The problem is that action camera, in terms of mobility, is actually significantly faster in directions that are not forward because action camera treats all movement directions as running forward
You know how when you backpedal you move more slowly? Not when using action cam. If you’re using action cam hitting your backward movement key simple runs backward
Action cam is not just a more actiony camera, it actually eliminates all speed penalites for strafing or backpedaling.
Except when using most skills.
They amount of mouse and keyboard gymnastics required to accomplish the same level of mobility in combat while not using the camera, however, is severe. If I find myself mouselooking with the normal camera I don’t get a free and seamless 180 degree camera flip when I stop attacking for a second, and it definately doesn’t maintain my mouselook direction when translating from, say, a full strafe to a backpedal. I’ve got to hit a pretty complicated selection of buttons to pull that one off.
Point here is that the action cam is measurably better in terms of mobility in a real fight, where you’re regularly stopping attacks for several seconds, nd massively superior in situations where you’re not attacking, like any part of the game where you simply have to dodge AOEs or make a series of quick platform jumps etc. simply by toggling it on than the alternative. It’d be nice if they baked the same functionality in to normal mouselook.
What I’m saying is absolutely true. Guild systems were not designed to make solo bank guilds, or provide “duos” with banners and the like in the first place. The revamped system simply reinforces the idea that a “small guild” is intended to be at least a party’s worth of players, and even then is extremely generous with those requirements, allowing use and progress of all systems to be done solo, including guild missions. You will make progress no matter your size, you simply won’t make it as fast. In this respect it is no different than the old system.
If you can PUG for a dungeon, or a fractal, or LFG for a map taxi, you can do the same one time for a guild hall. I’ll personally help you with this if you can’t find anyone else.
You can still get banners. They’re just more expensive. If you had banners unlocked before, go buy them with favor in the guild initiative. If you didn’t, go level a guild hall and a scribe like any size guild also has to.
Again, the difference in the new system is that you have to put in the work wheras in the old system you didn’t have to put in any work and just got influence and the selection of things it provided on top of the rewards you already got for playing content.
That system, as I’ve said repeatedly, was broken and skewed extremely in the favor of guilds with massive player rosters. Now the only thing skewed in the favor of those guilds is progression speed but not the ability to progress or the ability to actually utilize earned upgrades
Funny thing is I don’t recall reading “anywhere” that such changes were being applied to the game when I pre-ordered HOT (4 Copies I might add for the whole family).
Had I known prior, it would have influenced my decision…and saved me a few bucks.
There are some really cool things about the expansion that I do like, but the truth be told I’ve not even bothered to log in for close to a week now because it seems like everything with HOT has slanted or nerfed things in such a way as to funnel players “more towards buying gems”….
I don’t know about the rest of you but I’m over getting into a game just to see my time and investment turned upside down by an industry that can’t even be bothered to include us in the loop before making dramatic changes.
Its time for players to have some protections. We are after all what determines the success or failure of a game.
The argument that ingame economic decision are made from the lens of encouraging people to buy gems is just plain wrong due to the basic nature of the gem exchange.
Specifically, the more people that buy gems and convert them to gold, the cheaper it becomes to buy gems with gold.
No amount of nerfing gold gain or increasing gold costs encourages or rewards converting gems to gold.
With admin privileges and a couple of key strokes I’m sure any of that can be altered just like in every other MMO that has admin functions for economy adjustments..
not to mention there is nothing balancing, devaluing, or adjusting those dollars they are taking in. Its pure profit.
With admin priveledes and a couple keystrokes they could send also charge your preferred payment method thusands of dollars, sell your personal details to a number of direct avertising firms, or delete everything on your account, strip you naked, and jump your characters off a fatal cliff.
Yet they don’t.
If the basis of your argument is “well they could do something underhanded” that’s not really much of an argument.
Do you apply the same logic to every service which you pay for and every product you buy, or is it reserved for this one specifically?
The problem is that action camera, in terms of mobility, is actually significantly faster in directions that are not forward because action camera treats all movement directions as running forward
You know how when you backpedal you move more slowly? Not when using action cam. If you’re using action cam hitting your backward movement key simple runs backward
Action cam is not just a more actiony camera, it actually eliminates all speed penalites for strafing or backpedaling.
1: Thieves have always been top tier duelers. their job has always been to seek out and quickly down their opponent and get away. Every mechanic of the thief is based around either killing or avoiding combat. it is a job they do exceedingly well. WvW or PVP Thieves have alswayse been amazing. never the most powerful, but always well taken care of. (by that I mean they have had the needed attention given to both their underpowered and over powered abilities.)
Thieves are not top tier duelers, and haven’t been since the trait revamp. That patch scaled the power level of every other class significantly and barely moved thieves.
If you are dying to a thief in a 1v1 fight right now, and you are not also a thief, you are playing significantly worse than the thief.
What I’m saying is absolutely true. Guild systems were not designed to make solo bank guilds, or provide “duos” with banners and the like in the first place. The revamped system simply reinforces the idea that a “small guild” is intended to be at least a party’s worth of players, and even then is extremely generous with those requirements, allowing use and progress of all systems to be done solo, including guild missions. You will make progress no matter your size, you simply won’t make it as fast. In this respect it is no different than the old system.
If you can PUG for a dungeon, or a fractal, or LFG for a map taxi, you can do the same one time for a guild hall. I’ll personally help you with this if you can’t find anyone else.
You can still get banners. They’re just more expensive. If you had banners unlocked before, go buy them with favor in the guild initiative. If you didn’t, go level a guild hall and a scribe like any size guild also has to.
Again, the difference in the new system is that you have to put in the work wheras in the old system you didn’t have to put in any work and just got influence and the selection of things it provided on top of the rewards you already got for playing content.
That system, as I’ve said repeatedly, was broken and skewed extremely in the favor of guilds with massive player rosters. Now the only thing skewed in the favor of those guilds is progression speed but not the ability to progress or the ability to actually utilize earned upgrades
Funny thing is I don’t recall reading “anywhere” that such changes were being applied to the game when I pre-ordered HOT (4 Copies I might add for the whole family).
Had I known prior, it would have influenced my decision…and saved me a few bucks.
There are some really cool things about the expansion that I do like, but the truth be told I’ve not even bothered to log in for close to a week now because it seems like everything with HOT has slanted or nerfed things in such a way as to funnel players “more towards buying gems”….
I don’t know about the rest of you but I’m over getting into a game just to see my time and investment turned upside down by an industry that can’t even be bothered to include us in the loop before making dramatic changes.
Its time for players to have some protections. We are after all what determines the success or failure of a game.
The argument that ingame economic decision are made from the lens of encouraging people to buy gems is just plain wrong due to the basic nature of the gem exchange.
Specifically, the more people that buy gems and convert them to gold, the cheaper it becomes to buy gems with gold.
No amount of nerfing gold gain or increasing gold costs encourages or rewards converting gems to gold.
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
The old system didn’t require you to spend personal loot and gold. If you are a small guild with this system, each member has to take a much greater loot hit than if you are in a big guild. It is a terrible system and really discourages being in a small guild.
Actually, the old system only required you to spend personal gold if you were in a small guild as influence gain was directly proportional to the number of people online, and how much they played, wheras the influence costs were not.
In the new system every guild has to dig in to their pockets, and in return every guild gets to use their upgrades permanently.
It doesn’t discourage being in a small guild any more than the old system. If you wanted to advance more quickly as a small guild in the old system, you traded gold for inf. The same is true in the new system, only in stead of inf you’re trading gold for mats.
Nothing has changed aside from the fact that guild upgrades are no longer cost free for some, and super expensive for others. Now they have the same cost for everyone. That is the definition of equality.
Wouldn’t keeping existing, core game, elements in place and adding new elements, available to HoT purchasers, be appropriate ?
Expand the system for the expansion rather than contracting the system for those without it.
The problem here is that the rework of the system is so extensive it’s actually incompatible with the old. They didn’t intend to expand on the influence system because it was flawed. They intended to replace a system of extremely variable cost-per-member enhancements with an ongoing requirement of cost-per-member gain with one higher but fixed costs of a real economic nature that grant permanent unlocks that have zero upkeep costs.
There really wasn’t a way to leave in the old buff system. It was indicative of the massive problems with population imbalance and its effects on the usability of guild upgrades in the old system, and furthermore was incompatible with how buffs scale in the new system. All told you can actually reach higher buff levels in the new system for many things, as all buffs scale up 1% for each new buff acquired, and there are more types of buffs. The tradeoff is that you can only select one at a time, but they don’t cost anything once you have them.
The banners system, similarly, was redesigned so that banners are more expensive overall in terms of scribing costs.
Where avaliable they grandfathered in the old stuff, and even made a couple of special case implementations like the merchant that lets you trade favor for your old banner and consumable unlocks, but even there you can see the intent of the system is clear. Favor for banners is much more expensive than the old influence costs, specifically because the entire thing was designed to make banners more expensive as they stack with the new, more powerful yet more specialized buffs.
In other places they simply threw out the old system entirely. Guild mission unlock progression is gone. Where previously you had to unlock a metric ton of stuff to get bounties, and then more to unlock treks, and so on, you now just get mission types randomly rolled for you and unlock more mission slots. There was really no way to make the old systems limitations transfer because the overall goal was to make guild missions easier to succeed by making them free to attempt and repeat.
The place most people have a sticking point is the loss of the old buff system or how cheap the banner costs were, but both of those systems were horrible implementations that were prohibitively expensive for small guilds, and practically free for large ones. The new system equalizes the access while scaling the rate of progression. It’s more equitable than the old one, where if you were small and wanted to punch above your weight in influence you had to do so constantly with gold>influence trades. This was extremely problematic long term as if you were a small guild trying to keep up buff levels with a large one, you were dumping literally hundreds of gold a week to influence while the large guild did nothing but have people log in for influence. In the new system you can still punch above your weight in gold>materials, but the difference is that you only have to do it once for most things. The large guild can distribute the cost and get those upgrades faster, sure, same as the old system, but once you’ve hit the same buff level you can actually use the upgrades for free no matter your size.
There was nothing to be gained by extending the old system, as it was massively unfair and actively more hostile to small guilds than the new one.
To all the people complaining “we want back what we had” …
Hey, I’m all fine with repairing broken stuff. I’m fine with change. I’m fine with all the stuff they reworked and added for guilds.
What I am not ok, is that ANet repaired something I had on Core and put it behind HoT purchase. They took content from Core, reworked it into the new system and restricted it with HoT.
ANet is reselling content and mechanics that already existed to their players. Yes, they modified those contents and mechanics, but they are still reselling the same stuff back to us.
Thank god I’m not a huge Fractal fan, because those guys lost way more than I did.
You seem like a level headed person, so let me ask you.
If the decision were up to you, how would you retain the balance inherent in the new system, while making it what you’d consider fair?
I mean, if it’s an issue of non-HoT guilds not being able to use HoT buffs, now you’ve got a situation where it’s unfair on the part of guild leaders, as the onus is on them to buy HoT and find 2 or more people to help them claim a hall. It’s then extremely unfair to the HoT players to be saddled with acquiring HoT-Specific account bound materials for upgrades. The alternative is, then, to either make those materials tradable, and thus TP fodder, which breaks the entire design of things like map currencies in HoT.
The only alternative, as I see it, would be implementing some sort of core guild hall that only required core materials. In which case, HoT becomes useless in terms of guild hall progression. Just use the core hall, then move to HoT. They then need to fork the upgrade requirements for both halls every time they add new ones, and then fork it again with the next expansion, and so on, which quickly becomes an unneccessary mire of unneeded content equivalency, and stagnates content in large chunks by making its rewards redundant or unneccessary.
Masteries are another thing entirely. I’ll agree that the fractal masteries are strange but what’s the real alternative here? leave the old reward system intact and suddenly you’re looking at HoT players having access to extra fractal levels, and, presumably, even better rewards. The result ends up being the same thing. Fractals are percieved as “paywalled behind HoT for decent rewards.”
All the things people have problems with losing, I can’t see a way to have implemented in HoT’s new balance paradigm without somehow also making HoT redundant, poinless, or actively less rewarding than just playing the same old core stuff. I imagine there were probably some design meeting about this issue and Anet’s staff came to the same conclusion.
I’m interested to hear how you would have attacked the problem.
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
@PopeUrban: You keep saying that as if it were true.
How is it more beneficial for a small guild now than the old system when I could get banners before but I cannot now? Where can we teleport to from anywhere when we cannot get a guild hall?
Your definition of “small guild” is literally less than five players if this is the case. I have taken a hall with three players to assist a guild I imagine is what you’re talking about. It was two players.
As per Anet’s definition, a guild is an assemblage of five or more players. Your “guild” is also unable to do dungeons, fractals, or any other group content without outside help. The changes to the guild system were made specifically to close the inconsistancies and loopholes that allowed solo players or “duos” to take advantage of systems designed for and balanced around group play.
What I’m saying is absolutely true. Guild systems were not designed to make solo bank guilds, or provide “duos” with banners and the like in the first place. The revamped system simply reinforces the idea that a “small guild” is intended to be at least a party’s worth of players, and even then is extremely generous with those requirements, allowing use and progress of all systems to be done solo, including guild missions. You will make progress no matter your size, you simply won’t make it as fast. In this respect it is no different than the old system.
If you can PUG for a dungeon, or a fractal, or LFG for a map taxi, you can do the same one time for a guild hall. I’ll personally help you with this if you can’t find anyone else.
You can still get banners. They’re just more expensive. If you had banners unlocked before, go buy them with favor in the guild initiative. If you didn’t, go level a guild hall and a scribe like any size guild also has to.
Again, the difference in the new system is that you have to put in the work wheras in the old system you didn’t have to put in any work and just got influence and the selection of things it provided on top of the rewards you already got for playing content.
That system, as I’ve said repeatedly, was broken and skewed extremely in the favor of guilds with massive player rosters. Now the only thing skewed in the favor of those guilds is progression speed but not the ability to progress or the ability to actually utilize earned upgrades
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: PopeUrban.2578
Every mob you listed has a very simple to understand mechanic with a very simple to implement counter.
The difference between HoT mobs and their far easier brethren is that, unlike core mobs, the special abilities of the various mobs actually matter and require you to do something other than run the same damage rotation for everything.
There’s nothing particularly unfair about these mobs. They simply require you to actually think about defending yourself from them, have some defensive skills, or if you’re going full offense bring someone prepared to defend you. Just damage is not enough in HoT, and will likely remain not enough for all content going forward because the game being nothing but mindless DPS was the primary reason PvE was boring up until this point.
Pay attention to what’s going on around you. Use your defensive skills and dodges for defense rather than to proc boons. Defend yourself.
Every class has the tools, in pretty much any given build, to deal with HoT mobs. Here are a few tips.
Pocket Raptors: Kill them with aoes and cleaves. No, really, that’s the design. They are packs of very low HP mobs with low frequency spike damage. Dodge the charge, and kill them. You have two weapons, or you have kits, or you have attunements. Use them appropriately for the given situation.
Kite smokescales out of their smoke. dodge/invuln/whatever you got when they do their seeker attack. Repeat until dead.
Gwyllion: Breakbars are a thing in HoT. Learn to save hard CC against bosses for when their break bar is vulnerable. That is literally why they designed break bars. To give you a chance to actually use CC on bosses in large events. Gwyllion stealths. Use a mastry to counter it, or follow the guy that has the mastry.
Frogs: Stunbreaks are not PvP only skills. If it’s going to stab you, it has an obvious tell. It only pulls out daggers when it’s about to stab you. Use movement abilities to close when they shadowstep, or defensive abilities and dodges to counter their ranged attacks while you walk forward.
Mordrem (all of them): Use crowd control abilities All mordrem with “big trouble” abilities are also succeptable to stuns, fears, launches, and other such effects when attempting to activate those abilities. Interrupt them. If you’re blowing your CC on DPS and its on cooldown when you need to interrupt a key skill, that’s you playing poorly, not the game being unfair.
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
It says critical hit chance, why would you think it was supposed to increase healing? You’re not hitting things when you heal them. Ferocity’s tooltip, also says critical damage, nothing about healing.
I get where you’re going with this, but the tooltips aren’t unclear. The game never mentions critical heals. Literally the only reason you would expect them to happen is if you had played some other game that had such a feature (which als probably explained you you that its crit chance stat also effects healing.)
It would be interesting to add them as a mechanic, but healing is in much more need of reliable upticks than some sort of randomized mechanic.
The enemy shadow steps to you thing can kinda be done already with Scorpion Wire though, even if its very unreliable.
True, but “shadowstep to enemy” can also be done with a lot of abilities that aren’t steal. What makes steal special is that it’s an extra button, and that there are a lot of traits that can imbue it with extra effects.
Think about it from the perpective of an on demand instant pull that ca also be traited to daze, poison, ive you some init, etc. etc. as well as whatever aoe effects your elite spec line may add to it and it starts to make sense. This is essential as changing steal, as we’ve seen with other elite specs, means that “on steal” traits become “on using your f1 ability” and traits like improvisation become “using your f2 ability” etc.
It makes even more sense if it also generates a form of stolen item that’s different from the basic ones, so in stead of primarily offensive steals, you get a more group-centric buff. For example, stealing from a warrior gives you an axe whirl, but liberator-pulling a warrior might give you a “banner of might” steal that plants a might pulsing banner that can’t be picked up, or in stead of stealing the group support healing seed from a ranger you get a camoflauge kit that aoe camoflauges (the ranger version of stealth that breaks on movement) etc.
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
Runes of <elite spec name> recipies are learned immediately by the character that maxed out the spec immediately, and only then are added to the laurel vendor for other characters on your account.
So, if your character is a druid, you have to finish training druid to get the recipie. If your character is not a druid, you need to fully train a druid on your account for the laurel vendor to sell him/her the recipie.
A limited version of this would be cool without destroying the ability for people to still play a broad selection of content though.
Warframe had this cool system for leveling up where you’d gain XP to qualify for the next rank, but to actually rank up you had to complete a trial. So, you’d go do all these missions with your friends, however you liked, but when you hit what is the equivalent of the mastry system’s “spend hero points to train” button, you’d be sent to a solo instance where you had to demonstrate proficiency in various game systems.
This was a linear system, but it could be adapted for mastries so, for instance, in stead of just hitting a button for updrafts, when you got all the XP and mastry points you need to train it, you in stead got a little story-esque popup that said “you are prepared to modify your glider to take advantage of the jungle’s updrafts, talk to pact glider technician Nalla Skytinker to test your modifications”
Talking to the NPC would start a trial instance which would allow you to use the updrafts there, on some sort of time limited race course. Complete the trial, and you get a signoff from the NPC “Your modifications look solid Commander, I think these are ready for field work” and bam, now you have trained updrafts (and in a perfect world got a new glider skin, but that’s another topic)
This would be a much smaller amount of content, but would help the mastries feel a little more immersive without breaking the “do whatever you like to get xp and mastry points” model that makes it so friendly for group play, as well as perhaps enhancing the narrative or sense of accomplishment from leveling the various masteries.
You could also phase the rial NPCs in to ambient dialogue similar to how some of the story NPCs comment on your decisions in HoT. Like, how if you chose to defend with ibli, you and ibli have a little ambient conversation when you pass him in the world. if you run across Nalla skytinker she might comment on your mastry “How are those modificaions working out Commander?” “Just fine Nalla, The sky’s the limit!”
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: PopeUrban.2578
They need to easy up just a tad on the fail condition I think. If the lanes could succeed or fail independantly and then have the successful lanes just spawn some chak defense objectives I think it would get more play as it would work more like tarir.
See, in tarir you have four events that need to complete within X time, but the UI lists them all out so you can see if, say, south is doing poorly. This lets peple at a highly successful west go “well, we’re all boned if south doesn’t get some backup” and move to south. Also, the mechanics of the event let the most successful lanes basically stop their event at low HP to go back up the others if there’s a opulation issue, allowing player strategy to make up for lack of raw numbers on the map.
If TD worked more this way, it would be more comprehensible. Add a way for a winning lane to “hold the line” with some ongoinf defense objective, and a way for a losing lane to recover with a ‘repair the cannon’ objective.
In addition, the UI needs to clearly report the status of each lane so people know where to go to help a weak lane, and the UI could also stand to more clearly point out eggs and why smashing them is so important.
There’s twio hero challenge locked behind ley line gliding. One in Dragon’s stand ( spider queen area ) and one in Auric Bassin.
So there’s that I guess too.
nothing in Aurics basin is locked behind lay line gliding.
Nor any other gimmick, I have 100% map completion there, and I dont have ley line gliding and I have not abused any of the “tricks” to get into certain areas.
You can legitimately get all points in AB without it, it may just require some convoluted gliding, and you will need lean techniques.
I got 100% in auric basin without lean tecniques. That one tricky giding section where you’re intended to use the leyline? you can do it without even having updrafts unlocked. it just takes some extremely precise jumping and gliding.
+1, as a guild leader, the first thing I do every log on, and last thing I do before logging off is going to the hall to check production, treasury. and aetherium levels, and fill my scribing orders.
It would be awesome if the game actually logged me in to the guild hall in stead of loading whatever random map I’m in and then making me sit through another load screen to go my general admin for the day.
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: PopeUrban.2578
The lack of people is also because of the way the zone metas are designed specifically to break up large zergs in to smaller strike teams. In the old maps, you’d have a handful of events with massive groups of players present, and the majority of the events on the map failing because nobody wanted to do small scaled events which didn’t pay off very well.
The new system rewards the entire map for every single event that gets done, and events don’t sclae their rewards based on the number of participants, but rather scale rewards based both on the number of map-wide events being completed and the number of events you’ve done personally since joining the map.
People have adjusted to this (pretty fantastic) design of zone meta levels, and so during the prep phases they are actually extremely spread out through the zone, and are more inclined to hit events nearby than WP to wherever the biggest zerg is. The map design then eventually funnels the whole map in to larger zergs for meta boss events naturally.
It works! The event system now properly rewards doing what events were designed to do in the first place: reward you for assisting nearby NPC problems rather than waypointing to wherever the largest concentration of players is.
The maps aren’t less populated, the players are just more spread out because it benefits two players and everyone on the map if thos two players tackle a nearby event that nobody else is at more than if those two players go find a large group on the other side of the map to zerg with.
I get what you’re saying, but the alternative is basically a form of collections for everything.
The mastry system may not be immersive, but it does a pretty good job of being rather freeform in terms of how you progress it, and for a system that’s supposed to essentially replace leveling it does a pretty good job. I’m already seeing a lot of divergence among my friends in how we’ve chosen to progress various masteries and how it has individualized the leveling experience while still allowing us to do pretty much all the content available to us together.
I have a guy that went hardcore gliding, and one that went hardcore mushrooms, and one that went hardcore fractals, and one that went hardcore legendary crafting in my guild. We’ve all still been playing all the content together, but the way masteries are set up we were able to pick what felt important to us to progress.
In a system where you were more railroaded, if we didn’t all want to progress, say, exalted mastry, we wouldn’t be able to play together very much as we did masteries unless we all wanted to progress the same lines at the same time. We’d either all do content for exalted masteries, or we’d all be off soloing various different stuff. In the current system, the choice is simply “do you guys want to do HoT or Core stuff?” and we can all play together and still progress in the ways that are most attractive for us.
False.
I run a small guild and our guild hall is far more useful than the old buff/banner system.
At guild level 14, with very little work in the hall we have:
This system is far far more beneficial to small guilds than the old system. The assertion that it exists only for large guilds is silly. Guild halls actually scale for guilds of all sizes and reward effort and contribution proportionally. Small guilds like mine in the new system progress more slowly, but we can actually progress and use that progression. In the old system there were a lot of upgrades we simply couldn’t use due to the ongoing influence cost. Now we can actually use all of our upgrades.
The “small guilds” complaining about guild hall costs are people that fail to realize that those costs are permanent unlocks that last forever.
Guild halls are in no way unusable or even particularly expensive for small guilds provided you upgrade in a reasonable manner that prioritizes function over “get all the things as quickly as possible”
I and my members get great use out of all the cool stuff in our little tent city every day, wheras in the old system we got, what, an occasional banner and maybe one buff and two guild missions a week that we couldn’t retry if we failed them.
To all the people complaining “we want back what we had”
Whether you bought HoT or not The old buff system is gone, and everyone lost it.
The reason it is gone is the same reason you can’t gain influence any more, the same reason the new upgrade system runs on materials and aetherium, and the same reason guild missions are free to run and don’t require any unlocks.
They reworked the entire guild system from the ground up to make it more focused on directed effort, and less focused on passive gains and endless sinks, and more focused on permanent unlocks with larger costs.
You lost the old buff system. You also lost the requirement to constantly farm influence for buffs. You also lost the requirement to dump obscene amounts of influence in to the guild mission system. You also lost being penalized by losing guild missions possibly preventing you from affording buffs.
Tradeoffs were made in the new system.
Specifically, those tradeoffs were made in the direction of permanent rewards and unlocks, and it is for that reason the old buff system was retired. That level of buffs, all stacked together was a completely broken system that was completely inaccessible for small guilds and trivial for large ones.
I don’t see anyone complainig they “lost” their guild mission unlocks, or that they “lost” the ability to waste influence by failing them. That’s really what you’re complaining about here. You “lost” a system that required constant upkeep at an impossible level for small guilds, and zero upkeep for large guilds and in return got a system of permanent, scaling unlocks that only differ in the rate of acquisition, but require zero upkeep once earned
Of course the old system would be completely broken if it stacked buffs the way the new one does. That is why they changed it in the first place. It was completely busted in a way that conferred a massively superior advantage just for having a large guild. Not for doing anything with that large guild mind you but just for having a lot of guild members while being completely unaccessible or prohibitively expensive as a constant influence sink for smaller guilds.
How does that not appear broken to you?
Complain about the “paywall” of HoT all you like, but every single system in HoT was derived from player feedback, and the fact HoT even exists as a bundled expansion in stead of free releases is also derived from player feedback. We told arenanet that we wanted expansions. It wasn’t in their plans for the game. Now they’ve gone to all the effort to create a meaty expansion and want to incentivize its purchase. Did it not occur to you people that the expansion model would lock some features behind an expansion purchase?
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
Prediction:
Gunslinger will be an elite spec with rifle. They’ll put buffed ricochet in it. It’ll be a GM trait in the same tier as a capstone rifle trait so you have to choose between them. The other gunslinger traits will have a common theme of pistol/rifle/utility choices. People will be mad about it for a week just like feline grace/daredevil. Then everyone will forget about it after a few months.
To give thieves the ability to wield rifles would require an elite specialization being made. Making an elite specialization for one profession requires making an elite specialization for all of them. Adding new specializations requires lore, which requires an expansion, which requires one year of development after focusing on at least a year’s worth of living story updates. So maybe it’ll come back; 2+ years from now.
False. Anet already said that additional elite specs are planned for living story roll out, not just for big expansion releases. They specifically stated this is why they designed the elite spec system the way they did, so they could more quickly balance and deploy new build options, as elite specs only balance against the core class, unlike the GW1 skill system where all new skills has to balance against an ever growing number of existing skills, meaking each new addition harder to balance than the last.
ok well then if its for the gvg and wvw community, then how come can we not invite other players to come to our arena who are outside the guild. We cant do GvG because we cant invite another guild to our arena for a fight.
all you have to do is add them to your group. Then they can just walk or WP in. I’ve visited a lot of other people’s halls this way.
Completed auric basin after the fix patch. Still no reward chest or anything.
All these different bags give the same exact things: a blue or green with maybe some low end mats that are worth nothing and better vendored. Also due to salvaging nerfs, I am fairly certain it’s better to vendor all blues/greens/whites like the old days again since most the time when I do salvage I get nothing from these items now other than luck consumables. And what does luck do? Nothing, far as I can tell.
Luck increases your account based MF, which effects drops from mobs (not drops from bags)
This MF stacks with consumabnles and boosters and has a cap of 300% (by which point you’ll experience a pretty noticable increase in your drop rates of rares and exotics compared to a new player using the same boosters and doing the same content)
You’re not getting it.
The entire idea of the crafting was a path by which you didn’t have to use the TP or crazy low RNG to get it.
The crafting model isn’t balanced to make it easier or cheaper when you’re buying stuff. It’s to make it actually achievable at all if you’re not buying stuff from the TP. You can go gather the materials yourself, reliably, and not spend anything at the TP.
Crafting is the ‘I want a precursor and want to spend zero gold on it, and in stead spend my time’ option. That option didn’t realistically exist before crafting because the only way to acquire a precursor without the TP was to sacrifice your firstborn to rngesus and still possibly get nothing. There was no progression toward it, it was either you got nothing, or you got a precursor.
Paying someone else for their luck or effort is still the fastest way to get a precursor. They didn’t want to change that for the existing ones. What they wanted to do is to add a method similar to the new legendaries (which you can’t buy or drop the precursors at all) for people that would rather do it themselves.
Doing it yourself is nearly always slower or more time consuming than paying someone else. That’s why commerce works in the first place. The difference is that it’s actually reasonable to say “i’ll do it myself” now.
I can’t possibly see how that is any more reasonable to say if it will take way longer and cost just as much if not more gold.
You’re still viewing it in gold costs. The point is that you can do it by not spending gold at all in a way that there’s an actual progress path rather than a completely RNG super low chance path of binary success.
It’s the same logic as crafting ascended. You can hope for an extremely low RNG drop chance, or you can opt for a more time consuming but reliable path by crafting it. The only reason precursors seem out of whck to you is because you’re viewing them from the lens of gold cost because, unlike ascended gear, they’re actually tradable. Anet admitted making them tradable was a mistake which is why all new legendaries and their precursors are not rng drops or tradable. Take gold cost out of the equation. Just pretend that, hey, you wanted to earn it through your own play in stead of paying for it on the TP, and save or use your gold for something else in stead. Now, from that lens compare the method of acquisition of precursors with and without the crafting mastry.
That was the type of play the crafting was designed for. it wasn’t designed to make them more accessible for people who pay others for their effort to make the process faster.
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
As other posters have noted, this is implicit in the reaper’s design. in general anet has said in the past that they try to design classes/builds with some core flaws and weaknesses (in reality they are kind of spotty on implementing this design goal)
The thief’s weakness is pure burst damage. No matter how you build a thief, landing solid CC and applying one good burst chain will usually equal a dead thief. The thief mitigates his weakness by having a lot of ways to disengage from fights and avoid those bursts.
The Reaper’s primary weakness is a lack of mobility. The ability to successfully out-kite a reaper usually results in a dead reaper. The reaper mitigates his weakness by having big spike damage, lots of durability, and access to debilitating conditions and pulls to counter kiting and put the enemy in his danger zone.
The problem you’re experiencing is actually an example of anet’s intended balance at work. DD is a spec designed to very nearly hard counter a reaper is the DD plays better than the reaper. Meanwhile, reaper is designed to very nearly hard counter ele, whos core weakness is being spammed with debilitating conditions, as it screws up their damage, mobility, and defense rotations that are highly susceptible to debilitating conditions due to the mechanics of attunements. The counter-train spirals on from there with various degrees of success. Some build’s “core weaknesses” aren’t weak enough, and some classes’ “core strengths” aren’t strong enough, but the basic goal anet has expressed for design seems to be where they like it for reaper.
They scale up for each addition boost type you add to the bartender by 1%.
if your Xp boost is 3%, I’m assuming you have a t1 bar and just the xp boost. ket the karma boost, and both will be 4%, get a workshop, market, etc. and install their various moosts for mf, harvesting, crafting, etc. and each one added will increase the potency of all boosts.
I don’t know if other metrics contribute to their scaling as well. perhaps getting building to t2 also scales them up?
+1 VERY tired of this. For me, luck is much worse. I use my artificer and still might have 200 essences to click through. It’s so bad that I dread having to click through my inventory.
Make 250 exotic luck essences.
right click the stack.
Click consume all.
That’s exactly what they said it was supposed to be. It’s a place where people can be set on teams to attack each other. later you can put torches, traps, etc. to invent whatever scoring mechanisms.
Where did you get the idea there would be timers or built in scoring? They specifically said the point of the torches was so they could be used as scorekeeping devices or for whatever people wanted to use them for.
You’re not getting it.
The entire idea of the crafting was a path by which you didn’t have to use the TP or crazy low RNG to get it.
The crafting model isn’t balanced to make it easier or cheaper when you’re buying stuff. It’s to make it actually achievable at all if you’re not buying stuff from the TP. You can go gather the materials yourself, reliably, and not spend anything at the TP.
Crafting is the ‘I want a precursor and want to spend zero gold on it, and in stead spend my time’ option. That option didn’t realistically exist before crafting because the only way to acquire a precursor without the TP was to sacrifice your firstborn to rngesus and still possibly get nothing. There was no progression toward it, it was either you got nothing, or you got a precursor.
Paying someone else for their luck or effort is still the fastest way to get a precursor. They didn’t want to change that for the existing ones. What they wanted to do is to add a method similar to the new legendaries (which you can’t buy or drop the precursors at all) for people that would rather do it themselves.
Doing it yourself is nearly always slower or more time consuming than paying someone else. That’s why commerce works in the first place. The difference is that it’s actually reasonable to say “i’ll do it myself” now.
With the bigger bags of HP in raids, D/D daredevil is starting to look pretty darn attractive. I haven’t tested it, but in terms of just theorycrafting it looks like a possible DPS increase.
(traits only)
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQNAoYVl8MhGnYpTw6Jw/ELjFl3AEAHw2GWWd48tH8FPA
Upside: easily maintain 17% +damage throughout the entire fight, pulmonary impoact damage ignores armor (so more damage than mug, but takes a bit more work to apply) and increased overall damage from bound. You also have the option to take fist flurry for increased damage during periods you’re out of init.
Downside: less +damage (3%) in the last 50%, Rotation is harder, and you’ve got to be more careful with your dodges when attempting to stealth disengage.
It’s possible (but would require testing) that you could get better overall fight dps out of the backstab DD, but it would be harder to play.
Prediction:
Gunslinger will be an elite spec with rifle. They’ll put buffed ricochet in it. It’ll be a GM trait in the same tier as a capstone rifle trait so you have to choose between them. The other gunslinger traits will have a common theme of pistol/rifle/utility choices. People will be mad about it for a week just like feline grace/daredevil. Then everyone will forget about it after a few months.
And please no one say “ANet didn’t say it was going to be easier”. We get that. Obviously. We thought it was going to be a non RNG “cheaper” way to get a legendary. And because it would be “cheaper” (and by cheaper I mean less gold spent to get it), there would be a massive time commitment. What we currently have is practically the same cost in gold, along with RNG, AND a massive time investment.
They didn’t say it was going to be cheaper either.
They said it was going to be a more reliable way to acquire a precursor yourself in stead of buying it
The collections actually do that. You can fairly reliably farm every part of them yourself, or split your cost between purchase and farming. You are no longer limited to trying for obscenely low RNG chances or farming up the entire gold TP price of a precursor.
The collections don’t make precursors cheaper, but they make them reliably obtainable for people that don’t want to buy stuff from the TP to get them
Auric basin meta is actually quite good for gold, if you salvage properly.
You will, however be reliant on actually joining maps that are starting the final phase (like SW) and be limited in speed by all the people not instance hopping to do just the final phase (like SW) and will eventually get frsutrated because you can’t find instances fast enough (like SW) because people are trying to jump in at the last minute for the boss without being willing to build up the zone to get to it (like SW)
Maybe you don’t like it because you didn’t grew up playing that kind of games,
there’s a lot of people in here that really enjoy retro gaming, and SAB is a great way to get that nostalgia feel inside their favorite “modern” game.If you don’t like it, fine, don’t play it. Is that simple, no need to make forum threads.
Asking for something not to be implemented just because you don’t want to play it is just being a child. Is like; “please don’t make Chronomancer because I don’t like playing Mesmer and I prefer that all of you people work on something that I do like.”
first no need to get insulting. second i’m 37 years old. my first computer was the first home computer(my dad had it because he programmed for the state government; which had them first) so I remember Zork(the first rpg) and temple of Apshi(the first graphical rpg) and neverwinter nights on aol (the first mmo). I’ve played literally every console released in NA. but you know what was awesome? as time went on my games got better; computers got better/consoles got better, games got better in general. super Mario brothers was great because there weren’t many options at the time. so yes I grew up with it and yes I understand the development arc. that’s why I am impressed with how far it has come and how far it will go. but once you’ve shot off a railgun at a targeting board you really aren’t interested in taking the half hour to load a single shot into your musket and taking that shot on the same targeting board. evolution is good.
A lot of people are interested in loading a single shot in to a musket and taking that shot though. By your logic martial arts, both of asian and european bent, would be wastes of time because the art of fighting has “evolved”
You know what? Swordfighting, boxing, MMA, etc. are still quite popular. As are multiple forms of “antiquated weapon” target shooting.
This isn’t medicine. Evolution of design isn’t a simple function of accomplishing a rigid goal better. This isn’t getting better at killing people or saving their lives. It’s video games. Fun is a very subjective thing. Not liking the kind of platforming play that SAB includes is fine. Attempting to state that it’s somehow factually inferior is not. This is a matter of opinion, because it’s a matter of taste.
Your tastes have changed, but many people still really like the specific mechanics of old style side scrolling platformers because they are mechanics that are replaced not improved by the inclusion of 3d. It’s an apples and oranges comparison, not an apples and bigger, tastier apples comparison.
Would still prefer if they added bank tab separately.
Also that still does not answer the lack of Mystic Forge and other crafting npcs.
I suspect the lack of a mystic forge/crafting stations is anets way of saying “we don’t want to render cities completely obsolete.” And I fully agree with that.
If guild halls had mystic forge/trading post/crafting stations, I would probably never step foot in Lion’s Arch again.
This. Though I do think they should add some extremely high cost/impractical means to achieve them.
Something like 25 pocket mystic forges to install a MF in your guild hall, or like thousands of consumable guild commendation crafting stations to install them permanently in the hall.
Like, options that are so high cost and impractical that they’re almost the equivalent of a “guild hall legendary” in that they grant a nice prestige and QoL feature, but do so at a cost that is so stupidly high it’s almost a better idea just to ignore them.
I mean they already sell the permanent airship/nobles passes for gems, and those are of much lesser cost when converted to gold, and they haven’t suddenly made cities obsolete.
What we should really be complaining about….something that I haven’t seen anybody mention:
The new guild buffs can only be used one at a time. You have to choose which buff is active. That’s a huge nerf.
It’s also completely intentional.
The old system was a constant influence sink to keep up buffs. It’s major problem was that it was trivial to maintain for large guilds, and impossible to maintain for small guilds.
The new system is a front loaded cost, but once it is paid it’s done. This makes it a more accessible system for guilds of all sizes. large guilds may get the upgrades done sooner, but small guilds that take a little longer still have the same access to those buffs.
The old system was initially designed so that you couldn’t afford to have everything at once due to the ongoing costs, but the design was kind of broken by large guilds. The new system is much closer to the intent of the design, while making it more accessible and customizable for all guilds and their members.
The entire guild system revamp was done to reward players tackling economic and content challenges together in a way that’s compelling for guilds of all sizes, and rewards them well. The influence system, and by extension the old buff and banner acquisition model was funkitten tally broken specifically because past certain point as your guild grew, they didn’t just become easier to get. They became essentially free due to all the login and passive inf from people just playing the game, even if every one of them was playing completely alone all the time. meanwhile smaller guilds under the old system could play together every day and still get nowhere near the amount of benefit from their guild.
As for non-HoT players not being able to access HoT services. Honestly, guild halls are part of the expansion. I’m suprised they let those players donate to the treasury or enter the hall in the first place. It’s a buy to play game. It’s not unreasonable to expect that people buy the occasional “required” expansion to gain the lion’s share of content and benefits when that means there are not monthly fees or seemingly “required” cash shop items.
The more you give away for free, the less expansion revenue is gained, and you have to make that money somewhere, which in turn means pushing the gem store much more agressively. The expansion model as a one time equal cost is far more fair to the consumer than predatory and annoying practices like black lion keys to drive revenue.
With the old system it was possible to earn influence just playing together. Even a small guild of a few friends that just enjoyed to do some stuff together was able to get some buffs running with that. Sadly you are completly missing the point, that small guilds, even some medium sized guilds, will never get past that " but once it is paid it’s done" point. So i don’t know wich game you are playing, but the GW2 HOT i am playing is not “making it more accessible and customizable for all guilds and their members”. The GW2 HOT I am playing just took away any chance for my little guild to ever get those buffs running again, since we are only a few friends playing together and none of us is called “Krösus”.
We just gave up to have those things.
Usually an “Add on” adds things to an existing game for the players that buy it. HOT is in fact the only “Add on” that i EVER played that REMOVES existing stuff for players that didn’t buy the “Add on”
I don’t know what your experience is like, but my small guild, with an average of 3-6 active players a day…
Your results may vary, but this has made all of those systems much more accessible and fun to interact with for my guild. Now, if your definition of “small guild” is two people, then yes, you have lost opportunities if you’re not willing to take one day to team up with the really large number of other such guilds that just want to get their claim out of the way.
You’re in no way cut off from the system. You’re not willing to invest effort in your guild, and you’d prefer it return to a passive system where you just got stuff for playing the same way you’d be playing without a guild If my small guild can, as of right now, have a functioning guild hall with four t1 buildings and a couple buffs, I’m sure you could as well if you were willing to invest effort in to the guild you claim is so important to you.
If the complain is the incentive to buy HoT, I don’t know what to tell you. Campaign anet if you like, but the fact is you’ve had the ability to play the game with zero additional cost for three years, and recieved a massive number of free content updates in that time. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask people to pony up a little bit of required rather than optional gem store cost after that amount of time.
It would be awesome if we could all play the game for free and get every content update and feature forever. It is, however, not an economic reality unless they push much harder on the cash shop.
If I have to choose between buying an expansion every couple of years, or having even more of the game’s rewards and content locked behind nickel and dime cash shop approaches, I choose the expansion model.
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: PopeUrban.2578
- The mine has no miners I love the effort that went in to making the guild halls feel like real places in the world. I like how new NPCs show up at the waypoint, and that time was taken to have them have little conversations when they show up or when they’re just hanging around the tavern before their structures are built. It lends a nice sense of narrative and story to the hall and adds a little extra interest to major upgrade steps. It is only for that reason that I feel that the absence of NPC miners seems out of place. So much care was given to introduce these NPCs as people and phrase the hall as a real place that the world of tyria interacts with, but upon building the mine, it’s just a cave which seems to produce aetherium from thin air. A couple miners with some looping animations to spice it up a bit would be cool. Bonus points if they stop digging and start sleeping or screwing around when aetherium is capped out.
The mine expansion 2 gives you said NPCs. And im thinking more npcs will join as you build up each building.
That’s fantastic news. Makes me wonder why they didn’t bother adding a couple to the t1 mine, especially since the proprietor specifically says a line when it’s founded about miners and wages.
It’s a bit different than the other structures, where the initial NPCs seem to adequately fulfill the purpose of the place. The mine spawns with piles of mined aetherium and some supports, but nobody seems to be mining the place. it’s weird, but only because the rest of the system seems as “real” as it does.
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: PopeUrban.2578
Maybe I’m weird but I actually enjoy the process of sifting through bags and salvaging things. Like, it keeps inventory compressed while actually playing so I can focus, and after adventuring I have downtime moments that are still kind of exciting because of the addition rng “ooh shiny” moments.
Salvaging, which was sort of a GW1 staple as well, sort of clicks with me. Somehow it just feels more natural to break down all the random worthless junk than sell a never ending supply of it to merchant NPCs that don’t seem to do anything with it but make it vanish.
I understand why it all bothers people, but I kind of like it. I think perhaps if we could deposit runes and sigils to a collections tab like crafting materials it would make the bags/salvaging system a bit more streamlined as you’d spend less time clearing them out at a merchant or the MF just to clear space to open the rest of your bags, and more time opening them and going “ooh, shiny”
As well, some sort of “salvage all” command by rarity would be nice, again, to streamline the process while keeping the feel of doing a “loot audit” and having those same downtime “shiny moments”
it’’s add 2 more players, the same as if you qued without a guild team. This is the reason for the 3 player requirement. It ensures that your guild team is the majority of the team.
So the xp boosters really are only giving me like 38xp per kill?
I believe xp boosts multiple the base xp, and then add that amount to any other bonus xp is on the mob.
Also, kessex is a very low level area so the mobs grant relatively small amount of xp.
That said, you’re pretty much always going to get the majority of your xp from events and map completion stuff. Mob xp in GW2 is a relatively small portion of total xp gain.
Bonus xp is also accrued on mobs depending on how long they have been alive. The variance you’re seeing in bonus xp is because some of those ettins have been around longer. You’ll see this bonus xp in its “raw” form if you’re not running any boosters at all.
That bonus xp has been in xp since launch to encourage people to move around the map rather than farm the same pack of mobs on respawn.
I’d also like to note that the guild halls are huge
I remember it being mentioned in the live streams that region based decoration permissions were planned. There’s easily enough space in the halls to give a great many players their own piece of the pie to decorate, but in some cases I am hesitant to do so due to the way the guild inventory and decoration permissions work.
This is working as intended. They specifically made the dungeons only rewarding as a source of tokens and the things you buy with tokens for this reason. So that, like much of the other content, different content has different reasons people want to complete it.
Not getting a group to do group content isn’t arenanet’s fault. That’s your fault. People that expect to run tons of group content without establishing groups of regular party members to do it with have always stunned me with their inability to perform simple logic.
LFG in pretty much every game was always implemented as a way to find party members enough so that you don’t have to use it any more, not as the primary source of party members so you can be endlessly frustrated by running content with random people that you’re not certain know the mechanics or play the content well.
If you want to run a lot of group content establish a group of players that you run the content with regularly
let me make an analogy
you pay 10$ for a gym membership (i know that’s cheap) that gives you access to all their machines and weights.
one day they upgrade the gym and include a swimming pool. to access the swimming pool you need to pay 10$ extra to access it.But you don’t know how to swim so you don’t need to pay the 10$ extra to use the pool. so you keep paying your 10$.
Except now you can’t use the weights either on the gym floor, you can only use the machines. If you want to use the weights you need to pay for the pool
that is what is happening with HoT and the guild bonuses.
you paid 50$ to get the core that included guild bonuses.
you are not interested in the expansion so they remove the guild bonuses.they did something similar to fractals.
To use your analogy, what they actually did was remove the freeweight room, and replace it with a pool, then ask you for a one time fee to help cover the cost of the pool. You can still use the gym, just not the pool, and nobody can use the freeweight room because it no longer exists.
So you have the choice to defend the fort or run supply. You can’t get credit for both in the new system. How many people are going to leave the fort that they’ve been defending for a while to babysit a bull if it means not yet to g credit for previous work.
That’s the whole point. Silverwastes was a “alpha implementation” of the new meta design you see in the HoT maps. It’s designed for players to coordinate specific jobs and chase the meta to get higher ranks.
The issue isn’t event credit. It’s that they didn’t update SW and dry top to use the new participation system, and increase the number/frequency of bulls so that “bull runner” was a valid role for meta progression.
Like all the HoT zones that came after, the whole point of SW is to create a meta the encourages and rewards players for splitting up. The bulls do that to an extent. If you see a lot of people and are pretty sure the fort will hold without you, the idea is that you escort a bull to the next fort. The problem is that the spawn timings for the bulls don’t concide with the beginning of defense repair phases so players have a proper choice of “do I stay and get my credit from the defense event that is starting, or do I go with the bull and get the same credit from the escort?”
It was never explicitly designed to be getting credit for doing both at once.
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
You have to que as a guild team to get credit as well. Once your group is part of a guild team, when the first person ques it will ask you what team you want to que as. Select your team name.
When you start the match it’ll use your guild name, team name, and guild logo rather than the name of a player as “<player>’s team”
What we should really be complaining about….something that I haven’t seen anybody mention:
The new guild buffs can only be used one at a time. You have to choose which buff is active. That’s a huge nerf.
It’s also completely intentional.
The old system was a constant influence sink to keep up buffs. It’s major problem was that it was trivial to maintain for large guilds, and impossible to maintain for small guilds.
The new system is a front loaded cost, but once it is paid it’s done. This makes it a more accessible system for guilds of all sizes. large guilds may get the upgrades done sooner, but small guilds that take a little longer still have the same access to those buffs.
The old system was initially designed so that you couldn’t afford to have everything at once due to the ongoing costs, but the design was kind of broken by large guilds. The new system is much closer to the intent of the design, while making it more accessible and customizable for all guilds and their members.
The entire guild system revamp was done to reward players tackling economic and content challenges together in a way that’s compelling for guilds of all sizes, and rewards them well. The influence system, and by extension the old buff and banner acquisition model was funkitten tally broken specifically because past certain point as your guild grew, they didn’t just become easier to get. They became essentially free due to all the login and passive inf from people just playing the game, even if every one of them was playing completely alone all the time. meanwhile smaller guilds under the old system could play together every day and still get nowhere near the amount of benefit from their guild.
As for non-HoT players not being able to access HoT services. Honestly, guild halls are part of the expansion. I’m suprised they let those players donate to the treasury or enter the hall in the first place. It’s a buy to play game. It’s not unreasonable to expect that people buy the occasional “required” expansion to gain the lion’s share of content and benefits when that means there are not monthly fees or seemingly “required” cash shop items.
The more you give away for free, the less expansion revenue is gained, and you have to make that money somewhere, which in turn means pushing the gem store much more agressively. The expansion model as a one time equal cost is far more fair to the consumer than predatory and annoying practices like black lion keys to drive revenue.
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
I think GW2 is probably the best MMO I’ve played (as far as pve games go) in the last four years.
I do feel it’s at odds with itself in a lot of places. It phrases cosmetics as its primary reward method, yet offers far more cosmetics in its cash shop than the game itself. It often gives gameplay a back seat to story, and then turns around and creates gameplay focused elements with no story connections.
It claims to value accessibility and challenge in equal measure and ends up pushing a lot of content that is neither truly accessible or truly challenging rather than making a hard separation between the two. There are difficulty spikes and cliffs randomly interspersed everywhere in ways that frustrate the low-skill players and bore the challenge seekers without warning or signposts to let them know where their preferred type of content is.
It touts itself as a highly social game without taking the time to invest in social tools for players, or creating compelling incetives for people to form social interactions with others in its crafting or core open world systems. Requiring the presence of, but not the interaction with, other players. It then implements a guild hall model designed to foster that connection but misses the mark by providing no incentives for guilds to interact with each other
It attempts with WvW to create a mass battle pvp experience, but robs it of the consequence, risk, and player agency and ownership that make such experiences compelling and meaningful in an attempt to make it accessible, while simultaneously making scaling power through grind mechanisms like guild tactics and wvw ranks that make it extremely inaccessible.
HoT is a big step forward in addressing many of its problems, but GW2 has a long way to go if it truly wants to be the amazong of MMOs, selling three very different types of players on one shared product.
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
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