I have a lore question!
The last time I saw my BFF Riot Alice, she had made her way to prosperity. Shortly afterward, Mordremoth wrecked the place, and it remains wrecked by Mordremoth tentacles to this day. before that event happenned, she mentioned heading north. She was nowhere to be found in the silverwastes, so I’m assuming she changed her mind.
What became of Riot Alice? She’s not really the type to join the pact, and she’s too much of a self-starting-partially-redeemed-anti-hero to fall in with the current white mantle affiliated bandits.
I don’t see her having had reasons to head toward the jungle or the silverwastes, and breaking with her bandit contacts would likely make it pretty dangerous for her to backtrack in to kryta.
It’s pretty simple:
A funeral for these characters is the most logical jumping off point to get all the major characters together in one room again. After the HoT storyline, the Commander’s crew all have good reasons to go their separate ways, and a funeral is the best place to have a ‘catch up’ instance where they can all inform you about what they’ve been up to.
A WORLD SHATTERING EMERGENCY event would also bring them together, but if they were brought together specifically to fight stuff, it would be odd to have them standing around doing exposition on what they were up to while you were off investigating ley line anomalies and investigating the bandit/white mantle connection in either the raid or the current event bounties.
A funeral bridges that gap, everyone gets to catch up and THEN the WORLD SHATERING EMERGENCY can happen and, what do you know, everyone is already conveniently together nad you’ve already handled the exposition so you can jump right in to the new story.
No.
She’s just losing her marbles and talking to a completely normal plant.
Her friend the fern is basically Tom Hanks’ volleyball.
Its fine. Your ability to loot chests is primarily controlled by your ability to acquire keys, not your access to the chests. No amount of alts or taxis will allow you to farm up those keys any faster. Switching map instances only allows you to use them up faster, requiring you to spend an increased amount of time getting more.
In fact, the player that does not multiloot ends up with a virtually identical loot payout compared to time spent playing content in auric basin in the long term.
you can buy keys for aurillum. this applies to players who don’t need it anymore for collection stuff or people who don’t care about collection stuff and simply go for the monetary value.
It still does nothing to change the fact that a player with infinite alts can not acquire keys any faster than a single player. An equal amount of time must be spent acquiring keys, or aurillium for keys.
This isn’t like the old alt exploit with boss chests, where all it took was logging in more alts to loot the chests.
With the tarir chests, the faster you loot chests, the faster you run out of keys (or aurillium to buy keys) and you must spent an equivalent amount of time no matter how many alts you run through to loot chests.
The point stands. The only thing using alts or taxis to loot the chests does is use up keys faster. It doesn’t actually have any influence on time spent earning loot versus the loot’s payout.
you seem to not understand what multiloot is for. it’s not for opening more chests but opening the same amount of chests with higher quality. you could use all your 25 keys on low quality chests or you could use them on grand ones.
in the end you got better/more loot when multilooting than without.
not that i care tho. it’s too much work for me but i don’t mind others doing it.
Again, this changes nothing.
You have some choices when it comes to applying keys. If you want a greater loot volume in a shorter amount of time, you open all the chests. if you want higher quality per box, but less overall boxes opened (and thus keys used) then you only open the biggest chests.
These are true whether you do the zone hop or not. The overall opportunity cost per key used remains unchanged. The only thing that changes is how fast you use up your keys. You can spend 6-10 keys on big chests, even zone hopping, and get less loot with some mroe guarantees of quality. Alternately you can spend as many as 60 keys zone hopping and get a much larger pool of loot with less guarnatee of loot quality.
However, the time spent acquiring keys remains constant. Someone zone hopping to open 10 big chests is not gaining any more utility per time spent earning rewards (playing in AB to earn keys/currency for keys) than someone who is not. You could easily bank your keys and open one map of big chests, and simply return after the next phase. Your reward versus time spent earning it are exactly the same.
Opening the basement is not the primary reward for AB. Spending keys IN that basement is. The idea that it is somehow unfair is predicated on the false assumption that chests are rewarded for clearing the meta boss event. They are not. They are simply unlocked by doing so.
Its the same lock and key system used in nightfall to access the primeval armor vendor. You’re simply doing a task to visit a “merchant” Only in this case the “merchant” looks like a box, and accepts keys as currency.
Its fine. Your ability to loot chests is primarily controlled by your ability to acquire keys, not your access to the chests. No amount of alts or taxis will allow you to farm up those keys any faster. Switching map instances only allows you to use them up faster, requiring you to spend an increased amount of time getting more.
In fact, the player that does not multiloot ends up with a virtually identical loot payout compared to time spent playing content in auric basin in the long term.
you can buy keys for aurillum. this applies to players who don’t need it anymore for collection stuff or people who don’t care about collection stuff and simply go for the monetary value.
It still does nothing to change the fact that a player with infinite alts can not acquire keys any faster than a single player. An equal amount of time must be spent acquiring keys, or aurillium for keys.
This isn’t like the old alt exploit with boss chests, where all it took was logging in more alts to loot the chests.
With the tarir chests, the faster you loot chests, the faster you run out of keys (or aurillium to buy keys) and you must spent an equivalent amount of time no matter how many alts you run through to loot chests.
The point stands. The only thing using alts or taxis to loot the chests does is use up keys faster. It doesn’t actually have any influence on time spent earning loot versus the loot’s payout.
The only solid reason to add your game to steam is if you plan to use its social back end, or you need the marketplace exposure. Valve takes a cut of the profits in exchange for these services, and it is usually a good value if you don’t want to absorb the price of having your own online shop, friends list, etc. etc.
This is why you see many larger publishers moving away from Steam (EA’s Origin being a prime example) as once you have a framework in which you can offer the same services and benefits of Valve’s service, and have a large number of products to sell, it can become a net loss compared to doing it with your own marketplace.
Anet and NCSoft’s back end is pretty robust, so there’s little incentive to use Steam.
I love Steam, and when given the option i will usually buy my games on that platform. From a consumer standpoint it would certainly be more convenient if everyone used a single global marketplace to sell games online, but ultimately it isn’t realistic, and if it were the case the lack of competition would lead to even more customer unfriendly practices as the natural consequence of a monopoly.
Unlike competing platforms, however, Steam does offer an option to integrate third party apps in to its interface and front end, and even allow the steam overlay to function (though for obvious reasons it is not officially QA’d for third party applications.)
I know a lot of steam users that prefer that frontend for all of their games because of the universal social tools, so they just add non-steam game shortcuts for all the things they play outside of steam. Once you do, the experience is pretty much the same as a natie steam game, with the exception of automatic updates. Since most non-steam games have their own launchers to handle those updates its not such a big deal really.
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
Can we hope that this leads to being able to type in numbers larger than 250 for buy orders?
I really don’t understand why this limitation is in place. You can instant buy or buy ourder 250 items, and get those items from 250 separate stacks of 1. If I need 268 leather, why can’t i just type in 268? The items will still end up in stacks of 250 and 18 before they get to my inventory.
Seasons were a dumb idea.
Expecting any game mode in which:
To be any sort of “team sport” is foolish.
WvW is not, nor has it ever been a competitive arena where skill or strategy determines the outcome. It is not designed to do that. It is a pure numbers game where the greatest number of players logged in for the largest amount of time win matches.
Its appropriate rewards are context sensitive and personal. The new reward track system that counts and awards individual participation is much more appropriate than any team based reward structure due to the inherent instability of the competitive strength of the teams rapidly fluctuating.
Score and winning matches in WvW is, and always has been window dressing. Its only use is as a metric to match servers up with other servers that have similar coverage, in order to try and deliver a more even momnet-to-moment experience for players seeking to gain reward for participating in battles, by ensureing that those battles are at least somewhat more evenly matched. It is not a good metric to use to hand out rewards of any kind.
WvW tiers are not a cometitive ladder. They are an MMR rating of a giant, uncoordinated mob against another giant, uncoordinated mob. Having large guilds and good commanders does not change the fact that no single strategic entity accounts for a meaningful portion of any given matches warscore.
Its fine. Your ability to loot chests is primarily controlled by your ability to acquire keys, not your access to the chests. No amount of alts or taxis will allow you to farm up those keys any faster. Switching map instances only allows you to use them up faster, requiring you to spend an increased amount of time getting more.
In fact, the player that does not multiloot ends up with a virtually identical loot payout compared to time spent playing content in auric basin in the long term.
Alchemyst has hit the nail on the head here really.
Before complaining that thieves are “litereally unkillable” and “dodge everything” I encourage you to go, on your main ranked account, not a pubstoming alt account that’s matchmaking with complete newbies, and roll one of the popular evade builds.
Fact is that thieves die a ton. They usually die in the space of 2 or 3 hits, and simply spamming dodge will get you killed, and will not kill anything.
What people are upset about is that they got used to the idea of thieves not being able to do anything other than +1 due to having literally zero defensive tools other than stealth. Now that people can see the thief during the fight, they’re upset that their old strategy of rolling their faces across the keyboard to kill visible thieves isn’t working, and that they have to learn the class’ strengths and weaknesses it fight it effectively just like they do with every other class.
Thieves survive through timing active mitigation tools without the benefit of any other hard defenses. This requires the thief’s opponent to engage those active, timing focued defenses with active, timing focused offense. Thieves do not benefit from noteworthy passive defenses, lengthy defensive channels, or defense enhancing boons. A thief that is not actively pressing a button to avoid an attack WILL take the full force of that attack, to a small HP pool, with no means of mitigating it.
The thief has to engage other classes on their terms, baiting and countering their best tools. This is no different. When you fight a thief you have to treat the fight differently than fighting another class because different classes have different patterns and methods of attack and defense
To ensure that there’s a method for getting more from alts, but that simply having a bunch of alts doesn’t automatically make gaining the achievements easier.
It’s a convenience tax basically. It’s also probably there to slightly price adjust those lodestones for possible future use.
The game already has a mechanism to reveal those achievements in the form of the ingame mail you get, or the description on the “starter item”
Those starter items have an extremely high drop rate from extremely common enemies. Most players I know discovered these achievements naturally and thought it was cool.
This is far better than the LS1 method, where the game just spoiled the whole plotline for you with a list of achievements your character would know nothing about.
It’s the ‘Game of Thrones Effect’ how I call it. Since killing off key characters is dramatic and I noticed in many shows that after GoT had this much success, many shows do it. It’s ‘in’. Also, GW2 got criticized by a lot of players to be too childish/Disney-like, harmless events and no one dies you love (well unless you loved Tybalt…).
The difference is that when they do it in those popular television properties those sudden deaths have context and meaning. They’re not just random offing of characters. They usually serve as the end of an important plot arc, a logical conclusion of a long held grudge, or a way to establish a relationship and grow other characters.
Eir’s death serves only as a character development lever for braham, but the WAY in which she died was so inappropriate in context and execution that it fell flat. It was obvious that she died because the plot needed her to, not because there was any compelling story arc that led to her death.
A sudden character death can be effective when done correctly. Since you mention Game of Thrones, all of the sudden deaths in that series served as critical plot points. I don’t want to spoil the show for anyone, but if you look back on those deaths they all make sense and are usually big payoffs for the overall narrative structure.
Eir’s death did not mark the end of any plot arc, or the beginning of any other plot arc. It was not a narrative payoff. It was just sort of tossed in in the middle of an existing arc in an effort to help develop an underdeveloped character, and in the end that character, Braham, was not significantly effected enough by it for it to have any gravity at all anyway.
Contrast that with Traherne’s death. Traherne’s death had meaning, it was a logic end to a plot arc, and it served a purpose. It was belivable that he died, it was impactful for the world around him, and it was a death fitting of both the charactar and the story. The same goes for your order mentor, Scarlet Briar, several major release villains, and a host of other GW2 characters that have died.
Stein and company CAN do better. They HAVE done better. In this case they simply dropped the ball, likely due to an accelarated development schedule or limited resources to turn the writing in to playable reality.
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
Part of what makes exploration rewarding is the struggle that it entails. In my opinion, having a free, invincible camera detracts from the enjoyment of exploration and doesn’t add anything compelling to the user experience.
The idea that a place is too dangerous to go is exactly why it is rewarding to go there. it encourages teamwork, it encourages people to set goals, and it creates conflict with the environment that makes the experience memorable and interesting.
Anet still fails to realize that their entire reward structure is based around cosmetics. Having the primary source of new cosmetics be the gem store actively discourages people from playing a variety of content and in stead encourages farming whatever grants gold to trade for gems at the fastest rate.
Yes, much of it CAN be traded, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re still farming gold to buy gems. They’re just buying gems indirectly by purchasing them from another player with a service cost.
The long term effect if such a huge disparity between gem store cosmetics and those added as in game achievements is damaging to overall reward scheme of the game.
There are plenty of compelling rewards early on, as you are still getting gear for stats and unlocking the large pool of skins you may care about that the game actually offers, but we’re in the first major expansion now and the number of skins (again, the only tangible reward for doing anything in GW2) offered by HoT and its subsequent updates versus the number of skins exclusively offered by the gem store is severely out of whack.
Gem store skins used to be interesting options that complimented an already large array of ingame rewards. Now, gem store skins are the vast majority of options for new rewards. That creates an ultimately unrewarding game to play long term.
There is a middle ground.
We used to be able to buy temporary crafting stations with guild commendations. They removed these from the vendor with HoT becuase they didn’t want guild halls to “make cities obsolete”
Despite the fact that they sell gem store items that literally make cities obsolete.
Anet is far more worried about the utility of their convenience based microtransactions than delivering guild systems that are functionally rewarding in this case.
If they just returned the temporary crafting stations to the commendations vendor (and for the love of sanity, add that vendor to guild halls) their terrace passes would still retain value, but people would have an additional use for commendations and be able to pay a sort of tax to access that functionality within the hall.
The other option, which I made a post about in another thread, would be an update that allows the guild to “rent” a crafting station via some kind of NPC call box. Give the call two temporary vendor stalls, and let players in the hall pay in commendations or other currencies for “time”
In this manner you could have more limited crafting in the hall, but still wouldn’t make cities obsolete since you could only have say one kind of bench and a TP, or two bench types at any given moment.
Just have the players pay a commendation or resonating shard or something to a ‘call box’, select the vendor type, and they’ll come in at the waypoint and set up shop for a few hours. Players with permissions to do so could dismiss them early and replace them, or pay the vendor already on site to extend their time.
Market or workshop upgrades could extend the number of stalls and the time the vendors stick around per payment. You could even set it up so they just take a share of the mine’s etherium output, so that guild with full upgrades, or guilds that produce etherium at a far faster rate than they use it have an interesting option.
In this manner you could have access to any vnedor or station in the hall, but not all of them at one time, which would be perfect for different guild types. WvW guilds could slot wvw vendors, fractl heads could slot fractal vendors, etc. etc.
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
People complaining about ping:
Ping is not a game or class design issue. That is a user and server location issue. If your ping is too low to play an action combat game effectively, it has nothing to do with the design of the combat, classes, builds, or skills, and everything to do with your internet connection and distance to the servers.
Petitioning for design changes because of ping is like petitioning for sports cars to have offroad suspensions as a standard feature. The game is not built to be played at absurdly high pings. If you have absurdly high ping, getting anet to get a cluster closer to you, or improving your connectivity to the server are the issues you should be worrying about.
If you are unable to do either, it isn’t a game design problem. It’s a physics and IT problem.
When discussing class or ability design it has to be done from a median expectation or the standard user. That means a player with two hands, at least one working eye, a rig capable of running at a respectable framerate, and a connection to the server that offers a decent ping.
So, I play the d/d variant. Played it before HoT at that (you know, when it sucked and nobody complained)
Here’s some stuff you should know:
To have enough damage to actually kill someone, evade builds need to be very squishy. So squishy in fact that one stun or immob that actually sticks can be a fight ender. Make sure you bait with on and WAIT to use the second unless you want to power up bandit’s defense and get kicked in the face. Alternately, auto during bandit’s defense and interrupt the kick if you have a ranged CC.
Immobilize, Immobilize, Immobilize The only reliable way a thief has to clear immob is taking dash, or blowing shadowstep. Dodge thieves that take dash can’t really bring enough pain to hurt you in the first place, as they’re constantly dodging out of their own weapon range. Shadowstep is not something a thief wants to waste on an immob simply because it’s a wasted stun break, and many dodge thieves don’t take shadowstep at all because of bandit’s defense.
Tanks for nothing. Seriously. If you catch the rare dodge thief that’s built specifically to tank, just ignore him. If you can’t nail him or run him off with some good CC or immob, then you can be almost sure that he doesn’t have enough damage to kill you anyway. Just leave him on his point to flap around uselessly and go fight over the other two. He’s going to come in to +1 and not contribute much to the fight.
I’m lazy, so I vendor all my greens and blues, salvage yellows, and TP exotics. I MF the sigils/runes from the yellows with my pocket MF, and sell any valuable superiors I get.
It will empty your bags quickly, but it is not as efficient for money as salvaging all the greens and blues.
I seriously doubt customer service can do anything to help undo user error like this. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had rules specifically stating they can’t help you undo crafting that you used all of the game tools to do, that worked as they were intended to work.
Think about it. What if that gets out? I can claim I made a “mistake” crafting stacks on an item as soon as there’s an economic downturn and its no longer profitable.
Unless there was a bug in the crafting system itself I doubt they can(or should) help you fix your mistake.
What the story lacked was a proper epilogue.
1. No ending cinematic where our victory was celebrated and everyone we lost was mourned.
2. We have no idea how Zojja or Logan is doing or if they are even still alive (depending on who you picked).
3. We have no idea how the Pale Tree is doing now that Mordremoth is death.
4. We have no idea how the Pact is doing now that the Marshall is death.The list goes on. It’s one loose end after another.
This.
The franchise has, up until this point, been really good about having a solid “epilogue” instance where you get to catch up with all the major players of the story, have a quick chat with them if you want, and get a basic idea of what they plan to do next. In GW1 and release GW2 that’s also where they roll the credits and tell you how awesome you are.
I think they overestimated the time table for the LS release and thought that episode 1 of LS3 would serve that purpose (and it probably will) and that makes HoT’s ending feel overly clifferhangeryand without a proper sense of closure.
All it really needed was a short instance for Traherne’s funeral after the ending cinematic. You could have sad music in the grove, catch up with all the major characters, roll credits, heck, even play fear not this night over the credits again if you wanted etc. etc.
You could even press f to pay respects, hehe.
It doesn’t need to be a situation where the raid requires a thief, but thieves should be hands down the easiest class to integrate in to raid parties in a balanced fashion specifically because of the steal mechanic.
That extra button they added for using extra raid abilities? That is the thief’s built in kit
If there’s not a compelling reason to bring a thief to a given encounter, all they really need to do is design an encounter-specific stolen ability that makes them valuable as an alternative to the more mainstream picks.
No encounter should require a specific class, but every class should have at least two valuable roles in any given encounter. Thief tends to suffer in this situation because of their lack of group utility, and it would be simply to fix that problem by giving the bosses custom stolen skills. Since those skills are only stolen during the boss encounters, they don’t at all impact the balance of the thief profession anywhere else in the game, and play up what makes the thief unique in comparison to other classes.
For instance, what if the thief could steal a skill from VG that aoe dispersed red orbs? bam, instant utility. Is it required to beat the encounter? No. You can still use the standard method. However it allows the thief to use his unique mechanics in a way that can group utility, and makes him as valuable as other party options.
The end result is that the same thief build may have a wholly different job in different boss encounters, and be able to interact with those encounters in ways that other classes can’t, but doesn’t necessarily replace or make him superior to other options, just equal. That reactionary, on-the-fly design is right up the thief’s alley and is core to the design of the class.
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
People had the exact same complaints about dungeons at release.
People actually sucked it up and decided to learn to play the dungeons.
Now, a few years later, even the staunchest defenders of “difficulty should not be a barrier to specific rewards” tout dungeons as examples of reasonable, manageable content and are perfectly fine with them.
I try to stay out of these discussions because all of the points have been made, and discussed, to death at this point. The people that feel they should be entitled to every reward without the requisite structure of specific content will not change that opinion. The people that feel like rewards being limited to specific c ontent as a trophy of said content will not change that opinion.
However.
Both sides attempt to paint it as an argument of fact, or make appeals to democratic or populist philosophies rather than state clearly what the real conflict of ideas is. It is a difference of opinion.
In some people’s opinions, armor/weapon skin rewards should be accessible to all, and should never have utility as trophies of specific achievements and conquered content.
In other people’s opinions, what makes armor/weapon skins exciting is that they symbolize achievement and mastry of specific content.
Attempting to claim one way is “right” and the other is “wrong” is not only pointless, it is needlessly divisive to an absurd degree. None of you are right, and none of you are wrong. You just want different things from the same game. Anet’s job is to cater to as many of you as possible, as fairly as possibly, which means that your desires will never be adequately fulfilled as long as they strongly contrast with a large portion of the player base.
Unless there is largely unilateral community opinion on a subject that subject does not generally receive feedback based overhaul This discussion, and the myriad other threads like it only prove that there is not consistent enough support for a change to the status quo to make changing it a worthwhile decision for arenanet. The issue is too divisive, and when it is that divisive, the go-to strategy is to let it be as any change will not admirably impact the overall satisfaction levels of the player base at large.
If you upset just as many people as you make happy, it’s a zero-sum change. You can’t predict that when adding new content and systems, but you can accurately predict that when changing existing ones.
I wrote a long post and forum failed me…sigh.
TLNR of it was: venoms should be like signets for conditions. The active should remain as is, with addition of bleed to Drake Venom and confusion to Devourer. The passive should be a 33% chance on hit to apply the major damage condition of each particular venom. I had a suggested arbitrary length of 2 seconds for the condition duration. Unlike signets, however, the passive should remain active and not go inactive for the duration of the cooldown.
I would also remove the Dagger Training trait as redundant with these changes. The cooldown adjustment discussed above would also be a reasonable way to improve the “pace” of fighting while using venoms.
This is the most reasonable venom buff I’ve yet heard. It wouldn’t scale up their power with VS to absurd levels, and it would give a compelling reason to take venoms without running a full venom build.
And what, exactly, would your alternative “endgame” be?
Because they have that already. The “endgame” activities targeted at people who want to do events and open world stuff. Heck they had that before HoT. Its called silverwastes. Then they added four more zones of “endgame” in HoT.
They added even more “endgame” to fractals with the scaling adjustments.
Raids are not the “only PvE endgame” and even if they were, doesn’t that justify their difficulty?
World PvP is not about killing people. It is about objectives. Killing people is a method through which you claim objectives. If you are causing other players to run away, you are winning. If you want to play a game mode where killing is people is the primary focus, that is what Conquest is for. It is designed to funnel players in to very small spaces and force them to stay there to gain progress and rewards.
WvW is not designed for what you seem to think it is.
“Roaming” is just a fancier way of saying “I want to gank people and don’t care about contributing to my team.”
Scouts contribute to teams. They scout. It often means actively avoiding fights. Roamers just waste ques in an effort of find lopsided fights to stroke their egos, and complain when things don’t go their way.
WvW (and GW2 in general for that matter) is not designed around 1v1 fights. Attempting to make it so, then complaining the experience is lackluster is willful denial of the game you’re playing.
If you’re going to do something the game wasn’t designed to do in the first place, don’t complain that the thing you’re doing is poorly balanced.
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
No.
Raid serve the exact function they are intended for. Challenging group content. They serve a segment of the population that was not being served previously.
There is no reason to create an ’easy" version of raids any more than there is a reason to create a “player versus AI” variant of PvP.
Raiding is a specific type of content, build for a specific audience. If you are not in that audience, then just don’t do it or attempt to learn that content type.
It is a fraction of the content in the game, and, like the PvP update and WvW updates is a long time coming. Anet neglected gameplay that wasn’t open world and story instances for three years. They’re rectifying that problem by giving equitable treatment to the whole community. That means some patches they will serve parts of the community you aren’t in. They’ve now served that part of the community for the duration of HoT. We are moving in to LS3.
It is not ‘wasted content" just because some players don’t want to do it. Unless you spend equal amunts of time in PvP, WvW, fractals, open world, dungeons, and replaying story instances, some part of the game is always going to be ’wasted content" relative to the individual player.
This is not a single player game. It is not designed around individual players. It is designed to serve a massive and diverse community of players.
Because it was designed as a “waiting room” back when WvW regularly had long ques.
It wasn’t designed to be fair or competitive. It was designed to give people a way to get WxP while they were in que for real WvW, and to try out experimental ideas without disrupting ranked WvW.
Then they just forgot why they built it and dropped the disruptive elements directly in the WvW with HoT anyway.
Because Anet excels at designing systems and then abandoning them to go design more systems, so they can abandon them just as quickly.
Simple answer: They need to sell terrace/airship passes.
The answer they gave us for not adding crafting to halls was that they didn’t want to make cities obsolete. Despite the fact that they sell gem store items that literally make cities obsolete.
The reasoning here is clear. They removed crafting from WvW because, like the obsidian sanctum being part of EBG, or people using borderlands for “dueling” and “GvG” created population cap/balance issues.
It is important to anet that some part of the game requires you to inconveniently load in to a major hub. It is important to them that that hub is laid out in an inconvenient manner in order to sell gem store passes for more conveniently designed members only areas.
Crafting is the last piece of the “must go to town” puzzle, so they can’t take the brakes off. This is why they removed the inventory based crafting benches from the guild commendation trader with the launch of HoT, because HoT made it easier to gain commendations, and they don’t want crafting to be convenient.
This was already in the game at one point. They removed it as they added guild halls just to make sure crafting was inconvenient.
You know. To sell passes.
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
No. I like character birthdays and character-centric systems. IMO there’s too much account bound stuff in this game already. Really makes individual characters less important in a game that’s supposed to have a very large personal journey/story component.
“Here’s what we believe: If someone wants to play for a thousand hours to get an item that is so rare that other players can’t realistically acquire it, that rare item should be differentiated by its visual appearance and rarity alone, not by being more powerful than everything else in the game. Otherwise, your MMO becomes all about grinding to get the best gear. We don’t make grindy games — we leave the grind to other MMOs.”
Lol that’s not how the game works. I have been playing like a casual and didn’t drop a single ascended piece, since my come back before Thorn update. So yeah it is grind to play. This is totally useless to craft a weapon that costs you 200 hours or so just to have a skin … Imagine how all those people with bots were hard working for it, painful isn’kitten They brough many things to the game but no content … skills are still the same, you have got rebuilt traits system and (well that’s actually good) few more classes. I was expecting more maps or something, a deep campaign, not another story for kids, and on top of it you can waste your life just to get a legendary weapon so you can glow in night and be famous about how much life you don’t have lol
BTW: Grind is negative, because every good game is heading toward community, not some grindfest to waste your time, because they want either you to buy some stupid skins or make your life pathethic after spending those 200 hours on let’s say picking some berries.
The game is great when people can make fun by themselves, and it isn’t avaible when someone tells you how to play or give you restricted content. Really if this game wasn’t about gold you wouldn’t have met so many people farming everywhere for everything.
Guys and update. There is a raid lobby, and that’s good + you can get ascended gear there. It took them 2 months tho …
So, basically, you’re complaining that that is literally how the game works. That the ‘grindy’ stuff is “useless”
That’s the whole point. You don’t need anything you have to grind for. You can grind for stuff if you want it, but it isn’t required for progression purposes.
Hell, they even went out of their way to make sure you can get started raiding in exotics just to stick with that philosophy. The only place you need ascended gear that doesn’t regularly pass it out is fractals, and that’s just repeating literally the same instance at a higher difficulty.
If there were no costly/expensive items, what would the game’s reward structure rely on? Currently it relies in skins. It works. It worked for GW1. It works for a lot of modern games actually. Having the rarest and most costly/grindy items in the game confers little to no statistical advantage compared to the cheap, simple to acquire exotics, and you can do literally the whole game with the exception of repeating fractals at higher difficulty (which is not different content) and later raid wings (which reliably provide you ascended gear in the process of reaching them)
… The mode is built specifically to encourage giant zerg battles first and foremost, not to simulate a working battlefield. “more fights” is an obviously higher design priority than “meaningful objectives” because WvW is the single session popcorn version of a PvP siege game. …
Man, I just love reading your posts ! >_< Can I subscribe to your newsletter ?
What ever happened to the GW2 that I bought that promised no grind?
Quote from Mike O’Brien (May 2012 before release):
Here’s what we believe: If someone wants to play for a thousand hours to get an item that is so rare that other players can’t realistically acquire it, that rare item should be differentiated by its visual appearance and rarity alone, not by being more powerful than everything else in the game. Otherwise, your MMO becomes all about grinding to get the best gear. We don’t make grindy games — we leave the grind to other MMOs.
That is literally how the game works.
I have played games with multiple iterations of aoe limits. I’ve played with unlimited heal AOE, unlimited damage AOE, combination of both, etc.
AOE limitations do not serve to encourage or discourage zerging. They simply determine the density of the zerg.
Just changing AoE limits doesn’t immedately cause people to want to spread out and hit multiple objectives. It just makes people stand ten feet to the left when they zerg.
Encouraging splits means creating incentives for manned versus unmanned defense, and limiting instant travel severely. Moreso than that, it required meaningful objectives to defend. WvW’s objectives are meaningless by design. The mode is built specifically to encourage giant zerg battles first and foremost, not to simulate a working battlefield. “more fights” is an obviously higher design priority than “meaningful objectives” because WvW is the single session popcorn version of a PvP siege game.
Expecting meaningful tactical considerations in WvW is like expecting supply line considerations in battlefield. The game simply isn’t designed around it. It’s designed for players to constantly have some massive epic fight they can run to within three minutes, not for those fights to have any long term consequences.
Hammer Guardians have a 5 second blast finisher so they’ll still be the main providers of stability.
False.
Thief SB2 can spam blast finishers once per second until they run out of initiative. not to mention three dodges worth of blast finishers from daredevil on top of that if their aim is good. If their own fields combo’d in to stability they would be kings of aoe stability.
The dodge finisher is a leap, not a blast.
Woops, you’re right. Point still stands about Sb2 though.
It’s one of the best fractals. Unique mechanics per room, and a memorable, fun boss fight with an easy to understand gimmick.
I have taken guild members completely new to fractals and taught them reactor in half the time it takes to explain dredge.
If you’re suffering 10+ wipes at L11, it’s simply because nobody in your group is bothering to communicate and learn the encounter. With just a tiny bit of experience you’ll be trucking through it just as fast as the other ones.
Hammer Guardians have a 5 second blast finisher so they’ll still be the main providers of stability.
False.
Thief SB2 can spam blast finishers once per second until they run out of initiative. not to mention three dodges worth of blast finishers from daredevil on top of that if their aim is good. If their own fields combo’d in to stability they would be kings of aoe stability.
I’m fine with it being raid exclusive.
The idea that you should be able to have whatever you want by doing only the things you want to is dumb, creates boring loot, and makes content feel less rewarding.
This isn’t WoW. Legendaries are a skin with a largely ignorable QoL buff. You don’t need them any more than you need the gem store outfit of the week. If you’re not willing to do the content tied to the skins you want, then you simply haven’t earned that reward. Either you want the reward more than you dislike the content, or you dislike the content enough to live without the reward.
Just having a GW2 account does not entitle you to every item in the game.
Here’s the problem.
When you balance your entire game around top level competitive play, you crate an evironment that is less attractive to new players.
When you have the massive population issues GW2 does, the last thing you need to do is phrase the game around esports. Heck, the last thing you need to do in any game is design it around esports.
Esports will not pay your studio’s bills. Riot does not turn the numbers it does because of esports. Same for Valve’s Counterstike and now DOTA properties. It funds esports because it has a very accessible, easy to learn game that has a low skill floor and high skill ceiling. All those scrubs are what keeps the game going, and those scrubs are ultimately the major portion of people playing your game.
GW2’s problem is that is has always had a very high skill floor, far too close to its skill ceiling. In addition it is a very difficult game to watch due to the large number of effects, similar visual tells, and a rather dull main competitive mode the actively encourages not using most of the map and fleeing rather than sticking out fights.
Conquest is a game type that is never exciting with such a small player count. This is one of the many reasons GW1’s PvP had a larger following. The basics of “kill the lord to win the match” were simply easier for the average player to understand and encouraged teamwork on the field more than map awareness and running to arbitrary points in the map that more often than not are completely devoid of enemies.
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
I like them. I wish there was more use of their goop/lighting interaction though. Avoiding goop to take less zap damage is a really fun enemy design. When the higher level chak just hit for lots more zap regardless of goop stacks it kind of takes their unique flavor away, not to mention makes the mastry you’re supposed to use to get a leg up on them feel less like a reward.
Just to make sure, can one change ascended gear into the new 4 stats prefixes with the mystic forge without having to craft it that way? Simply by using an exotic insignia/inscription? What is the freaking point of adding fulgurite and all the other garbage to the ascended recipes then? LOL
It is literally pointless. It would make sense if crafting those sets has unique skins. It wouldn’t surprise me if that was the original plan and then someone in monetization said “nah, cut 80% of the armor and repurpose it as gem store skins.”
Unless its jewelry, ALWAYS just craft the cheapest ascended gear and re-stat it. If it’s jewelry… good luck!
HoT added a lot of systems to the game that are really good long term designs. Collections, elite specializations, WvW tactics, Guild Halls, tech updates to the way styory instances and npc conversations work, masteries, and a host of other things.
The problem is that, in typical ArenaNet fashion, they spent far too much time developing extensivble systems and far to little time developing content for those systems.
The new zones are fantastic. The problem is that there are literally four of them. The new armor is great. The problem is that there are literally three sets. The new masteries are good. The problem is that they all have excessively narrow uses due to the small number of zones.
Then there’s the weird handling of non-HoT accounts and guild halls. Like, why let people enter the halls if they can’t use the stuff in them? You could have easily said “that’s a HoT map, buy the expansion” and people would have been okay with that, Non_HoT accounts being able to access their upgrades from withing the guild initiative HQ, which is already less convenient than the hall to visit.
HoT vastly improved GW2, but it improved it at a theoretical level moreso than a usable level simply due to lack of content for its systems. The fact that half a year later they haven’t leveraged all of the new systems they build specifically to make extending them and rolling out content easier is the problem.
I’d like a lot of things.
However!
Keep in mind that the number one reason we get for there being so little armor added to the game is body morphologies.
I really don’t want to add more fuel to Anet’s “but we can’t do that” fire.
Would it be awesome to have more body model options? Yes. Is it a good use of Anet’s famously nitpicky, iterative, and mostly cash shop driven asset pipeline? No.
Literally all of the useful upgrades can be had, by your small guild, in less than a month.
My less-than-50-people guild had no issues with the system, and the permanent unlocks are far better than the old system.
The way it works, currently, is that the cost is static, and the upgrades are permanent. Consider that the most important upgrades, the guild buffs, all come from cheap t1 structures, I’m not sure exactly what it is you have in mind.
What you’re asking for is like asking for legendaries to be made cheaper for people that simply don’t play as much. It’s impractical and TBH a waste of developer resources. You’re asking for more work to be put in to a system that already accomplishes its goals admirably for no additional benefit.
The way the system works at present there’s no need to create smaller or cheaper versions. The more expensive an upgrade is, as a general rule of thumb, the less useful it is, with later upgrades being less and less impactful and useful.
Guild upgrades are not designed around a cost per player system. That was how the old system worked, and it was a disaster that was multiple times less friendly to small guilds than the one we have now. They are designed around a flat cost per benefit, and more importantly, designed as a group goal structure that takes real expense and effort for permanent benefit that never goes away.
My guild worked very hard on our hall because of this. You do not deserve an “easier” path simply because you are less willing to pay the advertised cost for the advertised benefits.
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
There are a couple of reasons game developers slow down crafting:
- If it’s nearly instantaneous, people don’t value it.
- There are economic ramifications to rapid crafting — slowing it down assures that people think twice about what they want to craft and when.
- It gives an illusion of having more stuff to do.
I can’t imagine ANet speeding things up much.
What they could do is allow us to queue up several crafts in a row. At the moment, if you want to make a hammer from scratch, you have to make each part one at a time. They could set it up so that it crafts all the parts in sequence — it wouldn’t be any faster, but it would be less tedious (and less prone to certain kinds of mistakes).
You forgot the most important one:
Database query speeds.
Making crafting take time means that it is far less likely that the item database servers will be overwhelmed with simultaneous requests, since they can schedule tasks much more efficiently by shifting each only minute time frames which are imperceptable in the full stack of a crafting que. Additionally, making most items craft one at a time means those queries require less CPU instructions to complete at once since you’re simply saying increment a value rather than adding an integer every time and filling the integer, which requires defining the integer, comparing the two values, and doing integer math on them.
In a single player or small multiplayer game this isn’t a big deal, but when you scale up that math to an MMO the size of GW2, in which every region needs to run on the same cluster for character/item databases those little calculations can quickly snowball in to big lag.
I wish I could hide the tabs and just have a big grid like my inventory. Those tab breaks waste a lot of screen space and make me spend a lot more time scrolling.
Just going to note here that having to use the elite to survive (which is the majority, though not all, of what is being said here) is not a good thing. Some people want to have some choice in how they play and build. Not saying there can’t be optimal vs suboptimal, but optimal vs dead is not good design.
That is a massive flaw in HoT as a whole. They introduced the elite spec system, which is a long term design to create build diversity by making it easier for them to balance adding new skills, traits and weapons. They then only added one elite spec so there are actually less choices since elite specs need to be superior to base specs (since you can stack them with any base spec) and thus the whole design is balanced around players using one of exactly one option.
I blame revnant. Should have put the time and effort that went in to designing the class with the least build diversity in to actually increasing build diversity for the existing ones.
At the expense of those who have the currency, but not on the current character. I agree that, if that’s the trade-off, better to reduce clutter on the vendor panel.
Is that really an expense? If you don’t have the item on the current character, you can’t use it anyway. Even with your click-to-spend solution this doesn’t change. You’d need to be on the character that possesses the item to click it.
The best solution is to stop ignoring the wallet for anything account bound stuff designed to accrue in stacks. They literally built the wallet to reduce interface clutter and headaches from tokens, yet they keep adding tokens without adding wallet support.
I can’t think of any good reason for all of the HoT tokens and festival tokens to be inventory items.
This game is simply not structured for it narratively or gameplay wise. They have a hard enough time pushing out pvE content under the assumption everyone is on the same team and can do it. Faction systems would require a multitude of other variations on missions, variations on maps, and most importantly do something Anet has designed the whole PvE game to never do: place players in competition with one another.
GW2 is very unique in that pvE design. Every time you see a player the only interactions they can have with you are positive. Help you kill mobs, help you res, lay down a field you can use, etc. They can’t steal your mobs, or your nodes, or anything else.
Adding a faction system would be antithetical to the way PvE works in this game. PvE is not designed as a competitive mode of play.
Event currencies can only be exchanged if you have them on hand to prevent confusion and interface bloat.
The merchant doesn’t show you the option in an effort to reduce confusion during times when you can’t actually acquire the currency, and presumably so he can support a potentially infinite number of time limited currencies.
A new player looking to get a super cloud because he saw it on the vendor list and then being told “actually you can’t get the coins” only after consulting a wiki is a far more disappointing situation than someone who has coins, which tell you what they do, and you know what they do because you acquired them during an event for that exact purpose walking up to the guy and suddenly seeing that you can’t get a nonfunctional option when you don’t have the requisite currency.
It significantly reduces interface clutter on an NPC designed to take literally all forms of decoration tokens from now until infinity.
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
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