Guild Wars 2

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

There’s also a difference between removing posts, and removing entire threads. There’s quite a few good discussion threads that have been moved to the trashcan, just because one or two posters made nonconstructive posts. A lot of the moderation seems indeed draconian, and out of control. And an increase in that sort of moderation, does not sound very pleasant.

That hasn’t been my experience. The threads I’ve seen that were completely removed instead of locked or culled were discussions that were either completely off-topic or about botting or other topics that aren’t a good idea to let run free on an official forum. The off-topic threads might have been good discussions, but I can’t blame ANet for not wanting to run a general online gaming discussion forum.

There are plenty of alternatives. There are tons of unmoderated GW2 reddits that are very active. The official forums should be strictly moderated, because this is where their customers come first for information. In my opinion, it makes more business sense to have a few folks unhappy that the moderation is too strict on the official forums than to have an environment that would give new or potential customers a bad impression of the game’s community.

There is a line of course where strict turns into oppressive, but in my opinion, we aren’t even close yet. There are more discussions than I have time to read and there’s a lot of diversity in the topics. If the community was truly being repressed, it wouldn’t be so active.

Purringcat.3920:

the prices on totems were fairly stable. now the sudden drop. and putting up only about 200-300 totems to drive the price down to 14s seems weird.

It’s not weird if the supply went up. See how the price trends down as the sell order volume trends up on the chart on spidy ?

Wanze.8410:

FrozenStarRo.7240:

Many are still working on legendaries and considering the horrendous t6 mat drops, it’s safe to say buying them at a reasonable price helps quite a bit. That’s 250 for 1 legendary alone. Also I imagine a bunch are working on crafting through 500 for ascended armor, so they’ll probably need a few aswell.

But the supply went up from 8k to 90k within 4 weeks.
You dont need totems to get to 500 in crafting as well. I dont see a reason why they should rise.

Maybe someone is trying to get rid of the extra supply by making folks on the forums think they’re getting a deal?

tigirius.9014:

I was wondering that myself, how can people search to make sure something wasn’t already mentioned when the search function hasn’t worked for me either in all this time.

Other search engines index the forums – just use the option to limit your search to a particular site. For Google (and Duck Duck Go which I prefer) just add site:forum-en.guildwars2.com.

At this point I’m not sure why the forum search isn’t redirected to Google or some other search engine until they can get it fixed. There’s probably technical issues.

Mythx.9847:

I am not really savvy on the background of Anet and where there roots are, but I have noticed that many companies seem to support “censorship” of certain conversations from taking place. I understand having rules that surround the use of clean words, but I think one of the most important parts to a successful business is criticized feedback. I am not sure where the line is drawn and how well Anet moderators handle this, but I would like to see more companies start allowing more “freedom of expression” within there products/services.

There’s a difference between constructive criticism and criticism. In my experience, the moderators aren’t quashing all negative feedback – they’re keeping the discussion civilized and removing posts that can have a bad impact on the game or players (accusations that players are scammers, exploit details, etc.)

ANet has an interest in the forums being a friendly place where most folks feel comfortable participating in the discussions. More feedback from more of the playerbase is definitely of more value than allowing an angry subset of the playerbase to rant unrestricted. I read the Battle.net forums, but I don’t post there because of the unfettered nastiness. I’d rather the moderation be a little too strict (yes, I’ve had posts moderated) than the forums turn into a free-for-all brawl.

CreativeAnarchy.6324:

I think that with how fast stuff can move in the general discussion, you would be better off with a suggestion sub.

Seems like it would be less of a headache at least.

The suggestion forum rolled really quick too and lots of folks were unhappy when their threads were moved out of general and into suggestions. I believe that this solution is better than what we had before even if it’s not perfect. Suggestions with a specific audience get more visibility to the folks that care most, and more general suggestions get more visibility than they might otherwise now that there are fewer forums.

Morrigan.2809:

I have Logitech G600 and I cannot imagine playing gW2 without it

Me too. My husband and I both had the Razer version, and ran into problems on both mice with bounce in the left button. The Logitech hardware seems better quality, and I like the ability to change the color of the lights when the profile changes. The third “shift” button on the G600 is also really nice.

Behellagh.1468:

Listen City of Heros had P2P trades that were fairly bulletproof. But it was in the game because a trading post … consignment house … wasn’t added until they had a crafting system which was year 3 of the game.

Not sure if it’s continuing existence contributed to the hyper inflation or just a side effect of rarity creating behavior that caused farming which netted a lot of money when you were looking for a specific item. We routinely had players that had to be creative how they stored their money because they had hit the bank’s 2 billion cap.

In my opinion, the lack of currency sinks early on put them in a situation that was hard to dig out of. We played the crap out of that game and after 3 years we had so much currency that we were standing in Atlas giving it away to new characters that had names and costumes we liked. The consignment house was also small enough and the pool of player currency large enough that it was easy for certain players to manipulate prices. If there hadn’t been so many crafting materials, it might have been better.

Personally I think it’s a good idea to not have direct trading, but still allow transferring of items through the mail so we can send gifts to guildies or friends. Supporting off-TP trading just makes the market less efficient and drives up the prices for everyone so that folks that have a tolerance for sitting in LA all day looking for a trade can avoid the gold sink.

Brother Dulfite.5793:

All sorts of companies monitor transaction and compile data. I don’t see why they couldn’t find a way to subdivide the servers up to see how much profit is being generated on each server by the BLT.

But it’s not profit, it’s just a gold sink. The gold from listing fees is basically deleted from the game. Why add up the taxes instead of just tallying up the sales? Listing fees can be manipulated by listing, then removing the listing over and over.

Actually, I think some sort of PVE competition among servers could be interesting, although I wouldn’t make it about the TP. Guesting kind of makes any sort of PvE competition meaningless though.

adamryason.9817:

Pandemoniac,
I too have had little to no time in the past year to keep up with the LS achievements and all in game stuff. A recommendation though, if you are interested in the lore behind the LS and game as a whole is to listen to a youtube video series or podcast. I follow WoodenPotatoes on youtube and he gives great 20-30 min videos as well as hour long podcasts with Matt Visual, 1-2 times a week about the most recent content and updates.

Thanks for the recommendation – I figured there were probably casts out there but haven’t gotten up the energy to go look for a decent one. And don’t worry about other folks discouraging me – I’ve been gaming on-line for quite a while now and got toughened up in the deepest pits of the alt hierarchy of Usenet. If I can make it out of there with my self esteem relatively intact, I can handle anything this well moderated and fairly civilized forum can throw at me, lol.

Doggie.3184:

I don’t mind any class, but Rangers unfortunately get permanently stuck with pets, and these pets often mess up things in dungeons because you can’t stow them in combat. They need to learn how and when to tell them to return to them.

The problems with pets in dungeons is first that players don’t put them on passive and direct their attacks intelligently, second players don’t choose the right pets for the situation they’re heading into, and last that players don’t take full advantage of the ability to swap pets to keep them from getting killed.

I don’t understand why some rangers don’t want their pets out. You get two extra abilities you can control, additional combo fields/finishers (although you usually can’t control when they happen), plus you’re able to deal damage to two targets at once no matter how they’re positioned (the one you’re attacking and the one your pet is attacking).

I think that most players new to the game look at a ranged pet class and think it will be easy mode. They try to play it like a WoW hunter and are disappointed because their pets can’t tank, the CC abilities aren’t designed to keep things at range indefinitely (they’re more about interrupting attacks), and they don’t really understand the importance of the mobility skills.

My ranger is my most active class – I’m constantly moving, checking what my pet is doing, saving my situational skills for the right moment, looking for opportunities to interrupt big attacks, keeping an eye on my vigor for my dodging, swapping weapons and pets to give myself different boons, etc. I love it, but I think it is the opposite of what folks expect when they look at the class description.

cesmode.4257:

Pandemoniac.4739:

The financial model affects the game design. Games with cash shops have to have some sort of mechanics for things to sell in the those cash shops. Games with the VIP model have to have ways of distinguishing between those folks playing for free and the VIPs that are either paying a subscription fee or have purchased something else.

Here we go.. the famous “just because you think so doesn’t mean everyone else does” argument. Over-used and does not apply here.

The financial cost of a game does not determine if it is FUN.

I didn’t say anything about cost. I said the financial model affects the game design. Fun gameplay is only one aspect of what makes a game good. What makes a game good is subjective, so of course the argument that your opinion doesn’t apply to everyone is relevant.

You said you didn’t understand why some folks focused on the lack of a subscription as a desirable feature, so I tried to help with that. I can’t ignore a clunky UI even if the game mechanics are cool, but I can understand how someone else could.

I love my ranger – she’s not top of the DPS charts but she’s got lots of tricks up her sleeve. You do no damage when you’re dead and she’s very good at staying alive. I’ve soloed certain group events with her – there are some champs she has trouble taking on, but I’m fairly happy with what she can do. You do have to understand how to use your pet though. I leave mine on passive and micromanage it in harder fights.

The engineer is also tons of fun, but folks like them better for groups because there is no pet to be mismanaged and they have group buffs/heals. Honestly I think most of the ranger hate is due to folks not understanding how to use their pets.

cesmode.4257:

Why do people say they like a game because it has no subscription? The fact that a game is free does not make it any more fun or any less fun. Financial model does not factor into whether ot not the player will enjoy the game.

Just because it doesn’t impact your enjoyment doesn’t mean that it’s not a factor for other folks. I like no subscription because I’m a game hopper and it frees me from having to pay for a whole month when I just want to play a weekend. Some folks can’t stand free to play games with a cash shop model because they feel like they’re getting nickeled and dimed.

The financial model affects the game design. Games with cash shops have to have some sort of mechanics for things to sell in the those cash shops. Games with the VIP model have to have ways of distinguishing between those folks playing for free and the VIPs that are either paying a subscription fee or have purchased something else.

The financial model may affect the game in ways that are unimportant to you, but it still affects the game and some of the folks playing it.

There’s a big merged thread (27 pages! ) on Open World Duelling

Also, other search engines index the forums so you aren’t stuck using the built in search feature. I use the site:forum-en.guildwars2.com argument on Duck Duck Go or Google and get fairly decent results.

Latinkuro.9420:

Conclusion

A lot of people say Guild Wars 2 lacks this and that and whatever.
But I say to you, all those other games are missing a hell of a lot more
that we as GW2 players take for granted everyday.
I believe we have been spoiled so much by all the nice good features of GW2 that now we expect an even higher level of quality and polish

I have to agree that GW2 fixed a lot of things I really hated about MMOs.

(Edited to remove my impressions of Wildstar)

It made me appreciate a few things about GW2

The quest where a new character gets initiated into the world of Tyria is 1) fairly short and 2) action packed. You get to kill some boss-like enemies right off the bat – I love the robot in the Asura intro.

There is no quest log with objectives in different locations or quest givers to keep track of – you just wander around and get XP for pretty much anything you do – hearts, events, killing creatures, harvesting, exploring. You don’t have to finish the hearts if you want to go do something else – your progress will be there when you get back to it, and they don’t unlock other quests.

Teaming is so easy. You don’t have to worry about who gets the loot, or the harvesting node, or the kill credit. It just works.

You have lots of choices of where to go adventuring regardless of your level. All the capital cities are two portals away. No zepplins. No hair raising runs through higher level areas.

Deposit all collectibles(!) Mail available without having to be at a mailbox. I could go on an on but I’ll spare you

I do have some things I don’t like about GW2, but I have some faith that they will eventually get fixed or improved. I’ve seen so many changes over the past year that seem directly related to the feedback on the forums that I’m confident if enough folks are bugged by something, it will get reworked somehow.

I have always been impressed with ANet’s attention to infrastructure. The hot patching is really an achievement in my opinion – it’s hard to imagine going back to a game with a regularly scheduled maintenance day. I imagine that their architecture was designed to be robust and handle all sorts of stresses.

The company I work for actually pays two different third parties to be on-call in the event of DDOS attacks and they filter the traffic to keep us up although at maybe a lower capacity than usual. We’re in financial services though, so the stakes are a bit higher if we’re inaccessible.

So if a mob has 100 health, does it matter if you crit for 150 points of damage or for 200 points of damage? If I had to guess, I’d say the difference is to prevent one shotting mobs in lower level areas.

I’m not going to get too excited about theoretical numbers. I’ll wait to see evidence that it actually impacts player’s ability to do the content. And no I’m not going to cry if it means full zerker’s won’t let me steamroll everything in my path.

The real test would be to take a power based character and a crit based character and time them against a particular type of mob in a level 80 area, then time them against the same type of mob in a lower level area and see if there’s a discrepancy. And you should take a decent number of samples given the unpredictable nature of criticals.

Guardian.5142:

That is where the game ends being straightforward for a lot of people. If they continue doing what they did to level, gathering, farming mobs, completing maps… they won’t get very far compared to someone who has the inside secrets and plays the TP.

What do you mean by “won’t get very far”? I can do all of the content in the game without playing the TP aggressively or grinding for gold. You don’t “win” by having a lot of gold in the bank. If someone chooses amassing gold as a goal, it would be silly for them to not pay attention to what things are worth on the TP. You don’t have to have inside secrets or flip items to make money on the TP – you just have to know what things are profitable to farm and sell. I’ll give you a hint – it’s not what the majority of players in the game are farming. High supply generally means low prices.

You’re assuming that giving everyone more gold is somehow independent of what things cost. What do you think will happen to the price of legendaries if gold is twice as easy to get? I’d bet that the price will about double.

I don’t think giving an end of the year discount on TP purchases is rewarding the right things. There are already rewards for playing the game through achievement chests, birthday presents, etc. Why single out money spent on the TP? It basically makes the gold sink less effective and reinforces the rich getting richer.

Abbadon.7958:

I played WoW for 6 years. Now im into GW2, which is so close, yet so different. I have a few questions.

There’s one more thing that might not be obvious – the skill points that you use to unlock your utility skills don’t have a cap – you keep earning them even after you’re max level, and they can be used as currency for certain crafting materials.

Iason Evan.3806:

We all pay taxes. In games (Arbitrary money sinks) and in real life. In real life they serve a purpose. Wouldn’t it be cool if the taxes we pay in GW2 actually served a purpose? I propose that every year we get money back based on our transactions on the BLTC. You could throw a 2 week content “tax return” update in that revolves around us doing fun little quests that involve Asuran bureaucracy or whatever.

While I think it’s an interesting idea, there are a few of problems with it – tax refunds are for folks that overpay their taxes. Those of us that spend the time to calculate what our taxes will be don’t let the government keep our money interest free The taxes on the BLTP are like sales tax – there’s no ambiguity in what you owe, so you can’t overpay.

The second problem is that filing your tax forms and working through a bureaucracy just isn’t fun for most folks. And lastly, why would it make sense to create an event where folks that spent more gold got more rewards than someone new to the game? Why not just make an event where everyone could get the same rewards for the same amount of effort?

Behellagh.1468:

The other thing about CoH and outfits is when you bought a costume pack, it was available on every character you have now and ever make in the future. Of course CoH isn’t around anymore that an argument could be made that they didn’t understand how to maximize income from a cash shop. But it garnered a lot of goodwill from their players.

I miss COH and all my costume packs – they made a ton of money off of me. It was a different paradigm though – your costume as a superhero or supervillain was a part of your character’s identity and had no effect on your skills. I loved having multiple costume slots and being able to switch them on the fly. COH is one of the few games that I dabbled in casual RPing.

GW2 is focused on different things. I enjoy the town clothes and toys, but without all the other support for customizing your look and ways to show it off, it’s not as engaging. In COH, you could create a completely unique look by mixing and matching different pieces and had complete control over the colors. A huge part of the game was developed to support messing around with your costumes, including earning extra costume slots and emotes when you switched between them. I don’t know if it makes sense to put that much development effort into making town clothes more appealing.

Stand The Wall.6987:

Most people who PvE expect others to go into Power Precision Critical Damage to down mobs faster. If this isnt what you want then join a Role Playing guild.

I think you mean “most people that speed run dungeons in PUGs” not most people that PVE. And I’m sure the RP guilds would prefer folks that actually have an interest in role playing. Just because you don’t follow the lemmings doesn’t mean you are an RPer.

Build your characters however matches your play style and ignore the folks who insist that you have to be in full Berserker’s or you suck. I’ve got a high toughness ranger and she does just fine. She’s extremely useful in pulling aggro off of the folks in full Berserker’s who keep getting downed, and she can go mano-a-mano with a Champ and his minions and keep them busy long enough for the folks that can’t wrap their brains around anything but DPS to get rezzed.

Don’t get me wrong – a good player in full Berserker’s tears things up, but simply wearing a full set of Berserker’s gear does not immediately confer an aura of awesome on you.

I also have a high vitality Necro that plays differently, but is just as durable. I figured with Death Shroud it would make sense to go full kitten and focus my build around having a large life pool. My ranger uses more of a combination of toughness and evasion. Whichever way you go, just make sure that your build supports the path you’ve chosen and don’t emphasize one aspect to the exclusion of all others ( there are diminishing returns as someone mentioned earlier in the thread).

I reported it as a bug a while back. The bandits with the bombs can be a real pain and the NPCs around there are almost always dead. It does seem like a broken event.

Romek.4201:

you should make a poll to find out how many gold everyone has
when not than its jsut speculation and useless
get 200+ people to vote and you know what you wanna know^^

A poll would be worse than useless, because it would mislead folks into thinking that the numbers actually meant something.

There are lots of problems with improperly conceived and executed online surveys, for example, “under-coverage” and “self-selection”.

The only way to get an accurate idea of the distribution of gold across the player base would be to beg John to gather up the data for us. I don’t think he should waste his time though unless it’s the total amount of gold earned normalized by the number of hours someone has played. Even that has problems because it doesn’t take into account the value of things that have dropped – like the folks that got a precursor weapon out of the forge but didn’t sell it.

Gold stockpiled in the bank is not how player wealth should be measured.

tolunart.2095:

Behellagh.1468:

Astral Projections.7320:

www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-21/diablo-3-case-virtual-hyperinflation

Aah! Wall of Text.

Looks like someone copied/pasted an article from another source without bothering to fix the formatting errors that came with it. There are subheadings and tables buried in the text that show where line breaks used to be.

There’s a better formatted version in Business Insider:
Weimaresque Hyperinflation Is Ravaging One Of The World’s Most Popular Video Games

Copying the headline shows a link to the same article on the Ludwig von Mises Institute site which I’m inclined to believe is the “original”.

There’s something about the way the redirection page for links in forum posts is handled that prevents me from being able to open them in a new tab. I keep getting

The page you were looking for doesn’t exist.

You may have mistyped the address or the page may have moved.

when I CTRL+click, but if I click directly I get the normal “This link is taking you away from the forums” page.

I would really like it if I could get the links to open in a new tab so I could go look at the external links without losing my place in the thread. I can use copy and paste, but some folks (like me) use the formatting to add links to the text of our post to make it more readable instead, so the only way to get the URL to copy is to quote the post and it’s kind of a pain.

OK I figured out what the problem was – the original poster didn’t include the http part of the URL, and someone who quoted them further down wrapped the link in the URL tags without adding the HTTP part… instant broken link whether you click on it or ctrl+click on it.

So – nothing really to do here except for me to pay a little closer attention to what’s going on before I post something as a bug…

There is some speculation that just having higher armor/toughness generates more threat (so you get aggro a lot). There’s a little more detail on the wiki http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Aggro

Guardian.5142:

Its been said that the evidence of a thriving economy is a healthy middle class.

I don’t think defining “middle class” as a certain amount of gold in the bank makes any sense. For me having 100g in the bank is pointless – I would have bought other things I wanted long before I let it accrue that high. Unless you’re saving up for something why let it sit there? You don’t get interest on it.

I’m gold poor, but I have lots of nice stuff. I’ve got characters fully kitted out in gear that is effective for the things I like to do, I’ve got the skins I want on most of my characters and I’ve got the dyes I want. I even spent some gold (maybe too much) discovering every cooking recipe so that even when my collection tabs are full my discovery pane is empty (don’t laugh I had a lot of fun with that :P). I don’t feel poor even though I don’t have a big pile of gold. I feel solidly middle class.

You don’t need a big pile of gold to enjoy the game, any more than you need to be at the top of the leader boards. Some folks have the goal of having a lot of gold or making it to the top of the leader boards or of having multiple legendaries, which is fine, but that doesn’t mean it is the yardstick that should be used to measure the entire player population.

Poor/middle class/rich are “standard of living” concepts, not amounts of money concepts (even though the subdivisions are typically based on income). My understanding of it is that the classifications are really a function of what percentage of your income you have to spend on necessary things (food, shelter, transportation to your job) versus things that make life better (entertainment, conveniences, vacations) and what quality of those items you can afford (do you have to live in a slum, or do you live in a house in the suburbs).

Danikat.8537:

2. Practice all the time.
Not just on jumping puzzles but anywhere you can jump, or think you might be able to. Even jumping on flat ground can be helpful to get an idea of how high and how far your character can jump. But it’s especially useful to practice it between platforms. Not only to learn the jumping but to learn what is and is not a platform and where on it you’re likely to be able to stand.

This helped me quite a bit. I like to make my own vistas by jumping up terrain. I got a lot of practice and some interesting screen shots

In addition to what other folks have said, pick your jumping puzzle character and stick with them. I had a really hard time switching between races because the visual cues were quite different. Also, there are invisible edges on things that can be helpful (the jump isn’t as far as it looks) or make things harder (you bang your head on them). Practice will help you find them. If you’re getting really stuck try a different path. I’ve made many jumping puzzles way harder than they had to be by not looking around for an easier path or jump than the one I was focused on.

Stormy Dragon.9210:

Except I was a Kiel supporter, in large part because Evon was largely making it clear he wanted to abuse the power of the position. So I’m kinda miffed Kiel is starting to turn out just as bad.

I believe that this is a valuable lesson in the nature of politicians and politics for you. No campaign promise survives the election.

Majic.4801:

Change is coming. Patience is counseled.

I was doing a search to see if anyone had suggested putting recaps in the Durman Priory vaults and came across this post

BobbyStein.2315:

We’re currently working on a system that will better direct players through Living World content. Eventually, it will also provide story context for LW and other content types. The first phase of the system should be ready before the end of the year.

That sounds like a solution is coming to me and I’m very interested to see what ANet comes up with.

Freeelancer.2860:

Pandemoniac.4739:

My solution is to go play something else where I feel less pressured to do time limited content and don’t have to rely on incomplete, fan created summaries to get me re-oriented in the game world.

There are also some official summaries of the LS available, for example this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBqw62AssWk

I don’t think I understand the purpose of this thread or your view.

That youtube video wasn’t posted by ANet so it’s hardly official. I’m not interested enough in the living story to try to patch together a recap by sorting through various fan posted stuff.

The purpose of the thread is simply to give feedback about my experience with the living story. I could have just stopped playing and not said anything, but I don’t think that helps anyone.

Freeelancer.2860:

@OP and people sharing same thoughts: I missed dragon bash and aetherblade retreat parts of the living story. I simply stopped playing game at that time, but I don’t blame ANet for whatever happened in my life and my inability to play the game. Instead I read about what interested me about those releases and now I even have the chance to play some of the content I missed through fractals dungeon.

I don’t blame ANet for anything. I’m not even demanding that they change anything. All I’m saying is that the constant change is making it hard for me to engage with the game. I’m not opposed to living story stuff – it’s just too frequent and too short term for me.

My solution is to go play something else where I feel less pressured to do time limited content and don’t have to rely on incomplete, fan created summaries to get me re-oriented in the game world.

Nomin.5901:

I gave you an answer to your question, Pande, There is no need to tell me your life story or be a kitten. But if you dont have time to play the most casual MMO I know, than I dont think MMO gaming is for you.

I didn’t ask a question, I gave some feedback on my experience of the game. There’s no “answer” there’s just other folks’ opinions which I’m actually interested to hear whether they agree with me or not.

I love the casual aspects of GW2 and that’s why I’m still interested in playing it. The living story takes away the the casual aspect of GW2 for me and replaces it with pressure to log in at particular times and do particular things or miss content that actually changes the state of the world and leads into other content.

I’ve played pretty much every major MMO out there casual or not (except EVE – I stink at that one lol) I’m working my way through SWTOR again right now as a subscriber, and I’m not experiencing the same reluctance to log in even though I don’t have a lot of time, so I thought about why and gave ANet some feedback.

You said:

Nomin.5901:

Although, I dont how someone doesnt have >30min over the course of 2-4 weeks to do 1 story mission.

I explained, perhaps a little too specifically, how that was possible. The end of the year is always bad for us market data types so I’m grumpy. Sorry. Not sure how that’s more kittenish than implying that my feedback is unfounded because I should make time to play the game every 2-4 weeks. That’s my whole point – I shouldn’t have to prioritize a casual game into my schedule to be able to enjoy it.

What if I feel like playing something else that month? The Steam holiday sales have filled up my library with lots of games of various genres that I’ve been enjoying – The Typing of the Dead is remarkably fun even though it’s about as far from an MMO as you can get. Why does every MMO have to be the “one game to rule them all”?

I’m fine with never being able to own a legendary, and ascended gear isn’t even on my radar yet. Folks who invest more time should have rewards that I can’t get. I don’t even care that I miss the holiday events because they don’t change the game world permanently. But why does there have to be so much one time only content? At least with the GW1 expansions I could work through the content at my own pace.

Donari.5237:

I do like the mashup of “I have what you need. What do you need?” you get from merchants. I had a guildie who liked to mentally complete a bandit’s dying "Now I’ll never … "

For me that one always finishes as “Now I’ll never… get to have any venom”. Yeah we played a lot of DCUO and killed a lot of venom addicted thugs.

Nomin.5901:

http://bit.ly/1bTelE3 Take 5-10min to read that and than POOF <3

Yep this really gives me the flavor of the content. Why would anyone bother to play it when they can just read this.

Story
The chapter sees Captain Ellen Kiel making due on her promises during Cutthroat Politics with expansions to the Fractals of the Mists.

Character Development
Player Involvement

Nomin.5901:

Although, I dont how someone doesnt have >30min over the course of 2-4 weeks to do 1 story mission.

Do you have a job or a career? If you’ve only ever worked a job, I can imagine you don’t really need to prioritize your time or energy. For me, any game that I have to make a commitment to play or fall behind is off my list. I’ve got too much other stuff to do that is far more important and demands my time unpredictably.

NASDAQ decides to change their symbology to make a couple of Google executives happy and guess who’s life it ties up for the next 4 to 6 weeks. And then they realize that it was stupid to try to make such a huge change and delay, which just gives all of us more time to argue about how we should be handling it and there’s another biweekly erosion of my time and energy.

On the other hand, I’ve got plenty of cash to spend on gems, so I really can’t complain too loudly, lol. My situation is different from a lot of folks I’m sure, but that doesn’t mean I can’t give ANet my feedback about my experience with the game.

Let me preface this with saying that I really like a lot about GW2, and I actually like the idea of a"living world". I’m finding in practice however, that it’s making it difficult for me to get re-engaged with the game after taking a break.

I took a break for a while because work was crazy and I needed less involving games (like Android apps I can play for 5 minutes and put down). I’ve been sort of itching to come back now that things have calmed down a bit, but each time I’ve logged in, it’s been halfway through a living story event, and I’m so far behind on why things are actually happening (Who’s Scarlet again and why do we all hate her?) I’m just having trouble engaging with it.

I don’t care about the achievements and I can handle missing holiday or infrequent one time events just fine. Holidays will roll around again next year in some form and the one time events are easy to get up to speed on what happened and what changed. I think it’s the frequency of the living story content that’s putting me off.

It makes me feel like I have to pay way more attention to the game that I’ve got the bandwidth for, and runs counter to why I liked the game so much in the first place, which is that I could pick it up and do whatever I felt like doing, harvesting, crafting, jumping puzzles, dungeons, etc. and still feel that I was making progress. Now I feel pressured to do particular activities when I log in because if I don’t I won’t have another opportunity to experience them later on.

An example might express it better. The original Woodstock was a one time event that can never be recreated and significantly influenced the US. I can’t go back and experience it the same way the folks that were there experienced it, but I can watch video of it and listen to the music and get some idea of what it was like to be there. The living story events are gone completely once they’re over (or at least that’s my perception of it) and there’s no way to go back and experience the content even partially other than reading about it.

Yes I could ignore the living story entirely, but I would really rather not. I don’t want to feel pressured to play a particular way at a particular time. There’s a fine balance between encouraging players to be more active and pressuring them.

I don’t have a solution – just expressing my frustration a little bit. I’m probably more sensitive to it than most folks – I get really stubborn when I feel like someone is nagging me to do something lol. Although, maybe a cinematic summing things up at the end of each event would be enough now that I think about it. When I’m ready to get caught up, and can go through the cinematics and feel more connected to what’s going on.

Aeonblade.8709:

No, that’s not what I was referring to specifically, just that they filter feedback at all seems weird to me. I’m not saying it was a bad thing, it’s just not something I have heard of before.

So they have a customer support team for the customer support team?

Well everyone in my company is responsible for making our clients happy whether we’re in support or not. We all get access to the customer feedback that the folks on the front line hear or that we get through surveys and such so that we can understand what folks like and where they’re having issues.

We have a team that collects the feedback, sorts it out and sends out the most useful comments (positive and negative) to the rest of the company every so often so we can look around our area of responsibility and see if there’s something we can do to make things better. The more constructive the criticism, the further it travels.

I expect that it’s similar for ANet. Not every developer can read every post on the forum or every e-mail. Some group of folks is filtering and collecting the feedback for the rest of the team to look over and discuss. Players are more likely to be heard if they express themselves in a less antagonistic way.

Aeonblade.8709:

^ What? So they filter the negative feedback? That seems…backwards.

I’m assuming you are referring to this?

Pandemoniac.4739:

My company regularly distributes customer feedback, positive and negative, to all of us (…) I have never seen any of the negative comments contain statements calling the folks in the company stupid, incompetent, greedy, etc.

Yeah, negative feedback gets filtered when it’s not constructive. It’s something to keep in mind when you’re dealing with any company’s customer support. Most businesses recognize that there are some customers that you won’t be able to satisfy no matter what you do and focus their efforts on the relationships that can be turned around.

My company is also committed to what they call “employee engagement” because happy employees make for a better experience for the customers they interact with. I’m fairly sure we don’t get the venomous feedback inflicted on us because it would be more demoralizing than useful in helping us figure out what we could do better.

I think it would take a really special type of person to listen to someone calling them stupid and incompetent and get anything out of that conversation other than “wow, that person is angry”. Calling me names doesn’t make me want to help you or make me care about your problems. That’s just human nature.

angelpaladin.7921:

I disagree with you OP while I do think some people come off a bit vicious lets get one thing clear.

Arena.net is not my friend they are not my family. They are a company I pay to provide me a service. I do not feel like that service is being rendered I will complain about it.

Why all of a sudden people think company’s are there friends or family is beyond me. Company’s could seriously careless about you or me. In fact the only thing they care about is $$….

So you’re only polite and considerate to your friends and family? How do you make any friends with that attitude? You can complain about a product and still be civil. A little bit of consideration costs you nothing, and in my experience, gains you a lot. More flies with honey and all that.

My company regularly distributes customer feedback, positive and negative, to all of us (even my team working deep in the bowels of the infrastructure that the clients don’t even know exist) I have never seen any of the negative comments contain statements calling the folks in the company stupid, incompetent, greedy, etc. Folks don’t hear your concerns when you talk that way. They don’t share and discuss your feedback because it’s buried underneath a childish temper tantrum.

If you’re really interested in getting something changed, it is in your best interest to at least pretend that you believe that the person on the other end of the conversation cares that you’re unhappy and wants to fix it.

Behellagh.1468:

And initially CREED will be the only cash shop item. So if no player every buys one to sell on the open market, there will be no way to play for “free”. And since at the beginning there won’t be a lot of in game currency circulating, how much would one go for? It’s a very Chicken/Egg problem.

It makes me appreciate the thought that went into designing how the GW2 exchange rate works. I think maybe it could use a little tweaking now that we have a better idea of how valuable gold is relative to gems but overall not allowing players to sell gems or gold directly to each other is a good thing I think.

So 15% of 2c is rounded up to 1c or is it rounded down to zero?

Naekuh.7925:

The item was not priced correctly in trend of actual value.
Id be suprised if anyone would actually buy it, as trading the gems for gold direct and rebuying the sigil to replace it would be a more viable route while still netting you an extra 3g if were talking about divinity.

Unless of course they priced in in dollars/euros instead of gold. $3 has a fairly stable value for me – I can get my favorite fancy coffee drink at Starbucks for around that and I’m not anticipating any huge changes in my income that would alter my perception of what constitutes $3 worth of value (I really hope I’m not tempting fate here, lol).

Who knows what the exchange rate or the prices of superior runes is going to do in the future. I don’t think it’s feasible to price the items in the Gem store based on what the going rate on the gold market is for particular items because it’s too volatile. You have to price them based on what you think folks will spend $3 on.

Malediktus.9250:

Pandemoniac.4739:

I think ANet made a slight tactical error naming the MMO GW2. It’s not a sequel but a completely different game, and comparing the costs of items to the cost in GW1 is sort of a red herring.

The game is from the same developers and publisher, so even if it wouldnt have the same name I would compare them, since the items do exactly the same.

So you would also compare all the Sony Online games to each other? I think trying to compare Everquest to Everquest II would be a stretch, but you think you can compare the cost of items in DCUO to say Pirates of the Burning Sea in a rational way?

There are a lot of things that are similar between GW1 and GW2 but the economies are completely different. What’s the GW2 equivalent of “wood plank”? Is it ancient, elder, green, soft, or seasoned? Are you taking into account that in GW2 you can harvest wood from well known locations, although you have to refine it to make it into planks? It’s apples and oranges.

I don’t see how you can compare the value of anything between the two games when there is a completely different market in each – different items, different drop rates, different mechanisms for making money, different gold sinks, etc.

If it’s such a terrible deal, no-one will buy it and it will be changed or removed. I know I don’t have much interest in it.

I think ANet made a slight tactical error naming the MMO GW2. It’s not a sequel but a completely different game, and comparing the costs of items to the cost in GW1 is sort of a red herring.

thejoedude.3465:

sorry but i have to disagree with you, games run solely by the game developers run much better than games where decisions are suggested and voted on by the players, its just not good for the game itself when that happens. take world of tanks for example, they let their players heavily influence the game and the game went to crap in a very short time period and now all the good paying players have left that game because the noobs got to suggest and vote and it just ruined the game because the devs listened to the players as much as they did. its just not good to do this, it would ruin the game for everyone

I agree with you that games shouldn’t be developed by voting, and don’t think it has anything to do with noobs voting. In my opinion, games developed with a strong vision of what they’re meant to be with close attention paid to feedback from the players are best.

If the only player feedback is a checkmark next to some pre-canned ideas, I think a lot of valuable input would be missed. Users should discuss their requirements and allow the developers who understand all the technical constraints figure out the solution that would work best for the most folks.

The problem is that it’s really difficult to get folks to tell you their requirements without telling you a solution.