Guild Wars 2

Well, might as well fire up the ol’ GW2 client so… I was hoping they’d complete the weapon set (my Asuran guardian needs her trident and spear) maybe next time

MadRabbit.3179:

If Mike is calling the shots again, I am going to be really, really surprised if that happens. He has a lot of good will from me as a customer and his reappearance is what makes me hopeful.

Mike O’Brien is now (temporarily) filling the role of game director but he was calling the shots all along; he’s the president of ArenaNet and executive producer of GW2, after all. Everything that has been done in GW2 so far was on his watch.

Palador.2170:

Dashingsteel.3410:

Luckily the good news that comes with Easter overshadows all other bad news.

Discount candy!

Yeah, it’s great! Easter eggs will be half price tomorrow!

I just want to say that while I’m personally a little disappointed that they’ve suspended development on these new legendaries I am so happy to hear that it’s because you’re focussing on producing more content. I’ve long felt that you guys seemed to be spread too thin and I’m glad to see that this is being addressed. I feel happier about GW2 than I have for some time.

I appreciate that others are angry about this, I can see why, but for me it’s a positive step and no matter what anyone may feel I think we all need to thank Mike O’Brien for letting us know what they’re doing here. They could have said nothing like they did with cancelled/suspended features in the past but Mike is being open and frank here, and I really, really appreciate that and hope it continues in the future.

So this is disappointing but thanks for letting us know. I hope the backlash doesn’t deter you from communicating with us again, Mike (you picked a real doozy to start with! ).

I had all my level 80s parked beside one of those flax farms (didn’t know there were two, thankfully, otherwise I also would have gone for both). I realised that this farming and the dailies were the only things I did in game most days because the meta’s take too long and getting most of the rewards from HoT require such grinding.

I then remembered that I already have a job and decided to quit until the April patch arrives if that doesn’t bring real improvements to the game I think I’ll just stop completely.

Anyway, forgive my aside, long story short, I’d recommend you take a break for a day or two from farming, see if you still enjoy the game at a reduced pace. You don’t need the gold and you sure don’t need the health issues.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Fairly often I see it posted that we didn’t make any changes to WvW or the Desert Borderlands map as a result of our Desert Borderlands stress tests. While it’s totally true that we didn’t attempt to completely overhaul the entire map a month or two before the Expansion shipped (as that was definitely out of scope)

And that’s why it’s important to involve your customers early, so you don’t have to “overhaul the entire map”.

You guys work in a bubble of your own making. I wonder how much of the reworking that’s currently going on in WvW and other areas of the game would have been required if you had involved your player base earlier and got feedback on the features rather than try to keep everything as a huge surprise? I also wonder how many WvW players would prefer a surprise and how many would have preferred being involved in (hopefully) preventing the gamemode from getting into its current state?

The new WvW hit beta and receive a ton of criticism (good and bad). Will a lot of that criticism go unaddressed because it’s out of scope again and what you’re seeing is what you’re getting or is it still possible to affect WvW as a result of this beta? Basically is it a test or is it a means of getting feedback on the systems as you’re creating them so you don’t have to go back and rework them again?

Gaile Gray.6029:

Ayrilana.1396:

There’s a lot of communication here. It’s just that it doesn’t always entail what people want to hear (e.g. Release dates, what’s being worked on, etc) which Anet has stated numerous times that they do not provide those details until it’s nearly completed.

Thank you. That is precisely right. Nearly every comment, request, complaint, or discussion point about communication comes down to, as I said earlier tonight, “Tell us more” or “Tell us when.” And there are many, many times when we’re simply not going to do that because, to quote Mike O’Brien, “it’s nice for you to have presents to unwrap on release day.”

There’s very little content to the communication here: talking is pointless unless you say something. If you’re not going to “tell us more” or “tell us when” then what can you tell us?

I’m not looking for hard dates or “promises” but I’d like to know that something of interest is coming. I’d like to see more communication about what the actual plans are for the game (especially open world PvE and LS) and what we can actually expect in the quarters to come.

I now suspect that the April quarterly patch will simply be tweaking rewards and reducing prices and contain no new content. Now, reducing the grind required to do anything in HoT is definitely a good idea but it’s only a starting point. What else is coming?

Sarrs.4831:

Idk it could go either way.

It could be a big rewards patch which drastically adjusts item prices for map currencies, map currency drop rates, adds collections for currently-unobtainable Ascended trinket combinations.

It could just be “everything in HoT zones costs half as much, bye”.

I suspect it will be the latter along with maybe adjusting scaling on certain events. Nice and all but hardly exciting (although it will, no doubt, be presented as if it were the second coming).

Personally, I haven’t logged in just over a week, the news that there would be no new non-raid PVE content until Q3 has turned me off the game. System changes are nice and all but HoT was far too light on launch day content and IMO ArenaNet are taking far too long to address that post launch.

The January patch was disappointing apart from the gliding so I’m just hanging around to see if the April patch brings any surprises but I’m not hopeful any more.

I pre-ordered the Ultimate version of HoT, I’ll be very wary of pre-ordering the next expansion until I know how much is in it. I quite like a lot of HoT but it is very light on content, we’ll see what the April patch brings but they’ve been very slow on adding content after the release.

It’s not worth the cost, IMO.

Just a note on this, in my case the second time it crashed I had already turned my settings to the lowest settings and I’ve been using the 64 bit client for the entire time its been available. Still crashed, might have time to give it another go today, for science!

winterlove.6834:

want to know is there low level HoT content where I could make a new character ssay reverant and level my character while exploring HoT content or is a lot of the hot content for higher levels

All 4 maps in HoT are level 80 (and the mobs pack a punch so they’ll rip through non-80s).

I haven’t had the octovine crash but Dragonstand has crashed the two times I’ve been there during/right at the end of the final cutscene. The first time I was solo, so I don’t know what happened the second time it seemed to be a map/server crash as when I logged back in my entire squad was scattered around various megaserver instances and we asked but no-one was in the one we’d just completed. Very annoying.

Blude.6812:

Ayrilana.1396:

Not this again. Nothing has been shown to prove that HoT was a failure.

Or to prove in anyway it was a success for that matter.

So it’s all pointless speculation? I agree.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Yeah… it is really embarrassing that in 2016 we have a single text based window with no functionality as the core means for finding a group in an MMO.

I’ve seen better LFG support in 2008 MMO’s.

It’s pretty poor alright, it needs the ability to advertise a squad desperately, both for raids and to enable people to organise maps. However given ArenaNet’s glacial pace when it comes to these things I suspect it’ll never happen (or will take years and then be marketed as one of the wonders of the world when it does come).

Edit: yeah, I realise that looks angry but it’s a serious omission and really hinders our ability to organise.

Kattenpootjes.4291:

Just ignore it, it’s one of those clever tricks to make players use their credit cards and buy gems to convert to gold

Hardly, it would cost about $900 or so to buy that much gold. I can’t see that many people being willing to do that for some particle effects, more likely it’s TP tycoons buying and selling.

Also, the listings are from players, not from ANet.

It’s not just always your client, this has just happened to me in Dragon’s Stand, I was in a squad, we got to the very end, the cutscene started playing then we all crashed. No-one in the squad was in the instance we just completed, which indicates that it’s not us, it’s the servers.

Because there are hundreds, if not thousands, of minor issues. A lot aren’t even logged in any defect tracking system and I have no faith in your ability to judge the complexity of the work required to fix a defect: sure it may be "one line of code " but the challenges in a system as complex as this game a) are finding the right line of code you need to fix and b) making sure that your fix doesn’t break anything else. Neither is as easy as you might think.

Finally these are as you say minor issues. They have better things to do with their time.

Participation should be independent of the map you’re on. Game wide, not map specific. The game should also hold a slot for you on the map you were on if you crash, for a few minutes, releasing it if you log onto a character in another zone or exit the game normally.

It’s an entire kingdom that’s been on the floor of the ocean for, what, a couple of hundred years and covered in Dragon corruption, it’ll take more than a couple of years to cleanse. Oh and the undead didn’t just disappear when zaitan did. Their corruption will remain for quite some time but it should be OK in GW3 I reckon.

Kraggy.4169:

Raziel.4216:

Marketing strategy for HoT.
Not related to mounts at all.
Merge time…. again.

This!

I suspect Anet have looked at the stats and seen just what a small % of players have actually bothered to unlock this skill as they [the players] have little or no interest in HOT at all.

Anyone who bought HoT will have unlocked Gliding in the first hour or so. It’s the very first Mastery in HoT.

I think it’s been proven by now that the op simply didn’t know what an inventory slot is and assumed it was a bag slot. Sad that his reaction is to sling mud at ArenaNet over his own ignorance.

Azure Prower.8701:

It’s broken and I want to play.

Either world is full or I just get kicked back to Divinity’s Reach immediately upon joining.

Yeah, is this issue being addressed?

Kejumi.3826:

10k drinks if you think about it isn’t that bad actually. as the event is apparently year long, as the above denoted, and I quoted the math in the link below:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/What-s-the-best-way-to-farm-Wintersday-Gifts/first#post5875120

77Hours isnt too bad considering I know I’ve spent more farming my legendaries, and what I have there doesn’t consider accumulated gifts from dailies, karma, and the other achievements. Besides they probably designed it so that not everyone could acquire the thing, because if everyone could get it so easily than what makes the item special.

The event is not year long, the 10,000 drinks achievement will be available through the year, which means you can still progress it throughout the year with the TP and the Wintersday tree in your home instance as the only real source to get drinks or presents. Your own Wintersday tree will not get you all that far along.

The event is a massive farm/karma sink and the item will have been purchased by most people who get it.

That’s not special to me and I personally never felt that something was made more special by denying it to others.

It’s Wintersday, a lot of people are farming that (especially kitten much farming is required for Winter’s Presence and that farming is so profitable).

They have, in the gemstore they’ve added Upgrade Extractors but they cost far more than any sigil or rune.

I’ve had good luck tagging up beside the HP I want, announcing that I’m going to do it and waiting a few minutes, just two players is enough for most of them and people running by will often join in (you get a daily reward chest for them).

In the future (when the next expansion comes around) I can see them reducing these HPs to Veterans instead of Champions.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

They’re clearly based on the English.

From their names and the myths they’re based on I would say they’re more Irish, Scottish and Welsh dryads/nymphs.

Aomine.5012:

Hint of making “fun” design and objective:

Make your own Devs do it. If they can finish it without any complaint and have fun while doing it, you have your design right. If they give-up half-way or think there’s no point, you have your design atrociously wrong.

QFT. If this achievement was a life time one that’s always available that’s one thing. This achievement is ludicrous. Having it as a requirement for the shoulders is doubly so.

Gaile Gray.6029:

• We will be leaving the Festive Imbiber achievement active throughout the year.

10,000 drinks over 52 weeks is still ridiculous, it’s almost 200 a week. Seriously, how is this any better when the drinks themselves aren’t available (in any appreciable quantity) during the year?

I’d like to ask who exactly considers this kind of “achievement” fun? How did this ever get into the game? Basic maths would tell you this was unachievable through game play, this is just another gold sink.

ham.8209:

2 weeks from now if i remember right . and look out for them gift box,s all over the place . they are the bomb lol

You think it’s going to end before new year’s eve while a lot of their staff is on holidays? More likely it’ll be mid January like other years.

antichecker.1675:

Pifil.5193:

antichecker.1675:

this is a ridiculous joke, my guild has 2 guild missions only able to be done in the stronghold. Funny how Anet allways messes things up, but the community never gets any kind of recompensation.

Yeah, they should add a free week onto all of our subscriptions for this!

Let me put it this way. I spend quite some money in this game. Lets just say the sum of all is 4 digits. So if you think GW2 is all f2p and the devs are working for free, you couldn’t be more worng. They actually gain a lot of profit from the Gem Store. And that is perfectly fine. I enjoy the game and like to support the development of it. But think about it, if in worst case some bugs would cause all players who ever spend in this game, to be upset with it at the exact same time and they would stop playing. Your totally “free” content would have no more budget and you could keep ur free subscription without new legs, new rais or anything besides cosmetical.
So yes, even if it is f2p, customer happyness is something crucial.

Apparently you somehow think that I believe that this is all “free”. Of course they make money, of course they do, otherwise the servers would have been shut down ages ago. Personally, I’ve spent more money on this game than I did on my WoW subscription and I think it’s money well spent. I like supporting the game through the gemstore.

Back when I was playing WoW if the servers were unstable for a long time Blizzard would add a day or two to your subscription, because people were paying a subscription to a game without being able to actually play it. That made perfect sense, here you’re not paying a subscription and the game is still up, they just disabled one of the sPvP modes because of a game-breaking bug. The rest of the game is running fine so what do you think would be suitable compensation for players in a game without subscription fees?

Personally, I think the idea of them giving anyone compensation over something like this is ludicrous. A game mode being down for a while isn’t likely to drive anyone away unless they were planning on leaving anyway.

antichecker.1675:

this is a ridiculous joke, my guild has 2 guild missions only able to be done in the stronghold. Funny how Anet allways messes things up, but the community never gets any kind of recompensation.

Yeah, they should add a free week onto all of our subscriptions for this!

John Smith’s job is to protect the economy, not to provide fun content. I trust he will do his job.

Will we enjoy it when he does so? Maybe, but getting less of anything in games is rarely fun.

Raziel.4216:

Methal.9045:

Goatjugsoup.8637:

its only a chore if you make it one

its a chore.

Not to those who take their sweet time.
It’s not a chore, I enjoy it.

Me too, I’m not in a rush to finish them. I take them as a long term goal rather than something I have to get out of the way right now.

Kichwas.7152:

Blame the art team.

Stupid art team!

It would be a colossal waste of time to rework all the maps for this and would be like a red rag to a bull for everyone who didn’t buy HoT.

Personally, I’d rather they put that effort into producing new maps.

It’s just a name. A lot of elite skills are trash (especially racial elites) so I didn’t think these would be any more powerful than normal specialisations, especially because they said they wouldn’t be any more powerful than normal specialisations right at the start and several dozen times since.

Quarktastic.1027:

Wethospu.6437:

If you are on EU, I can solo the fight for you.

GG

I could probably solo it too if I was you….but we can’t all be you.

I believe he was offering to help the OP get the achievement.

Killyox.3950:

Valentine.4286:

Okey, gj.

Now go outside and move around a bit. Must have been, I dont know, 3days and 8 hours since U moved?

Why do you care and what’s it to you? Jelly or what? Why do people feel the need to belittle others and give them “advice”. Care about yourself man.

I think it was a joke.

Earlywood.7438:

Just getting fed up a little. I spend time throwing my tag on and running a Verdant or Auric map, getting participation well over 200% (not that it matters) only to have a crash with a few minutes left of night time after an hours worth of work, to come back to a new dead map with no participation.

Please, if participation is used to determined your rewards at the end, make some sort of attempt to get people back to the right map. I love the idea of participation to determine rewards, but this really needs to get implemented better. The way it currently works, I just can’t trust that the game will make it to the reward.

That sounds like a great idea and participation is a good way of determining which map you “belong” to.

In general though, if the game loses contact with a player (they should be able to tell the difference between a crash and someone exiting the game or changing characters) then they should “reserve” that player’s slot on the map for two or three minutes to see if they come back.

I came here to see if I was crazy and had misread the rune that was unlocked when my Daredevil auto-maxed out this morning (had about 260-270 hero points in it before the change) and also to find out where the rune recipe unlock had gone (it wasn’t on my ranger who’s my 500 leatherworker).

I’m surprised they didn’t just give us an account bound recipe for the Rune the same way they do with the Daredevil headgear and staff. That would have been a simple solution, you could have learned it on whatever character instead it’s kinda confusing.

Thanathos.2063:

Again: You can buy each recipe for a single laurel if you want another copy.

That’s cool, that’s what I’ll do so, it’s no big deal but it’s still a bit weird that they did it this way.

Valky.2574:

Pifil.5193:

No just the normal “my sneering assumptions are facts” attitude so common round here.

And what makes your opinions any better ?
where is your proof on sales ? yea that’s what i thought

At lest we have post on ppl complaining of empty zones on peak times

Which opinions? I haven’t actually expressed any, nor have I said anything about sales, I just warned against making assumptions. Assuming something is true because that would back up whatever you believe to be true is a bad idea.

You may wish to look up the mega server system, it may explain those empty zones.

halcyonforever.6028:

I have also been exclusively in the halloween zones, HoT can wait. Also just because someone ended up in an empty zone doesn’t mean there aren’t countless others full to capacity that you just draw the short stick on starting a new one. It happens.

Exactly, I took a break for a few months, coming back and after a few goes I thought the Silver wastes were dead, I was about to give up on them when someone on the map mentioned there was another map l looking for members and told me about the LFG taxi stuff, then I realised I was just unlucky and being put in new, empty zones and that there were loads of Silverwastes instances where people were playing.

Once people get their exploration done the same things will happen here.

Ticky.5831:

RedBaron.6058:

The only reason HoT launch was smooth is because the sales were really below the expectations of ANet…

Not enough players to hamper the servers…

Do you have anything to back that up?

No just the normal “my sneering assumptions are facts” attitude so common round here.

Adding a fourth line would break the game and create a huge power imbalance between players with HoT and those without it. This is a terrible terrible idea.

I don’t know the last time I saw real reviews on metacritic as opposed to protest reviews used to “punish” companies.

Aye.8392:

Pifil.5193:

… I can’t see how a system that requires you to get unique, individual Hero Points once per character can be seen as “grindy”

But, that isn’t really true is it? I had over 2,000 skill points on one character and they decided to take that away from me and replace the points that I had already earned with shards. Now I have the pleasure of earning Hero Points yet again. Woohoo

It is true. It is completely and utterly true. When they replaced Skill Points with Spirit Shards and Hero Points you got one Hero Point for each Skill Challenge in the world that you’d done and the rest were converted to Spirit Shards. You didn’t have to go back and unlock the Hero Points again, you couldn’t in fact, you can do each once per character, which is what I said.

When you take into account the fact that they gave us enough Hero Points from levelling to 80 to fully unlock all our character’s traits and skills this means that each character will have some Hero Points left. As the Hero Challenges in the expansion are worth 10 Hero Points each the whole “grind” becomes “do less than 40 hero challenges on your characters you want to play”. Not that much of a grind once you do them the first time.

Aye.8392:

And to top it off they are allowing me to spend hero points on unlocking weapons, sigils, runes while not allowing me to play with the Scrapper properly until it is ALL done. Nice of them to let me know that’s how it would be before the game launched, too. Don’t you think?

I do think that all the “extras” (apart from the initial weapon chest that gives you the ascended weapon collection unlock) should have been the last things to unlock that you should have unlocked the skills and traits first. Then, if people want to they can unlock those sigils, runes, etc (I can see people wanting to skip those parts if they have multiple characters with the same profession).

Aye.8392:

At least it’s not like the fractal players — they get the pleasure of buying the ability to get rid of past “rewards” at the wonderful price of one gold per item. I’m glad A-Net at least understands rewarding good play.

Erm… no comment on any of that. Actually no, screw that, you’re right, the “reward” for doing something should never be just an invoice for a gold.

I have no problems with the Hero Point system and the cost of the elite specs, I don’t see this as “grindy” at all, I can’t see how a system that requires you to get unique, individual Hero Points once per character can be seen as “grindy” (especially when masteries are account wide so you’ll be able to get your alts their Hero Points a lot quicker). I feel that word has lost its meaning (like the word “noob” has) and a lot of people now use it to mean “anything I don’t want to do”.

Anyway, I’m enjoying playing the game and I want to get that across, it’s not all bad, everyone isn’t unhappy, some people really like seeing an open road with things to do, things to unlock and not having everything finished.

Edit: the one thing I would say is that I think it would be better to have all the traits first, so they are the first things to unlock and then the skills. You can play with these specs quite well when you have all the traits unlocked.

Chris Cleary.8017:

Hey all,

Just letting you know we are aware of the crash revolving around the Pact Mastery for Auto Loot and are working on a fix.

In the mean time, you can disable this by unselecting
Autoloot: Quick Interact in the General Options settings

We’ll get the fix out asap!

Thanks to you and everyone there, Chris, your hard work is appreciated, especially on the weekend!

tonyajc.2618:

Who knew the Jungle was filled with so much Salt water?!

I bet that’s how we’ll kill Mordremoth, we divert all the salt from the forums into his root system.

I don’t want a refund either, in fact I just put a bunch of extra money into the gem store too.