Guild Wars 2

I’m on the fence about this… on one hand, there’s no way to get rid of the corpse scout. On the other hand, they have a very limited field of view and can’t move. You can use that to your advantage to set up an ambush, but you have to be organized. It’s an effective anti-zerg strategy.

I’m sort of interested now in running some experiments to figure out how to counter the corpse scouts.

Humans love to find patterns, even when there are none – it’s a survival mechanism we evolved. It may be that your wife is getting more drops of some other type that y’all aren’t noticing because they aren’t as interesting to you as the dyes. Or maybe her psuedo-random number generator on her computer is busted

One of the best parts about duoing with my husband – he gives me all his cooking supplies. Not his dyes though… he leaves them unidentified to sell them. I don’t get how he can do that.

There’s a known issue with the quote/report buttons not showing up sometimes. I posted a thread with a work around in the forum and web site bugs subforum.

EnochDagor.6185:

I can assure you that if ANet is worth their salt, they have TONS of statistical data ranging from average queue times in WvW, to number of kills in pvp situations, to average duration of a fight in pve. And probably tons and tons more. And what’s more, they verify and check what the vocal minority on the forums are saying versus this statistical data. If they see an issue, they take it to their QA team and try to reproduce it.

Data is a much better source of information than player surveys, much like forensic evidence is more telling than an eye witness account.

There is evidence that ANet is collecting it. John Smith did a really fascinating analysis of the virtual economy we’ve seen graphs of the relative popularity of each profession/race/crafting discipline, and players can get our number of hours played and number of deaths in game, so it seems pretty likely that ANet is collecting a ton of data.

I don’t think the problem is necessarily that ANet needs more player feed back. I think the problem is that some players need/want stronger feed back that their opinion has been heard than is even remotely feasible.

Some folks want a poll and then they want the results published so that they assess where there opinion stands in popularity among what they would perceive to be the majority of people who play. It’s human nature – humans have a tendency to want to constantly measure where they stand relative to “normal”, aka the majority. An anthropologist could probably explain why. In some folks that urge is stronger than others, and when those folks find like-minded folks they tend to group up and get stuck in a feedback loop and then their discussion becomes more about reinforcing which group they belong to rather than exploring the topic at hand.

OK, too early in the morning for me to travel much further down that path.

sinister.9216:

Moral of the story: Gamers are a mostly clueless bunch that have no idea what they really want.

Moral of the story: Gamers Customers are a mostly clueless bunch that have no idea what they really want.

Gathering requirements for software, regardless of whether it’s a game or not, has always been problematic. Folks are very good at telling you what they don’t like when they see it and less able to tell you what would delight them. You take their feed back to fix the annoyances, and you use your expertise and vision to try to create something that will delight them, keeping in mind that you won’t be able to make everyone happy.

I think that the angst that a lot of folks have over ANet listening to the extremely (and repetitively) vocal people on the forums is wasted energy. My experience with the Arena Net folks from the original Guild Wars is that while they are responsive to player feed back, they don’t compromise their vision just to cater to the masses.

Truga.5897:

@Pandemoniac: Actually forced grouping also used to be something that’d create an opportunity for social interaction.

There are lots of opportunities for social interaction that don’t involve forcing me to play with folks I don’t want to play with. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been on a pug with some nimwit that was making my game time less fun, but I was trapped because of the time I had invested in finding a full team.

Don’t even get me started on the folks that roll a healer type for guaranteed team spots and sit around sponging off the rest of the team. And that’s not healer hate, that’s bad player hate. The DPS types that have no clue how to manage their aggro and drag mobs down on the healer (instead of taking them to the tank) while screaming “HEAL ME!!!” are just as bad.

I have played dedicated support characters in most games and take a certain amount of pride at being good at it. There’s no downtime when I’m your healer because I don’t blow all my resources overhealing.

I think that GW2 has struck a nice balance with requiring a group for dungeons and not for everything else. There’s plenty of opportunities to interact with folks, you just have to take the initiative. There’s time to chat during those escort DEs. Someone else mentioned in the forums that he had a good time offering folks tours of Lion’s Arch to get the map completion done.

Forced grouping is not a good thing. I don’t want to sit around trying to find a group instead of actually playing. I don’t want to have to play with people who annoy me because we need a warm body to fill out the group. Grouping should be consensual.

LadyRhonwyn.2501:

Rick.1378:

I don’t have the solution, but I certainly do miss those days of forced grouping for the social aspect.

I don’t like that forced grouping at all. It would mean I can’t play according to my own schedule. What if I only have 30 minutes to play and have to spend 20 minutes of those to search for a group and then 10 minutes to decide what to do?

I think the problem is that some folks equate being in a group with being social. Forced grouping doesn’t make folks more social, it just makes it harder for folks like LadyR and I to play. I’ve rarely found friends through forced grouping. Almost every single friend I made in game was from me saying something goofy in general chat, or helping/getting helped with some task.

If you want to make the game more social from a grouping aspect, you’d have to add voice comms for groups. The role players are very social, but they don’t have fighting getting in the way of their typing. This is the advantage of joining a good sized guild – they often have a team speak/vent/mumble server.

Litego.4953:

Motion sickness is not caused by camera smoothing, it is caused by having a too low FoV, this is a fact.

Not my motion sickness. I don’t have problems in GW2 unless I’m a giant Norn attempting a jumping puzzle inside a cave which cause my camera to jump around out of my control. The camera has gotten better and I may be able to turn my speed up from having it all the way down.

I do have problems with first person games even with a large FOV and it all comes down to erratic camera movement and bad rendering on the outer edges of the screen while I’m moving. I can’t read as a passenger in a moving car either. It has nothing to do with FOV for me.

MrLee.6892:

How many days without a response and now this thread is moved to the Ranger forums?

The last dev response to the thread was about 24 hours ago as of me posting this… it takes time to investigate issues.

Why shouldn’t this be in the ranger forum?

I agree that we shouldn’t have repair bills in WvW. Having to go to a way point potentially really far from the action and traversing hostile territory without your squad is penalty enough. I hate having to worry about whether I can afford to fight to the death.

I started looking for a main hand weapon to complement my torch. I used a sword in my main hand for a while. It had some nice mobility skills, a cripple, a poison, and a leap finisher. As much as I like having a leap finisher, I didn’t have the situational awareness to handle all the jumping around and ended up falling off ledges quite often. I really preferred being able to swap to either weapon set regardless of the terrain and maybe just lay off a particular skill. I ended up with an axe, which has a bleed, a chill + pet caused weakness, and an AOE that doesn’t need your enemies to be tightly grouped. The projectiles work well with all my combo fields.

My swap is a shortbow. It’s really hard not to choose the combination of range, mobility, condition damage, and a daze/stun. I put sigils of battle in both weapon swaps, so I get stacks of might which increases my power and condition damage. I have runes in my armor to increase the duration of might to leverage it a little bit more.

Wilderness survival was my first choice of traits – the toughness, condition damage, edurance regeneration, and protection on dodge looked helpful, but I was really interested in Hide in Plain Sight, Shared Anguish and Bark Skin. When I picked up the might and might duration on my gear, I decided to head down skirmishing for the fury and swiftness on weapon swapping, since I was likely to be doing it a lot to proc my sigils. Because I had trap skills for the combo fields, the ground targeting was attractive. I then picked up Marksmanship for the condition duration, Opening Strike, and Predator’s Instinct.

OK, this is getting long. Apparently I had more thoughts than I thought Let me know if I’ve completely baffled you with my stream of consciousness style. Those were my choices, and I hope by showing you how I got to them instead of just showing you what they were, it might help you make choices that suit your play style.

This is my thought process when making my ranger build. It’s not going to result in the uberest damage or PvP pwnage, but I’ve soloed that group dynamic events and I do well in dungeons, so I’m happy with it.

So, when I’m doing a build, I think about three questions:

1. How am I going to survive?
2. How am I going to do damage?
3. How will I help my allies?

Survival
There are three aspects to survivability – avoiding damage (evasion and control), mitigating damage (debuffing enemies’ damage or speed/armoring yourself), and repairing damage (healing and condition removal). The ranger skills have lots of evasion, control, debuffing choices and a bit of healing.

Damage
Damage boils down to burst damage or sustained damage. I favor sustained damage, and the ranger has a lot of ways to do damage over time with various conditions. One thing that attracted me to a condition build is that I can put out three different types of conditions – bleeding, burning, and poison damage in one build fairly easily.

Team friendly
This is basically a catch-all for anything that helps your allies other than you keeping yourself alive and dealing damage.

So, looking through the skills, I pay attention to (in order of priority) anything that has a primary or secondary effect that increases my survivability, is compatible with sustained damage by conditions, and can benefit an ally. Then I do another pass and fill in gaps for certain situations.

For condition removal, you don’t get a lot of choices, so I settled this first. There’s the Signet of Renewal, Evasive Purity trait, and the brown bear special attack “Shake it off”. You can also send a projectile through a light combo field, but the ranger has no way of putting a light field down (not even with a pet, unless it’s a pet Guardian) I chose the bear because it it had more utility in my opinion than taking up a slot with the signet and the evasive purity was too high up a trait tree that didn’t interest me.

Putting down combo fields counts toward all three of my questions, so I looked at this next. I chose Healing Spring because it is an AOE heal, water combo field and condition removal for allies. I chose a torch for an off hand weapon for the fire combo field and the condition damage. I chose a jungle spider pet for the poison combo field, the immobilize, and the stun attack. I grabbed Frost Trap and Flame Trap to have some variety in the combo fields I can put down. I picked Viper’s Nest and Spike Trap to have some variety in condition damage. I swap the traps around often depending on what I’m fighting and who I’m fighting with.

I moved from combo fields to straight up survival skills. Lightning Reflexes was one of my first choices – damage, evade, stun breaker, and a Vigor boon, what’s not to like? I discounted all of the spirits pretty much immediately – too cumbersome to get much utility out of them.

I started looking for damage and situational skills next. I grabbed Sharpening Stone for even more conditional damage. I grabbed Search and Rescue for running dungeons.

Continued below…

I just received a notice that included the thread title – Thanks for listening!

I’m posting on my phone from work right now… I’ll get my thoughts together tonight when I’ve got a real keyboard and can see more than one sentence at a time

One thing worth checking out is the Ranger page on the official wiki. You can get to every skill/trait/pet from there and poking around might bring you some inspiration.

I think dye crafting gets overlooked as a money maker for chefs. Unidentified dyes sell very well. The ingredients requirements seem a bit steep because of the variety of things you can get from one node and because some require spending karma, but they don’t seem that out of line with similarly valuable products from other crafts.

Did you /bug it? It does seem odd and it’s expensive for players to verify. The devs would have an easier time determining if it’s just a streak of bad luck or if something is wonky. We have a pretty prolific dye crafter in our guild. I’ll ask him if he’s noticed anything.

I did notice some animation issues when I swapped weapons. I have the trait that applies swiftness on swap and occasionally my arrows would shoot backwards over my head. I’ve also had issues getting “f” interactions to work when auto-attacking with the short bow (picking items up mostly). It wasn’t frequent enough to make a bug report on, so I’m unsure if that’s the issue they were trying to fix.

I favor hybrid builds and I like the ranger best among the professions. Your pet choice impacts your build quite a bit. You can create your own combos and the variety is only second to the staff necro, especially if you choose a pet based on which combo fields/finishers it can do. I like the flexibility of switching between melee and ranged, and I really like the variety among the secondary effects of the skills – evades, interrupts, boons, debuffs – the ranger has a little of everything so you have a lot of choices once you’ve got all your traits and a pile of skill points.

On the other hand, the variety is good for solo play, but there may be better team hybrid professions.

I’d also like to see at least a hint of which thread was moved – a couple of words from the thread title or something.

If the subscription feature was working, it wouldn’t be so much of an issue.

Spud – it’s awesome that you want to help folks out. You might want to mention which server you’re playing on.

City of Heroes had an entire super group that dedicated themselves to helping folks by porting them across zones. Maybe there is a Tyria Tours guild in our future?

I’ve found that once I got my gear in order, the lower level areas were too easy. I would like to have the ability to increase the amount I’m down scaled to make the areas a little more challenging and get a little boost in karma/xp/money to compensate for slowing down my killing speed.

I liked the way City of Heroes did this – you talked to a reputation NPC, and for a small fee you could choose from among several levels of difficulty. I would keep the normal down scaling where it is now, and maybe add two steps of increased challenge.

It would be nice if the NPCs outside of each dungeon could adjust your challenge level, and if the fee was comparable with taking a waypoint; high enough that you don’t want to change it every 15 minutes, but not so expensive that you’re reluctant to adjust it for a personal story step or dungeon. I think it shouldn’t apply at all in situations where you aren’t down scaled.

I like the ranger for soloing. There is lots of survivability in your traits, utility, and pet choices and good damage output.

You don’t have the heavy armor of the warrior, but you can do combos solo, which a warrior can’t. I use my AOE heal, which is a water field, with projectiles for regeneration. I use a spider pet, which gives a poison field and a stun as its special ability. I have a torch on the off hand for the fire field which gives extra burning damage. You can also use a frost trap for an ice field, although I have a condition build, so I’ve been sticking with the poison trap. I keep a brown bear on my swap for the condition removal, but you could use a drake to get a blast finisher.

I have traits that transfer stuns every so often to my pet and another that stealths me when I get stunned, dazed etc., both of which are great when soloing. I’ve got a number of skills that let me evade without using my endurance.

It does take some strategy when you’re soloing champs, but it’s doable. I’m 80 now and I’ve got 75 or 76 deaths. Many of those were in dungeons, my personal story, and sad to say, poorly executed jumps. It’s a very active profession when going up against more difficult content (well at least the way I play it). I micro-manage my pet and I’m constantly swapping weapons and pets and saving my evades and interrupts for the right moment. For easier content (down scaled in the lower level areas) you don’t have to think much at all.

The down side is that it happens to be the botters profession of choice

I dug up a screenshot of my ranger and I know exactly what dyes she has on in it – Midnight Sky, Antique Gold, Earthen.

The dye search turned up River, Midnight Ice, and Royal Blue when I uploaded the screenshot. Even cropped, the background and the lighting made it difficult for the automated algorithm.

I auto-leveled the cropped image then used a dropper in Paint.Net to get the RGB Values and Midnight Sky showed up in the HSL result for the blue, along with Midnight Violet, Sapphire, and Midnight Blue in the other choices. It narrows the possibilities, but it doesn’t necessarily get you all the way there.

Jestunhi.7429:

Interesting… how well does it deal with the fact that the same dye on different materials is displayed as a different colour?

It doesn’t – it just gets you close to the hue for the matte materials I think. I think there are some dyes that are more than just color as well. The tool is just an approximation, similar to the way the 3D viewer on gw2db or guildhead is – it doesn’t show the full in-game effect with shaders particles etc.

Renegadeimp.8439:

Remember, they are making the game for the players to play. It is in their best interests to design gameplay that EVERYONE likes and plays, otherwise the game will simply end up like all other MMO’s over the past couple of years, and NOBODY wants that to happen.

If you try to please EVERYONE you end up pleasing NO-ONE.

It is impossible to make a game that everyone likes. I think the disconnect here is that while there is negative feedback that is constructive, a lot of it is advocating for a complete redesign of game mechanics that a lot of folks like.

Renegadeimp.8439:

This game has great potential, we just need to get the developers to see and realise that.

What you’re actually saying here is “this game has the potential to be exactly what I like if they would just change it to be less what other folks like”. I think this game is just fine the way it is with a some of the adjustments/bug fixes that ANet has already indicated are in the works. It seems to me that the developers have made the game they wanted to make, and there seem to be quite a few folks who enjoy it.

Frankly, I find the “all you negative folks need to go away” threads just as annoying as the “this game needs to be completely changed into something it was never intended to be” threads.

I love this game, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want bugs fixed, DR thresholds adjusted, exploiters banned, etc. The difference is that I believe ANet when they say (sometimes repeatedly) they’re working on a fix and please be patient. I don’t need to dump my complaints on every thread that has a something positive in it just to make sure that the devs don’t ever feel too good about what they’ve accomplished. I also don’t feel the need to post how much I like the game in every negative thread just to make sure the devs don’t get too depressed.

The ANet folks are very capable and professional, and I’m confident that they can sort out all the feedback and decide how they want to move forward without me trying to shout down other folks’ opinions. I stick to giving my opinion, let other folks give theirs, and let the chips fall where they may.

There’s a really neat tool that will tell you what GW2 dye matches a particular color:
http://pendiongaming.com/gw2/dyesearch.php?h=f81e34

You can upload an image and get matches from the main colors in it, so a downsized screenshot might work. Lighting is definitely an issue though – it can throw the colors off because there are so many different shades. It also doesn’t take into account how some dyes affect the shaders, so it will get you in the ball park colorwise, but not necessarily get you to the exact dye someone used.

If you notice someone looking particularly spiffy, your best path is to ask them what they have on.

Now I can say “I love this game” without folks saying “wait until you’re 80”. I do still like the game and feel like I still have plenty to do – a few stats might explain why my experience is so different from the folks who are unhappy:

• I have a little over 200 hours played on that character
• my crafting levels are around 250
• the highest level zone I stepped foot in before I hit 80 was the Iron Marches (Never been to Orr)
• I’ve got 58% world completion
• I haven’t completed my personal story
• I’ve run 5 story modes (2xAC, TA, 2xCD) and one explore mode (I leveled to 80 in it)
• I’ve done a little WvW (about 20 badges worth)
• I only have about 2 G in the bank after upgrading my weapons and twinking some alts. I bought one piece of cultural armor for the skin, and converted a few silver into gems for a silly chef’s outfit & toy frying pan.
• I’ve always had enough money to repair or to take a way point if I felt like it
• I haven’t spent any time farming or grinding or really doing anything I didn’t feel like doing
  • Well, I spent about 40 minutes reporting/interfering with/encouraging other folks to report some bots near Sleekfur Encampment. ANet has changed things up a bit there so it’s no longer a good spot for bots and I don’t feel it was wasted time.

I think the folks that are complaining about end game need to switch “wait until you’re 80” for “wait until you get to Orr”. I still have a ton of stuff to do that doesn’t involve Orr, and I’ll probably wait for a bit to finish my personal story after reading about the completion rewards being a bit busted.

I am a little disappointed in the problems that are plaguing the higher level content, but there is so much other content (for me, and how I like to play) that I have plenty to do while it gets worked on.

So, how did I get to the level cap without accomplishing one single thing? Honestly, I haven’t a clue. I spend a lot of my time looking for hidden areas and chatting up the natives for clues while completing a region and looking for cooking materials. Yes I know I could just look them up on gw2cartographers.com, but I like finding them myself. I also pal around with friends leveling their alts so I’ve run through the lower level areas more than a couple times. I always have a food buff on – the stuff I cook while leveling up isn’t worth anything on the TP, so I just use it or give it away to guild mates. I run everywhere instead of waypointing to keep my character svelte

I get why more goal oriented folks are unhappy. If I see a bugged skill point, I go do something else and check to see if it’s working later and it doesn’t bother me. If I was really focused on getting my world completion done, constantly having to leave one bit undone and come back to it would really get on my nerves.

My understanding is you need to be logged into your account to see it, but I’m unsure how to pass the credentials from the browser.

Honestly, when I get in that mode where I don’t feel like doing anything the game has to offer, I put it down for a while and play something else. It doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t come back to it, it just means you’re not in the mood for it.

There doesn’t have to be one game to rule them all. Play what you’re in the mood for… I’ve been playing a little Torchlight II, some Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet, and um (OK this is embarrassing) Jewel Quest III (but only when I’m really tired and can’t focus on anything else).

My experience is that the CC hate doesn’t decay much – even if you stop attacking, you stay at the top of their list for a while. I’ve got a condition build so even if I stop attacking, I’ve still got damage ticking on them. I’ve found the best strategy is to keep fighting. The only way I’ve been able to drop aggro is when my trait that stealths me when I get stunned, dazed, etc. triggers or when they down me. Sometimes when I’m downed, my team mates can pull them off and I can rally.

So, long story short – best defense is a good offense. Kill them before they kill you

I danced with a champion and his army of branded solo and didn’t die – it’s completely doable. Killed his army, and got him 98% dead (while he was still picking up additional minions as we fought) before some folks came along and helped me finish him. It took a lot of focus and resisting the urge to use a skill just because it was available but it was a blast.

Spidy is actually an open source project and there is lots of information on Github about how it works. I would recommend getting involved there if you want to help out – they’ve laid a lot of groundwork and welcome contributions.

I’ve found that mobs REALLY hate it when you CC them – are you stunning a lot with that big hammer?

I have a ranger that is very middling DPS (because I’m a slacker and I’ve let my gear lag), but I do focus on interrupts, immobilizes and such with my choice of skills and pet. Every dungeon I’ve ever done ended with me being chased by the big guy relentlessly, even though I was with folks that were no slouches when it came to damage.

Lastpass works for me if I use the button fill in my credentials, but I have issues with letting it auto-login or letting it automatically fill in my credentials.

I like cooking more than the other crafts. Everything I make is useful to some extent with the +10 xp. The recipe discoveries are more like puzzles. The ingredients are regional and give me an excuse to travel to places I might not have had a reason to explore. The large number of ingredients adds an organization/inventory management mini game.

I would hate to see it “dumbed down” to be as dull as the other crafts. Folks are given fair warning that it’s different before they sign up to be a chef. I’m still only around 250 and I’ve been cooking since the pre-purchasers could play, so I did get some advantage from when certain ingredients were on the vendors. I’m one of the two or three people that actually liked those cooking ingredients being moved into bags, nodes,, and trees though.

I’m 79 and about to hit level 80 and I’ve never set foot in the Cursed Shore or Orr. I’ve been too busy looking for dill sprigs and rosemary.

I wouldn’t mind seeing a slightly better return from the herb nodes though. There aren’t that many in a region, and the variety of things they can drop is so large. It might be nice to have some flavor text in the tooltips of certain ingredients to give a hint of the best place to look for them.

I don’t group with strangers just to run around doing content. If you send me a group invite or whisper “Hi” with no reason I will ignore it. I do group with strangers to help them with a jumping puzzle or to find a POI. I had a lot of fun partied up with someone who needed help finding the Funhouse skill point. I showed them the path, we did the event chain that spawns in there, and then went our separate ways.

I do most of my socializing with my guild. I don’t think that I’m unsociable because I don’t want to explore Tyria with a stranger. It is more fun to roam the world with a pal, but expecting someone to pal around with you when you haven’t said more than “wanna party?” is kind of weird. Yes, striking up conversations wih strangers that lead to friending each other and playing together can be tough – joining a guild makes things easier.

I was perusing the Dev posts and came across this thread:
Account terminated after gold items transfers. So there are some attempts to monitor the gold getting moved around, and it is impacting innocent folks (not a criticism of ANet here – they fixed it quickly).

It’s not easy to separate the gold buyer from the non-gold buyer. Not saying it shouldn’t be done, just that it has to be done carefully and without torches and pitchforks.

ounkeo.9138:

the problems MMORPG’s face are similar to the music and movie industry.
1. pirates providing copyrighted content
2. users downloading the content

The industry solution:
First, go after the pirates. When that didn’t work or had little effect; go after the downloaders. Thousands and thousands of regular users, innocent and guilty, old and young, people with internet connection and those who didn’t even have a computer. All targets and all threatened and/or taken to court.

Piracy is still rife.

The proper solution:
Is exactly what Apple did with iTunes. Provide a competitive alternative. Cost wise, the price is reasonable. They made content available and easy to get. the problem of piracy cannot be absolutely eliminated, but it can be managed and controlled and mitigated.

I think this is a good analogy.

ANet has provided a safe way to buy in game gold with real currency. The problem is that the gold sellers can offer gold so much cheaper that some folks will roll the dice on losing their accounts (to the gold farmers). The reason the gold sellers can offer gold so much cheaper than the gem exchange rate is because they are making use of exploits and third party programs to farm it. I saw 1 g for the USD equivalent of about 80 gems advertised the other day – is there anyone legitimately playing the game that would sell an entire gold for a mere 80 gems?

So, I think that ANet is correctly prioritizing making it much more difficult to generate in game gold with bots and exploits. If the gold sellers can’t sell the gold a lot more cheaply than it can be bought through the BLTC, then fewer folks will be tempted.

As other folks have pointed out it is much more difficult to identify the customers of gold sellers than it is to get rid of the farmers supplying the gold that is being sold. Better that ten gold buyers go free, than one innocent player suffer.

This thread from Jon Peters regarding FOV might help explain why there isn’t an option to adjust it.

JonPeters:

I’ve seen a lot of topics on this both here and externally so let me try and address it. The current FOV is going to stay because increasing it, while having some benefits for some players, has too many drawbacks.
1) performance suffers greatly because of how things are built and view distances
2) art suffers because of texture tiling, LOD problems and just general stretching from the fisheye effect.
3) gameplay suffers because positional awareness becomes less necessary in a game where combat is greatly designed around positioning.
There is a a serious camera problem, however, which is making some players nauseous. We believe a large number of these cases are not FOV related but rather due to bugs in camera smoothing. Because of this we are expediting a quick fix to this issue that is currently in testing and should see the light of day in the next build we do.
Jon

BrienBear.6073:

No game, as far as I’m aware, has ever banned buyers. See, here’s the thing. Those buyers, they’re also customers of ANet. Those buyers, I’d assume, will continue to play longer because they have their (wrongly acquired) gold. So as much as it sucks, it’s somewhat counter-productive to the game-makers to actually kill the buyers.

This only applies to games with a subscription. Having players that buy gold outside of the game then use that gold to inflate prices on the TP or buy gems would be bad for the game.

The only reasons I see to not go after the buyers are that it is difficult to distinguish them from innocent players who might have traded with and account before it was compromised, or that closing the holes gold farmers are exploiting to make their gold is consuming most of the resources ANet has to dedicate to the problem right now. I hope we’ll see some action against the buyers once the bigger fish are fried.

I back off my DPS quite a bit in the lower level areas – I suppose if you wanted to keep using all your skills and such, you could downgrade your weapons. I realized I had let my underwater weapons lag behind my level when trying to complete the underwater heart in Metrica. The down scaling is brutal when your gear is more than a couple levels below your actual level. Just don’t forget to switch back

Snuffy.4061:

Do you have camera shake on? I don’t get motion sickness myself, but hitting a champion in melee with loads of effects and spells going off, my screen constantly shook and hurt my eyes badly.

Oh yes, definitely turn that off if you haven’t. It was the first setting I disabled.

I haven’t found myself using the items I’ve crafted past level 20 other than jewelry, artificer potions, and food. Oh, and bags.

I think that once I get my leather working skill up to the higher tiers, I will find it useful, but all the intermediate stuff along the way has not been better than what I can get from the TP for a few silver or as karma rewards.

I have transmuted some of the skins from crafted items on to other gear though.

Eladriel.7295:

Pandemoniac.4739:

1. If someone is behaving badly, give them the benefit of the doubt until they’ve proven themselves to be an irredeemable jerk.

Everyone has bad days and sometimes there are other reasons for folks doing things that annoy you that have nothing to do with them being a jerk.

Having a bad day is no excuse for treating others badly. I have bad days, I don’t get in the game and treat others badly.

Maybe behaving badly wasn’t the best choice of words on my part. If someone ignores my request for help, or runs over my corpse, or is a little curt, I don’t get angry, I assume they’ve got something else going on in their lives that’s distracting them or keeping them from being their normal friendly, helpful selves.

If someone trains a bunch of mobs on you then laughs when you die, or is overtly rude, well I think that falls under “proven themselves to be a jerk”.

I empathize with you Syynx – there are many games I can’t play for more than 20 minutes because of motion sickness (Borderlands, sigh.) I’ve found that the camera speed affects me more than the FOV though. The only time in GW2 I had a problem was trying to navigate my giant Norn through one of the hidden jumping puzzles in LA and the camera kept flipping around out of my control.

You might try turning down your camera rotation speed (I have mine all the way down), and mapping the “about face” action to your keyboard for when you need to quickly change the camera. Experimenting with the camera position may help a bit too. It might not though – I think there are different physiological reasons behind the motion sickness. I have the “can’t read a book while riding in a moving car” type.

Daniel.2743:

Pandemoniac.4739:

If ~300 hours of play for a flat ~60 dollars is a good value for one type of game, why would it not be a good value for a different type of game?

Well this isn’t a single-player game with co-operative, at least that’s not what was advertised, it’s an MMORPG. If the game only has a certain amount of longevity for players, then I don’t think it’s worth it.

MMO just means massively multiplayer, which GW2 is (and GW1 wasn’t). It doesn’t have anything to do with longevity except that many folks expect MMO to mean longevity because MMOs are almost universally subscription games (or started out as subscription games).

When you play a subscription game, you’re basically leasing it. You can’t play unless you pay the fee, but in exchange for the fee you’re supposed to get more content than if you buy a flat fee game like GW2. So, each game may be equally worth the money you spent, even though you’re paying more for the subscription game, because you’ll end up (in theory) playing the subscription game longer.

I still don’t see how the value proposition changes based on whether the game is single player, co-op, or massively multiplayer. Either you got $X worth of enjoyment out of the game or you didn’t.

I played only 20 hours of SpaceChem before it got waaay too hard, but on the other hand, I was completely absorbed in it when I was playing and I only payed a few dollars for it, so I feel it was a good purchase. I have 100 or so hours in D3 and I’ll probably never go back to it. Even though I’m sorely disappointed that it won’t have the longevity D2 had for me, I still don’t regret buying it. I had many moments of “OMG! That’s so awesome!” in my first play through, and I’d pay $60 for any game that I thought would give me that experience again.

I have the same issue on the Nook reader. I can browse the forums, but the browser crashes immediately after posting a reply. The reply does get posted, so it seems like the display of it is what causes the crash. The chrome browser on my Android phone works fine however. I’m not sure about the built in one and I’m not keen on testing that

Daniel.2743:

No, and the reason I say that is not to be controversial, I genuinely don’t believe it’s worth the money. I have played for 272 hours. Which is good compared to single-player games or standalone retail RPG’s. But for an MMORPG I started out thinking I would play this game for years to come, only to be disappointed I expected a whole lot more.

“Worth the money you spent on it” is a different question from “met your expectations”. With the amount of pre-release hype and the expectations of some of the GW1 fans, I imagine there are lots of folks that ended up at least a little disappointed.

If ~300 hours of play for a flat ~60 dollars is a good value for one type of game, why would it not be a good value for a different type of game?

Yes, I’ve gotten more enjoyment than I expected for my $60 (Ok, let’s say $80 because I spent some money in the shop). In my opinion, ANet has delivered on their goal

ColinJohanson:

Our goal is to make it so you get more from Gw2 for free than you get from a game you pay a subscription for.

Even with the money I’ve spent in the shop, I got more value out of this game than Secret World or Diablo 3. SWTOR is close in value right now, because I really enjoyed the few months I played before I started not having fun, but I spent more on it when you factor in the subscription fees. I think the plans for Halloween will probably push GW2 far ahead though.

Jack of Tears.9458:

Yeah, for whatever reason I don’t always get the “quote” tool when I’m lookin’ at a thread, so I have to copy and paste instead. Problem fixed, no harm done.

If you use the permanent link and edit the last part of the URL so that it has the post number followed by /quote, e.g. “/332819/quote”, you can get around the missing tools.

And to stay on topic, I only have two rules when it comes to etiquette:

1. Treat other folks how you would like to be treated
2. If someone is behaving badly, give them the benefit of the doubt until they’ve proven themselves to be an irredeemable jerk.

Everyone has bad days and sometimes there are other reasons for folks doing things that annoy you that have nothing to do with them being a jerk. That guy that cut you off on the road – maybe he just found out his wife is in the hospital. The person that ran off after only rezzing you half way? Maybe her guild mate was in trouble (we use Teamspeak when we WvW) and she had to go. At least the next person that comes along only has half as much to do to revive you.

AlexanderFaust.4518:

Gear progression is also associated with “Power Creep”.
Perhaps this vid will help you better understand the issue.
http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/power-creep

Awesome link. It does a great job of explaining the issue and how it impacts game play.