play by survivors. Don’t want to walk on a trap? Only way to possibly do that is to stand still. Don’t want to get killed by karka? Well, your best chance is to hope that the ghosts with lots of motes are following the other survivors.

Same with the scoring. Die really early, get tons of motes. Die later, have to wait for a very small few to respawn and try to get them before other players.

In a game called Southsun Survival , it’s pretty terrible that the best way to play is to not survive.

If they nerf ghosts ability to do damage, make the maps smaller, and up the rewards for the last survivor, you’ll get a situation where the survivors will want to find, fight and kill each other. The current state of the game is why people hoard rations and hide on a boat.

Personally, I’ve found ghosts to be ridiculously OP in this game. It’s a good game, to be sure; but I think it’s somewhat broken in this way.

Ghosts are players who have been less skilled or lucky in this game. Yet, they have access to incredibly powerful skills, with no risk, to quite easily kill players who are unable to see them, unable to react to them, etc. But this is the problem – that the final few players almost never even see each other. They might see a beacon, but they’d never go to it, because in that situation, you know that your main enemies are the ghosts. There is literally no incentive to seek out and kill other players; you just have to hope that the ghosts near them have fewer motes. Moreover, the game itself spawns karka, etc if it notices there’s not enough killing going on, and keeps the game’s duration down. I understand there needs to be a balance between having some sort of integrity to the idea of the game, and keeping dead players around and not horribly bored.

Option 1 in this regard is to simply remove them: make another mini-game or something, maybe on a different part of Southsun.

My own suggestion would be to alter the ghost skills to remove the ability to do direct damage in the following way:

1. Pull of the Mists: yeah, whatever. Could be changed to a more useful skill if they wanted.
2. Nice Trip (Place a pickpocket trap at target location. The foe who trips this will be knocked down and lose all items.): This is perfect, imo. The trap can be extremely effective, if used with the correct timing and in the proper situation. eg. if two players are fighting each other, one of these will tip the balance. Or if they’re on low health, it could tip the balance over to dying of hunger.
3. A Sign from Beyond – not all that bad, in theory. You place a beacon, other players will come and kill that player, right? Except it never happens; the primary purpose of this trap is to apply 2 stacks of torment and let the ghost kill that player. So, at the very least I would make the torment cleansable by using rations. Preferably, replace it with cripple or chill (also cleansable).
4. Call of Karka – ridiculously OP. A surviving player has very little time to react, and in most circumstances, no way to deal with it. I’d recommend replacing it with another trap, or maybe with a "lure’ – a skill you place (in a trail) to lure a karka from the surrounding areas, towards a player.

Only those 2 changes would, imo, solve the ghost problem. To compensate in terms of the balance, you could make the usable map area smaller. With a smaller map, and without having to be afraid to move because of ghosts, surviving players would have the incentive and ability to seek each other out and kill each other, rather than standing still (the only reason to stand still is to avoid traps, and the only reason to do that is the invisible, invincible, OP ghost thing).

chaoslava.3710:

Looks like Divinity’s Reach

QJ = Queen Jennah?

I’m not asking for more different legendaries in this thread, though obviously those will be nice. This is suggesting a minimal ‘wardrobe’ functionality.

In the recent blog post, it was said Legendary gear would get the option to change to any set of stats out of combat. This is obviously an extremely desirable functionality, that would justify making legendaries beyond merely the desire for their skins. Perhaps even in spite of their skins. Certainly, you can transmute other skins onto the legendary, but that will permanently remove the legendary’s “natural” skin, which many players would be unwilling to do. Moreover, due to the functionality (and presumed stat increase above exotic when ascended weapons, etc, are released), players who have legendaries will be discouraged from using other weapons, with other skins.

This, then, is my suggestion: each piece of legendary gear would be able to have a single alternate skin. This would be obtained by transmuting another item (or using a consumable skin) onto the gear as usual… but instead of deleting the ‘natural’ skin of the legendary, it would apply only to the alternate slot. This alternate slot could be transmuted as often as desired; while the natural skin would be unaffected. Players could change between the two appearances in the same manner as however the stat change will be done.

Certainly, more than one alternate skin would be good, but I think that would be going too far towards a player wardrobe, which so far the devs haven’t really wanted to implement.

They’re releasing Living Story every 2 weeks, right? And each Living Story comes with a couple of hundred AP. You don’t have to just rely on dailies.

It’s like fighting a champion. The NPC’s get to have awesome stats and abilities, because they’re NPCs. This is a PvP minigame… the NPCs are just there for achievements and special abilities. If you wanna fight fair, play against other players.

I’m pretty sure it’s not because they can’t reference alcohol; considering there are vendors who sell alcohol, and that one heart that makes you drink rum…

That said, I can’t think of a compelling reason for it not to be alcoholic.

I’ve been having this problem too, though waiting only seems to work some of the time.

Thing with world shattering peril is that, after a few weeks of it, it becomes kinda… underwhelming. Watch a few episodes of certain sci-fi shows to get the idea: “Oh no! The Earth is going to be destroyed! Again! Just like it was about to be last week!” They only way they can up the ante is to go “Oh no! The entire universe is going to be destroyed!” which tends to happen at least once a season.

That’s why you keep the Elder Dragons in reserve. That’s why we do some police work and settler negotiations. It might not matter to the whole world, but it matters to the people involved. (Admittedly, creating character development and interest needs a lot of work in most cases of living story so far). That way, when the world actually is going to be destroyed… it causes genuine interest and concern, rather than just ‘meh, again?’.

Definitely needs to be less happening in LA. In fact, aside from redecoration etc, I would be perfectly happy if no living story ever required me to go to LA. And if they put the minigames (eg. Dragon Bash) in different places, too.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

People have to run a second screen (laptop, smartphone etc.) to get the most out of it.

Alt + Tab. Not quite as efficient as turning your head from one screen to another, but sufficiently effective. Some sites also provide overlays, which by their nature, remove the need for a second screen.

As for Waypoints, you have to run there in the first place. I consider that sufficient context.

Dragon Bash will probably return, though many things will likely be unique to this year. Certainly I would expect a completely new set of achievements next year. And obviously the story element (this particular murder mystery) won’t return.

To be honest, considering the time you have left, the Dragon Bash achievements will be a lot easier to get. And the Shattered Wings are (to most people) a better reward.

Sky Pirates will not return. I’m sure we’ll see more of the Aetherblades, and that their story will continue, but this living story chapter will not be back.

Teevell.1684:

He wants people to stop logging into WvW if their server is outmatched…kind of like a silent protest.

At least that’s what I got out of it. I mostly skimmed.

Yeah, that’s my impression too. I think the idea is that the losing server(s) stop logging in, then the winning server caps everything and gets bored, so they stop logging in too. I.e. no one is logging in to WvW. At this point, I assume the belief is that Anet will take notice, and somehow ‘fix’ the matchups.

Pretty sure they also said she’d be available from then until the end of July. But I cbf to go find a reference for that.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

well, 23 dailies is a reasonable amount.

You’ve backed off denying it’s massively cheaper, then.

Which, incidentally, is still why 23 dailies is not a reasonable amount. It’s a hard to get item. You need to put in a bit of effort to get an ascended backpiece, rather then just sitting back and letting it fall into your lap. And, as discussed earlier, it’s a tiny stat increase above exotic. Across one item. If you don’t feel it’s worth the effort, don’t get it. If you do, do.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

karma, coins, laurels etc other forms of grind is “massively cheaper” you mean? how so?

100k karma = 23 dailies. That’s actually quite a bit less than the cheapest ascended gear bought for laurels. And that’s without karma boosts from bonfires/boosters, guild banners and bonuses, ice cream, infusion, etc (up to +95% karma, ie. almost double). Karma is incredibly easy to get, and apart from exotics and stuff for legendaries, there’s very little to spend it on, so it’s very easy to accumulate. Not even remotely a grind.

As for coin… T6 mats and coin are easily interchangeable. If you wanna grind coin, feel free to do so and then buy the mats.

As I said, I’d like there to be alternative recipes that do not involve a vial of mist essence, so people don’t have to do Fractals if they don’t want to, but otherwise the recipe is fine and does not exclude any types of gameplay.

Riselight.3695:

I think it only works in cities

This. It’s basically to stop you getting a free 30sec invulnerability in, say, dungeons, or to tank a boss.

Only thing that needs nerfing is the requirement for a Vial of Mist Essence, which is what forces people to play the RNG game in fractals. Everything else is appropriate. No one bought these back pieces for the skins, mostly because the skins aren’t worth it. Saying that you should get a massively cheaper option, because it’s generic, is not a compromise.

Moreover, the stat increase from exotic to ascended backpiece is tiny. If you really, really, really think you need it… then it’s worth that amount of gold to you. If you don’t… then make do with an exotic.

Shadow Blade.1324:

Actually they cant give themselves as much gold as they like as by design they have to play on normal accounts outside of the office, in the office they play on their test server ergo if you wanted to get rich quick you would let a “bug” slip through and exploit it before “discovering” it and patching it.

Uh… no. They have dev accounts that they can play in normal servers. You see them around, tagged as Anet devs, sometimes. More to the point, they CAN just write themselves gold in game very very easily. They can also write themselves any item they might want in game. And do, actually. And why the hell would they make an expoitable bug for themselves? They make the freaking game… do you seriously think any of the devs really cares about how much ingame gold they have? Let alone that they would write an exploit into a patch, in order that they could spend a ridiculous amount of their own time running toons through a jumping puzzle… to make a measly few gold (aka. non-existant virtual numbers)? Seriously man, get a grip on reality.

Shadow Blade.1324:

because the living story rewards 1g for a 5min escort quest and a similar personal story quest would reward an item worth 1s or less

This is a permanent jumping puzzle. It’s not personal story, it’s not living story. You’re comparing to the wrong things.

lordkrall.7241:

Ah, but different personal stories (especially the racial parts) offer completely different stuff. Which would make such a thing a nightmare to program.

Seriously? Does it even have to list the item? Can’t it just be “yes, this character has received his reward for lvl 10 personal story” ?

Oranisagu.3706:

Olvendred.3027:

Clearly, it was a bug. These things happen. Quite often, actually, if you pay the tiniest bit of attention to any MMO on the planet. They get fixed. It would be unfair to penalise people playing the game in good faith beforehand, so those people get to keep their money.

really, you think that was clearly a bug? when my brother mentioned it (we were on skype at the time), we both thought: ‘finally, an item which can either be used or sold for a somewhat appropriate price’. if you look at exo prices, 3s sounds much more like a bug than 60s.
we actually thought ANet finally realized how ridiculous the vendoring prices are and they would slowly start to change them to realistic values (especially with all the soulbound/accountbound stuff you can’t trade).
yeah, I guess it’s naive to think they would improve such obvious oversights after less than a year.

Look at exotic vendor prices, and then tell me you think 60s was a more likely price than 3s. If all rares and exotics had vendor prices that matched the prices on the TP, you would break the economy. Every time you vendor an item, it introduces that much gold into the game. A huge amount of rares and exotics drop every day, across all servers. What you call ‘obvious oversights’, most would describe as ‘a necessity for a working economy.’

It’s a bug. There’s not going to be one exotic worth massively more to vendor than all the others. There’s not going to be one JP with massively greater guaranteed rewards than all the others. The fact that other people made money from a bug does not mean you are entitled to do so also.

lordkrall.7241:

The main issue with personal story resetting is the fact that the personal story gives unique rewards. And it would be quite complex to remove all these rewards with a race change, especially if they are transmuted and such.

Why? If a reward is intended to be unique to the point that they don’t want you to get it again, just make it so a reset personal story will not give those rewards again, rather than deleting the ones you got the first time around.

I know very little about programming, but they seem quite capable of having some sort of checkbox per character: “yes he has gathered that ori node today” or “no, he has not”. If you’ve received the unique reward once, you can’t do it again.

Shadow Blade.1324:

if you didn’t want the pauldrons to be worth this much why price them at 60s to start with then nerf it? why not 3s to start, im beginning to think the developers intentionally put these situations in game to exploit them before they remove them for “economic balancing”

No clue what you mean here. Were the devs so inclined, they could literally just give themselves as much ingame gold as they liked, with no one the wiser. To go through such a ridiculous contrivance for such an insanely trivial reason… umm, yeah. Paranoid much?

Clearly, it was a bug. These things happen. Quite often, actually, if you pay the tiniest bit of attention to any MMO on the planet. They get fixed. It would be unfair to penalise people playing the game in good faith beforehand, so those people get to keep their money.

Either destroy cultural armours, or convert them into the corresponding skin from the new race. As for personal story, either require that you’re up to a certain point, or reset it but so that you can’t get certain rewards again (I’m sure Anet might have concerns about Black Lion Keys, for instance).

The cost: 800-1200 gems sounds about right.

Yep… because you get such great rewards from other JPs. I don’t know why anyone is unhappy at this… you’re getting a free exotic that you can use if you want to. If you don’t, then you’ve lost nothing. It’s the exact some thing that happened with the ‘Mad King’s Slippers’ at Halloween, btw.

Soulstar.7812:

They are not switching the shoulder skins… it took these guys 7 months to give us new armor.

Each new armour piece requires 30 iterations: 3 armour classes, 2 genders, 5 races. Multiply that by six if you want whole sets. And then test that they work and don’t clip, etc, with every combination of armour pieces already in game. That’s why we’ve gotten so many new weapon sets, because they’re so much easier.

It’s not terribad. I’d prefer if the tree did something other than just… tamely fall over… though. Idk, explode or sizzle or something.

There are 30 twohand weapons, and 44 one hand (main and offhand; counting those that can be main AND offhand twice, eg. warrior sword) weapons across all classes. Add to that the 3 skill between thief sets; engi kits; and the fact that all ele weapons have to by multiplied by four because of their four attunements.

Just adding only one alternate skill to each of these would be a ridiculously massive and time consuming task. Balancing them all would be something else entirely.

The dungeon is excellent: challenging, but with just enough room for error that you’re not instantly screwed.

My only problem is that the mechanics, yet again, favour parties with lots of guardians. Tanking Mai and Horrik to get her into the circles, mass condi removal, stability, general damage mitigation… I’ve done it a few times, and the times when I’ve had 2 or more guardians in my party have been far and away the smoothest and easiest. That’s not to say it’s impossible on other classes (I myself play staff ele), or even hard if you know what you’re doing; it just tends to favour guardians.

^ this.

Also, there’s only room for a certain amount of roamers per map. 6 supply camps; 2 yaks per camp every so often… if you want to play solo or in a small group… then if a lot of people are doing that, you either magically turn into a large group, or all have very little to do most of the time. Roaming and havoc teams are extremely valuable, but they’re only one side of the WvW coin. The other side is the large group (‘zerg’ if i have to call it that), which is able to take towers and keeps, and is able to defeat large groups of enemy players. Either style of play on its own is massively less effective than both combined.