Guild Wars 2

Harper.6175:

PopeUrban.2578:

You’re trating Taimi like she’s the rule. She’s not the rule, she’s the exception, which is why doing the things she does still works in the world.

Lots of Asura can build golems, but only a very small handful of asura can build golems capable of what Taimi does.

Taimi isn’t an average child, she’s an exceptional one, just like your plaer character is an exceptional member of whatever race you are. making the argument that she’s just a disabled child is like saying the story is unbelivable because my character came from the slums of DR and went on to be a pivotal factor in the death of two elder dragons.

Like it or hate it, the main characters are main characters because they’re exceptions to the rule. Taimi isn’t just a child any more than traherne is just a scholar, Logan is just a human in armor, or Snaff is just a golemancer. These characters, like it or hate it are unique specifically because they’re exceptional examples of the people of tyria with skills, knowledge, determination, or circumstances that most people simply don’t have. That’s what makes them heroes of the story rather than nameless filler NPCs.

And I understand that.
All that aside – being an exceptional builder of golems and a prodigy don’t mean you’re automatically qualified for front-line fighting.
Taimi has proven in this very story that while she has a lot of cognitive potential she is still a child – because of her inability to control her emotional side and lack of emotional maturity – that almost gets her killed.

That’s not the kind of person you want by your side when you’re fighting for your life. Or for some bigger goal.
If she can make great golems she should just send the golems. Or have some other asura drive it around.

Taimi specifically built that golem to do exactly that, overcompensating for her weaknesses by building the equivalent of a homebrew ferrari so she wouldn’t be reliant on other people to push her wheelchair.

It makes sense for her as a character. She’s defined by her rash judgement and childish selfishness specifically because she’s a selfish child. A selfish orphan who is told by her society to fall in line and just give in to her limitations.

The plot itself has made that very clear about Taimi. She shows up not because you ask her to, or because she’s the best option, but because that’s what Taimi wants to do. Over the course of the living story she goes to great lengths to prove she’s a valuable member of the team, and that she can hold her own. She develops a familial relationship of mutual respect with the player and the party over time, which is a very natural character arc. It’s something she desires as a person, and by the time you reach rata novus she’s grown as a person. At that point she’s not brashly running off in to danger, mistakenly assuming she’ll be fine. She knows she won’t be fine. She knows she needs your help, and she knows you need hers. She’s there specifically because someone needs to fill Zojja’s shoes, and Zojja’s MIA.

Leaving her in Rata Novus makes perfect sense. You’ve just helped her reactivate the defense systems of an extremely formidable fortress. It’s probably the safest place in Tyria for her to be.

By this point in her story, and yours, she has proven multiple times that she’s a valuable asset, despite her physical limitations. She’s also proven a willing restraint because she values your respect for her as an asset, rather than the annoying child oyu have to babysit that she was when she first appeared.

It would be extremely out of character for Taimi to say “here, responsible adult, drive my hotrod mega-golem because its too dangerous for little old me” It doesn’t make sese for her motivations as a character. Furthermore it wouldn’t make sence for the PC or Braham to suggest it. With that golem she’s proven her ability to fight even the gnarliest battles. Without it she’s physically vulnerable but no less mentally imposing.

Taimi and those around her are very aware of those limitations, and the plot makes no effort to downplay them.

Despite the ham-handed writing, rata novus got Taimi right. Willingly blowing up that golem is a powerful action for her, she’s placing her trust in you. She built that thing so she’d never have to rely on others, but over time she has learned, from you, the value for having family and allies, and internalized what it means. Furthermore, your character has reciprocated that relationship. She’s been instrumental in the struggle against Mordremoth.

She knows she’s an exceptional combatant inside that thing. That’s why she built it. She also knows she’s a stiff wind away from certain death without it, and its taken a long stretch of storytelling for her to trust your party with her safety, and for your party to trust her judgement. That’s character development, and IMO it works pretty well.

Right, but the point is that dungeon tokens work because there are a massive variety of unique items yo can buy with them, AND there are three paths per dungeon, AND dungeons paths are (design wise) lengthy encounters. Yes you can speedrun them. Yet you can skip through most of the mobs. However that’s not the intent of the design, and the only reason it persists is because Anet realized the player base wanted shorter group content and abandoned further balance/mechanics updates to dungeons.

Play a dungeon as intended, actually killing the mobs, and you’ll discover that its often a much longer encounter than a world boss. it’s longer specifically because its designed for repetition. Repeating the same three hours of content is far less grind headache inducing than repeating the same 30 minutes.

Both systems, Tokens and Rare drops exist to patch an unfortunate reality of theme park style MMOs: The developers can’t create content faster than the players consume it. In a perfect world, you’d only do any given fight once, there’d be no incentive to repeat it because there would always be a new piece of content.

However, that dream is a functional impossibility due to the tinme it takes to create that content always being far longer than the time it takes to play it, so we have to incentivize repetition so that the content feels valuable.

Rare drops create an urge, due to rarity, to repeat the content because there’s a chance at immediate payoff. Tokens create a progress bar. Tokens say ‘you have to complete this x times to get Y item’ while drops say ‘you can complete this because its fun, and you might get this cool thing on top of all the normal things’

The problem with tokens is that it speaks to a sense of entitlement. The idea that just because a player wants a thing, they should be able to get it through brute force. They remove luck, and thus rarity from the equation. once you implement a token for a given item there is no going back. The item’s rarity declines in a linear fashion over time.

As much as people claim they only want skin X because it looks nice, people want that skin because of its real or percieved rarity. Drop chances are real rarity, while popularity ot items is percieved rarity. Some people prefer stuff like newbie skins dyed in expensive colors for instance. That’s not because the skins are rare, but because it has the net effect of making hteir appearance unique compared to those around them.

This isn’t about showing off, but rather a sense of ownership over one’s character. the ability to customize, to no be a faceless clone of other players in the world.

Those two concepts, real and percieved rarity are closely related. As goes one so goes the other. The less real rarity an item has, so too falls the perceived rarity of it. No atter why a given player wants it, for bragging right or pure aesthetics, the net result is an item that becomes less desirable to everyone.

Token systems are appropriate for functional items. They level the playing field so that players aren’t limited to luck just to stand on equa footing with their peers, and this ensures a larger overall population is equipped to tackle the latest and greatest content at all times, and nobody gets left out.

However, GW2’s economy isn’t built around functionality. It’s built around cosmetics. It is built around the concept of percieved rarity. For that reason, having rare drops is MORE important in GW2 than most other games. Rarity and rarity alone, not stats or utility, is the sole reason for players ot acquire new items after the first few months of play.

Sure, you might want a specific item, and it may seem nicer if you, personally, could acquire it easier, but ask yourself why you want it in the first place. You desire it out of a sense of percieved rarity. Because it will make your character look cool, or unique, and not just like everyone else. Taking rarity out of the equation and just turning it in to a grind with a rare chance of a shortcut harms the core mechanism that makes you want loot, and thus derive enjoyment from repeating content, in the first place.

Unneccessary.

Rare drops are a healthy part of loot games. Part of the reason loot in GW2 is often seen as not very exiting is the homogenization of drop tables in the first place. In GW1, there were a large variety of skins, some more rare than others, but what mad that cosmetic drop system shine was that the vast majority of skins only dropped in specific parts of the world.

Killing a specific world boss shouldn’t equate to a sure run at rare skins. It should equate to reasonably sure run at common boss themed items and an overall loot value consistent with the effort.

The reason token systems exist in dungeons is that those skins are thematically tied to a piece of content specifically designed to be repeated for tokens, and that all of the unique rewards afforded by those tokens are sufficiently numerous that repetition of the content (multiple paths) should be rewarded by a choice of items.

World bosses are not dungeons. They’re short events specifically designed to prevent repetition. Rare drops from those events are meant to encourage people to do them on occasion for the off chance at cool loot, but really just because the payout versus time spent is lucrative. Moving to a universal token would encourage people to abandon all but the easiest bosses. Implementing your token system would effectively remove triple trouble from play.

The idea that you should have a guaranteed chance at acquiring any item in the game, especially when those rewards are purely cosmetic, is harmful to the overall design of a loot based title, and is equivalent to removing loot from mobs entirely and putting every item on a vendor.

Token systems do not create fun loot systems. They do not allow rare items to retain their value. They make loot boring. GW2 already has a large loot interest problem. We don’t need to be looking for ways to make the loot even less exciting.

What’s wrong with Auric Basin? DS is fun, but I really like AB more. The outpost event chains tell really good stories, the boss fight feels loks a decent all-points siege, and the treasure vault lootsplosion at the end of it all feels like an amazing payoff.

The only thing I could really complain about with AB is that the boss event is supposed to be breaking a siege on Tarir, but it feels inverted, as if its the players that are sieging the place rather than the other way around. They could literally just reverse the direction of the octovines and have everyone enter the battle from the center of Tarir, with perhaps a few more small mobs coming in through the gates.

The story instance and the map meta events are two halves of the same fight.

The game doesn’t explain this well, but lore-wise they take place simultaneously. You personal instance version is you and the NPCs taking on a special mission deep behind enemy lines, which they’re able to do because mordremoth is distracted by the massive battle outside. That massive battle is the one you’re playing fighting the boss battle in DS, the mouth of mordremoth.

That’s also why the mouth dies the way it does. It is affected (conveniently at the end of the meta fight) by the events that transpire as a result of winning the PS fight.

They’re two sides of the same coin. In order to really see the fiht against mordremoth, you’ll want to do both so you can experience both sides of the story.

WvW tournaments were and are a horrible idea.

Expecting a mode where nobody can control their allies or enemies to be competitive is folly.

Those items need to be simply added to the new reward track system.

Super pets that require you to DO stuff? Anet tried that with HoT. You used to have to finish a boss event to tame a tiger. A tiger, which, is just a “shiny” jungle stalker, granting fury in stead of might.

Then the community cried so hard about it that they decided rangers shouldn’t have to do stuff to get pets. Even pets that aren’t particularly exciting.

I could see minipet collection/battle being a thing, they already started on the system in EOTN with the polymock game. Polymock would be a better addition than minipet battles simply because minipets are a major cash shop items for GW2, and polymock is based on statues, which would be earnable completely ingame in stead.

Nodes with the same upgrade level share an ID for the purpose of cooldowns.

If you have one hall accessible with full upgrades, and one that’s missing an upgrade, you shouldn’t upgrade the missing one, as (at least until Anet fixes the system) you will be able to harvest both halls.

Thing about it like rich or static nodes. If you take a rich node on one character and go back with another it’s used, even if it’s a different map instance. If you go to a different node you are allowed to use it. However, if you go to the same noral node on 2 characters you can hit it again, or even the same node in 2 map instances.

The guild hall nodes track for your account as entities, rather than relative to the map. They work like rich nodes, but each level of upgrade for those nodes is a different entity. So, if you have a fully upgraded ore node, gather it, and then apply an upgrade to ore nodes, you can instantly gather it again. The same thing applies to multiple halls. The level of upgrades doesn’t matter, but if the nodes have, individually, different upgrade levels than you can harvest both because the game considers them different entities.

Zenith.6403:

I’m not saying stealth is OP, it’s just not fun to play against and could be fixed.

1200 range attacks aren’t fun to play against when you don’t have access to a 1200 range weapon. The ability to see your target or not has nothing to do with your ability to act on the target.

This is why stealth exists, and also why thieves, the class with the most access to stealth, can’t also use it to plink at range. Without stealth, what exactly is the thief to do in that situation? Eat damage while closing, waste initiative and cooldowns just to get within striking range, and basically be assured that no matter what, they engage you at a disadvantage. I suppose they could throw a scorpion wire and by some miracle the target doesn’t step five inches to the left.

They could also steal to teleport to your face, in the process dazing, blinding, damaging or doing a number of other customizable effects yet you don’t seem to think there’s anything wrong with that mechanic, which is a much more effective way to counter ranged builds.

Stealthing still requires the thief to spend initiative and cooldowns, but doesn’t require them to eat damage just to get the fight started. In addition, the way this game handles stealth, in order to use it at all the stealther pretty much has to stealth within visual range of his target, more often than not leaving a visual indicator of where that stealth began.

As for reflects, you as why they can completely nullify your input to a fight. Flip that around for a sec. If people can’t meaningfully halt attacks at range, then why would anyone ever play anything that wasn’t a max range build? It’s universally inferior at that point for the same reason stealth exists.

Ranged mitigation is there so that you have to pay attention not only to other ranged characters, but everybody else. it’s there not only for them to counterplay your damage, but to fore )you_ to counterplay the reflect. Turning your damage against you evens the ranged fight for that duration, meaning that ranged classes aren’t always apex predators because even at max range against melee they still have to fight on both the offensive and defensive.

Allowing any character the ability to just deal multiple attacks worth of damage with impunity to retaliation is bad design. That’s why stealth burst was nerfed until it couldn’t reliably kill people that were’nt already injured, why stunbreaks exist, and in general is healthy design.

There are a lot of problems with GW2 PvP, but ranged versus melee isn’t one of them. In that respect GW2’s pvp is actually quite fair.

It sounds to me like you have certain expectations of rock-paper-scissors balance, where the counter to range is range, and melee is damage hampered in order to gain enhanced survivability. That’s just not how GW2 is designed. Everyone is built with the potential for roughly equivalent amounts of damage, more often than not enough damage to spike down an opponent in less than ten seconds if not countered.

This is vastly different than league’s design, in which there are massive differences in the survivability or damage output of various champions to require specific synergies.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Vault_Transport

We keep a stack of these handy specifically for WvW because they’re cheap to build now, and it prevents anyone ever needing to leave a battle for buffs, siege, or anything else.

Not recommended if you don’t usually wvw with your guild, as at 2g it’s a little expensive for personal use, but when you travel and fight as a guild, small donations of material to the same scribing fund you’re using for tactics makes them worth the cost for the ability to summon your guild bank anywhere in the mists and let your whole guild use it.

You’re trating Taimi like she’s the rule. She’s not the rule, she’s the exception, which is why doing the things she does still works in the world.

Lots of Asura can build golems, but only a very small handful of asura can build golems capable of what Taimi does.

Taimi isn’t an average child, she’s an exceptional one, just like your plaer character is an exceptional member of whatever race you are. making the argument that she’s just a disabled child is like saying the story is unbelivable because my character came from the slums of DR and went on to be a pivotal factor in the death of two elder dragons.

Like it or hate it, the main characters are main characters because they’re exceptions to the rule. Taimi isn’t just a child any more than traherne is just a scholar, Logan is just a human in armor, or Snaff is just a golemancer. These characters, like it or hate it are unique specifically because they’re exceptional examples of the people of tyria with skills, knowledge, determination, or circumstances that most people simply don’t have. That’s what makes them heroes of the story rather than nameless filler NPCs.

RDarken.2495:

PopeUrban.2578:

The thing is, GW2’s loot economy is based around drooping and salvaging large quantities of items. In order to pay out what feels like good loot for killing stuff, the “trash” greens and blues have to be somehow manageable without requiring people to visit a merchant every 5 seconds.

In order to cut the number of bags, they’d have to seriously increase the number of inventory slots be bag, or offer some sort of median vendor payout for said bags.

Increasing inventory space doesn’t solves the “click all the things” issue, and offering a vendor payout for unopened bags would just feel like a penalty for people not willing to open the bags and loot things “properly”

Without completely changing how the loot>materials>crafted items economy works I can’t really see a better option than what they started in the HoT maps, use less bag types so at least when you’re looting the bags stack better. Anything else would require not just an overhaul of loot, but of the whole loot and crafting systems to a point it wouldn’t be worth the headache and require stupid amounts of resources to to band-aid somethings that’s a pretty core part of how the game’s economy works.

Plus, I like taking the down time to open a bunch of bags. It’s like when you’d trick-or-treat as a kid and then come home and inventory all the loot. It’s kind of relaxing after several hours of murdering stuff.

Why can’t mobs drop the approximate amount of gold and/or mats instead of useless gear we have to sell? Add blues and greens to merchants (I think they actually may be already), so newer players can buy it if they want it, give the rest of us the raw results. ez pz

There are choices inherant in the greens and blues that are important to the economy. See, greens/blues are a built in risk/reward system. You can go the safe route and vendor them, or the unsafe route and salvage them or mystic forge them. That unsafe, gambling route can result in much higher payouts than vendoring, but also risks resulting in lower payouts, and also serves to provide luck.

Both of those things are important to the supply of crafting materials, runes, and sigils to the economy, which in effect determines their rarity.

Economies that mostly reward just currency with no coice point in what to do with the majority of the loot aren’t any fun, and just result in boring and unfulfilling loot. This was the problem diablo 3 had before they shut down the gold AH. Once you had “good” items, every other item was completely useless and it was very rare you’d find something that had any use other than as a fancier colored piece of vendor trash.

If your proposed solution was adopted, the price of materials would skyrocket, as their only source would be from spending money, in order to spend even more money to salvage them, or gathering. Most of the t5+ common materials the player base introduces to the economy are the result of salvaging, not harvesting.

Would adding more liquid currency balance that cost? Yes. But it would also result in far less potential rolls for fun loot by getting some ectos or T6 maps. Ectos would tank, and gameplay would reward players more for buying items from vendors than actually playing the primary focus of the game and killing mobs for loot.

But hey, lets say you put the raw pats on the drop tables too. Just adding the mats to the drop tables would remove the choice point, meaning far larger amounts entering the economy. in order to balance that you’d have to pay out far less per player on average than you do with the opportunity cost of salvaging them.

That results in an economy where rare mats are far less rare, which in turn results in lower payouts for the mats that drop for you, personally, leading back to the same problem. The only loot of value you’re acquiring is currency, but because everyone else is doing the same thing, only a very small handful of drops (unique skins) have any value at all, so your loot is just numbers shifting around that you pile up for mich longer periods before you can get the satisfaction of spending that money on something you want.

In a game with constant stat ramping, this kind of stuff is okay because what’s “bad” loot for you may be great loot for a lot of other players. In GW2, however, stats cap out pretty fast, which means there’s no incentive to look at an item you don’t need and make a choice regarding how valuable it is to other players.

The GW2 economy replaces that choice by giving your loot multiple built in purposes so that loot is still interesting despite most experienced players never finding “better” items, or even finding items other players would be willing to purchase because they’re an upgrade.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

PopeUrban.2578:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

PopeUrban.2578:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

DoctorDing.5890:

Really enjoyed those events. I was a bit bemused by the Mastery XP rewards automatically applying to my already maxed XP line. Would have been nice to be able to stash those to use against (presumed) new masteries in the future but I guess in Central Tyria we’re never short of XP.

But, yes. Nice surprise. More please!

I was hoping to stash mine also as I’m mastery locked now in Tyria. But no, it was automatically applied, and therefore it was a worthless reward for me.

Anet already confirmed they are not adding new central tyria lines, like ever. This reward was to give new/slow players a nice buff to help them out.

This is just a small lore/fluff event, it isn’t supposed to pay out amazing rewards.

Yep, a worthless reward to all people who had either completely maxed Tyrian Masteries or to those whose mastery lines were halted but had some Masteries they could still do.

The actual reward is the 1g trash item for completing the achievements. The xp is just a buff for newbies. That’s why you get it before you finish, just like the greens and stuff from the events.

I was simply saying that being able to stash the item would have made it useful to those who’s Tyrian mastery lines are halted but had Masteries left to do. It couldn’t have been that difficult to make it an item you hold on to and used later if you can, rather than an item that’s only useful for some.

Doesn’t that XP already go to an unfilled random line? Or are you saying that you have all your avaliable lines capped out and can’t move on due to mastry points?

In which case I’d say why aren’t you doing stuff that rounds out the mastry points, as at that point all your xp in central tyria is being wasted anyway.

If you just want to feel like an immortal stone cold kitten, go reaper. There’s not much else in the game built around the playstyle of just facetanking in PvE that’s mostly built around dodging. Properly built tanky reaper has crap mobility, but he’s designed not to need it as he can just suck up damage while still outputting a lot. He’s less good against big hitting bosses, but wrecks trash like they don’t exist. Still, if you want to be the guy that has to face down something six times your size just to break a sweat, reaper is for you.

If you want to ratchet that dodging/active playstyle up to elevan, go daredevil. it’s all based around constant skillshots and positioning for optimal damage as well as survival. He’s less good against trash as he will eventually run out of dodges if you’re fighting constant waves of it, but he’s superb against heavy hitting bosses due to their low rates of attack and the multi-hit nature of many thief attacks that makes them more effective against larger monsters. If you want to be the guy that dark souls his way around the biggest enemies in the game, but can be potentially felled by massive zergs of little guys, try daredevil.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

PopeUrban.2578:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

DoctorDing.5890:

Really enjoyed those events. I was a bit bemused by the Mastery XP rewards automatically applying to my already maxed XP line. Would have been nice to be able to stash those to use against (presumed) new masteries in the future but I guess in Central Tyria we’re never short of XP.

But, yes. Nice surprise. More please!

I was hoping to stash mine also as I’m mastery locked now in Tyria. But no, it was automatically applied, and therefore it was a worthless reward for me.

Anet already confirmed they are not adding new central tyria lines, like ever. This reward was to give new/slow players a nice buff to help them out.

This is just a small lore/fluff event, it isn’t supposed to pay out amazing rewards.

Yep, a worthless reward to all people who had either completely maxed Tyrian Masteries or to those whose mastery lines were halted but had some Masteries they could still do.

The actual reward is the 1g trash item for completing the achievements. The xp is just a buff for newbies. That’s why you get it before you finish, just like the greens and stuff from the events.

The daredevil playstyle is an evolution of using the old d/d unicorn in PvE. Only with Daredevil you can do the playstyle with more weapon types and aren’t limited to having just really awful condition damage.

It’s glassy, but rather than “strike and disengage” the playstyle is “keep striking and dodging the biggest hits” because your attacks are also your survivability. Unlike stealthy D/D PvE, where your goal is to sporadically apply big spikes of damage, and get out of combat range to avoid damage, dardevil is awarded damage, boons, and lots of stacks of debuffs on enemies for effectively using his damage mitigation tools while remaining engaged, but loses survivability when he stops striking.

Basically, Daredevil thief is built more around tanking small hits and staying in the fight using more dodges/blocks/weakness, evading bit hits while staying in the fight, using his heals to stay in the fight to keep his damage.mitigation high while core thief is much more built around relying on not taking any hits at all and using his skills to take a time out from the fight if he starts taking damage to get back up to full and try again.

Basically, it’s tankier, but your damage and survivability depend on staying in the fight rather than core thief’s more hit-and-run style tactics.

Our guild runs raid on sundays and often finds ourselves short a few people. Your "teach, not berate philosophy is very much how we approach raids as well. Be happy to take down your contact info or take a spot in your guild to increase my pool of cool raiders to hang out with.

That boss easily hits the whole room three times which means you need to time out two dodges to avoid all three.

If you see any agony ticks at all you failed to dodge a pulse, and like all enemies, the raw damage from his attacks scales up at higher fractal levels. In the 90s, it is a VERY big hit before the agony even starts ticking.

The ice elemental doesn’t have the same ground smash attack. you can avoid his attacks just by being out of the AoE. The dredge, however, hits practically the whole room

Its a tradeoff he gets to be more lethal because he doesn’t spawn adds like the ice guy.

Claiming already selects the guild with the most members present at the point of claiming to give them first dibs at putting their name on it.

Just because you have better bonuses, it doesn’t mean you have the authority to show up to an objective another guild fielded way more members to claim and take ownership of it. If you want your guild to own an objective, your guild need to show up to actually take it. If you feel your server would benefit more from your bonuses, the system is designed to encourage you to either take over unclaimed objectives, or actually do the work and go take one from the enemy.

It’s fine the way it is. The alternative would be allowing guilds with a lot of upgrades to more effectively troll their team than people just claiming stuff because it had literally no buffs or name on it.

When you’re outnumbered at a choke point, you need to call for assistance or find another choke point.

This is why there are four wvw maps and a pretty big auto-teleport zone around entry waypoints so you have a safe place for form up your counter-zerg and punch through.

If they’re locking down literally everwhere you can port to in WvW, your team is so hopelessly outnumbered that you’re not going to accomplish anything anyway.

Glacial.9516:

Not sure if it applies for all of them, but I’m pretty sure the Trophy items that cannot be sold are primarily used for quests? That is, drops from specific mobs at specific times that can be turned in for heart quest or gathering quest progress and such.

This is true, and in newer events, it automatically removes those from your inventory when the event ends. They just need to update those event/heart trophy items to do the same.

Cyanon.1928:

PopeUrban.2578:

The thing is, GW2’s loot economy is based around drooping and salvaging large quantities of items. In order to pay out what feels like good loot for killing stuff, the “trash” greens and blues have to be somehow manageable without requiring people to visit a merchant every 5 seconds.

In order to cut the number of bags, they’d have to seriously increase the number of inventory slots be bag, or offer some sort of median vendor payout for said bags.

Increasing inventory space doesn’t solves the “click all the things” issue, and offering a vendor payout for unopened bags would just feel like a penalty for people not willing to open the bags and loot things “properly”

Without completely changing how the loot>materials>crafted items economy works I can’t really see a better option than what they started in the HoT maps, use less bag types so at least when you’re looting the bags stack better. Anything else would require not just an overhaul of loot, but of the whole loot and crafting systems to a point it wouldn’t be worth the headache and require stupid amounts of resources to to band-aid somethings that’s a pretty core part of how the game’s economy works.

Plus, I like taking the down time to open a bunch of bags. It’s like when you’d trick-or-treat as a kid and then come home and inventory all the loot. It’s kind of relaxing after several hours of murdering stuff.

Nothing of this will change if they add an “open all” option. You and everyone else can enjoy opening thousands of boxes every month while the rest of us who care about our carpal bones can still enjoy opening them all at once.

The reason there’s not an “open all” option is because opening a box usually fills more inventory slots than the box did. an invetory full of boxed, and hitting “open all” would result in no change in the amount of clicking required, you’d just be clicking “take all” in the inventory overflow screen in front of a vendor in stead of clicking on the boxes.

This is why the items with a “consume all” option are all items that do not create additional inventory items when used.

I’m gonna go ahead and say it:

LS2 should be included with HoT

The pay-per-episode system made sense in the old free update financial model, and it still makes sense to sell to free players who may be on the fence about forking over for the full game and want to just get their toes wet with a cheaper content purchase.

However, the entire reason they gave for making the core game free to play was so that new players could easily get in to the experience by just buying the game. LS2 is a massive part of the storyline, just as important to it as the core personal story. It should be included with HoT based on Anet’s own logic.

Sure, start selling LS3 episodes on that model until the next expansion (free during release, small gem cost to unlock if you didn’t log in during release) but the same should apply. When the next expansion releases and HoT becomes free as well, LS3 should at that point also become free with purchase of the expansion so new/lapsed players at the point can seamlessly experience the story at the point of purchase in stead of being nickel and dimed just to understand what’s happening in the game they just bought.

if they keep charging for old LS episodes, the barrier to entry four or five expansions from now could easily exceed the cost of core+HoT for new players, doing exactly what they’re trying to avoid and creating an unreasonable cost barrier for new player to experience multiple years of existing content and acquire the unique rewards it offers.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

DoctorDing.5890:

Really enjoyed those events. I was a bit bemused by the Mastery XP rewards automatically applying to my already maxed XP line. Would have been nice to be able to stash those to use against (presumed) new masteries in the future but I guess in Central Tyria we’re never short of XP.

But, yes. Nice surprise. More please!

I was hoping to stash mine also as I’m mastery locked now in Tyria. But no, it was automatically applied, and therefore it was a worthless reward for me.

Anet already confirmed they are not adding new central tyria lines, like ever. This reward was to give new/slow players a nice buff to help them out.

This is just a small lore/fluff event, it isn’t supposed to pay out amazing rewards.

They should add a breakbar tutorial event in the first HoT mission. Some low damage boss before you arrive at the first cutscene in the second story mission that’s invincible when not broken, like a vine with a wall that prevents further movement forward.

just hook it up to the help tips UI to point out “HEY, SEE THIS BLUE BAR? You need to use crowd control effects to empty it to stun certain powerful foes!”

Stuff that could be added to guild halls without actually breaking the game:

Actual jumping puzzle (with chest) in a decoration-illegal area. Chest awards guild currencies like common scribing mats and crystals used in t2 armor/weapon deisgns.

PvE configurations for the arena. Think of the queen’s gauntlet. Now imagine being able to phase the arena in to various boss fights where it simply hides your decorations and rigs the arena for the fight. Said fights could also be a new type of weekly guild mission (Gladiator Challenge)

Fractal Configuration Device – Addon to the portal, allows your hall to function as a fractal lobby.

Time Limited TP, crafting stations, and vendors – Unlike the permanent, free versions found in cities, these are powered by the same crystals used in the weapon/armor recipies. You walk up to the node, get a dialogue box asking how long you want to set it up at a rate of 1 crystal per minute. Accept the dialogue and an NPC arrives at your waypoint and walks over to the market to set up shop (similar to how the proprieters show up when you first build structures) When his time is up he kicks off a 2 minute event asking for crystals. If people give him more crystals he hangs around. To balance it against cities, have the hall only able to support 2 such NPCs at a time. Lets say people with proper guild permissions could dismiss them early.

The zone currency vendors from HoT, the central tyria karma vendors, black lion trader, dungeon token vendor, fractal vendors, commendation merchant from the initiative HQ, and laurel vendor as well as an NPC for each crafting discipline to set up a usable station provide enough variety that you couldn’t completely replace cities with this function, but the constant coming and going of the NPCs and the added conveneince would add some life to the place. After all, they want the rare crystals they can only get from your hall, so it makes sense they’d be willing to the the legwork for a price, and those crystals are already gated time-wise pretty efficiently and only have very limited uses.

Minigames in the bar Existing minigames. A permanent golem chess and belcher’s bluff table would be a start. Gives people something to do just hanging out.

Costume brawl leaderboard in the arena Just for fun, let the arena track guild member’s costume brawl wins/losses.

NPC housing nodes Invite various NPCs to live in your hall. On the down side each one slows down your aetherium mining rate. On the up side they have a chance to roll as vendors each day, using a similar one purchase per day system as the guild trader and selling various low tier black lion items for 5-10 commendations like boosters, ticket scraps, transmutation charges, unidentified dyes, etc. The type of NPC housed and number present affect their chances. Want combat boosters? invite some vigil to live in your hall. MF boosters? Get some Skritt! Scraps? Set up a black lion franchise! Dyes? Go consortium! These NPCs could also permanent sell various consumables already found on heart arma vendors throught the world (golem in a box, ogre pet whistles, etc.) in addition to their rare daily chance at becoming commendation>black lion traders.

For added fun, let these NPCs show up to help you with guild missions (where they, being crap at combat because they’re NPCS, will be mostly useless but great cheerleaders)

Guild Daily Jobs A jobs board that randomly rolls a daily achievement when interacted with. Completing this achievement awards a random crafting material to the treasury, with more expensive/rare material being (obviously) more rare. The roll is randomly determined per person, so its a good system for guild that share a hall but may have play schedules that prevent everyone from playing together, and is a great way to let even new players contribute to the hall without unbalancing the economy.

Expanded Portal allow guild members to invest commendations to unlock waypoints on a weekly basis. This adds an interact effect to all waypoints, allowing you to channel your commendations in to them. At 50 commendations invested by members of your guild, that waypoint is added to the portal list for one week. A great way to help newbies or direct guild efforts for player run events.

The thing is, GW2’s loot economy is based around drooping and salvaging large quantities of items. In order to pay out what feels like good loot for killing stuff, the “trash” greens and blues have to be somehow manageable without requiring people to visit a merchant every 5 seconds.

In order to cut the number of bags, they’d have to seriously increase the number of inventory slots be bag, or offer some sort of median vendor payout for said bags.

Increasing inventory space doesn’t solves the “click all the things” issue, and offering a vendor payout for unopened bags would just feel like a penalty for people not willing to open the bags and loot things “properly”

Without completely changing how the loot>materials>crafted items economy works I can’t really see a better option than what they started in the HoT maps, use less bag types so at least when you’re looting the bags stack better. Anything else would require not just an overhaul of loot, but of the whole loot and crafting systems to a point it wouldn’t be worth the headache and require stupid amounts of resources to to band-aid somethings that’s a pretty core part of how the game’s economy works.

Plus, I like taking the down time to open a bunch of bags. It’s like when you’d trick-or-treat as a kid and then come home and inventory all the loot. It’s kind of relaxing after several hours of murdering stuff.

Glacial.9516:

Instead of another ‘eater’ item, adding material storage for runes and sigils would help this problem immensely. Clearing stacks of 100+ runes and sigils that have accumulated is far easier than dealing with them individually, even for the laziest of us.

This, also, more uses for sigils. There are a handful of crafting/scribing recipies that require sigils as a crafting component.

The X vs. Enemy type sigils are slowly being phased out of the game anyway so they need more uses. A quick and dirty fix for that is statues for scribing, since their value is already so low, a direct upgrade path via crafting for those would be a good idea, like 4x minors+dust=major and so on.

You could right click deposit the sigils, scribes could turn them in to statues of various mobs (quick pose/material swap for the art assets for scribing statues)

Could also tie them in to collections for titles. 250 sup centaur slaying sigils+centaur slay achievement + drops from completing all centaur zones + drop from killing ulgoth = Unique centaur themed ascended backpack? I figure backs are a good idea since there are so few acquisition methods for ascended backs, and backs are class/build/character model agnostic as items.

For the non-mob sigils, LEGENDARY sigils/runes craftable by jewelers (jewelers need more than this for 400-500 but its a start) would also be a good sink. Make the gifts require stacks of a large number of sigils to complete, and get a sigil/rune legendary with the same stat swap function as the weapons. Considering that for a full set, you’d want 6 runes and 2-4 sigils, that’d be a useful but not balance destroying way to sink them from the economy, give legendary owners something they’ve wanted for a long time, and increase their value so that having all those stacks in your bank tab feels like decent loot and not annoying trash.

Finally, the ability to craft more esoteric/weird infusions would be another logical place to use lots of runes/sigils as crafting components (and another good idea for 500 jeweler) Considering the non-stat effects of infusions are deliberatly situational, infusion slots seem like a much better place to buff vs. mob type bonuses rather than sigil/nourishment slots. Could provide unique mob inspired auras, MF versus mob type, and other such things.

Felahr.9830:

Learn how to bloody read, people. I dont care that I got free stuff. I care that I cant DO anything with it. Cant vendor it for 10 copper, cant forge it, cant TP it, cant NOTHING. A couple ectos isnt going to break the economy, at least make the kitten salvagable.

A couple ectos for every single existing player all at the same time would absolutely break the economy.

The point of those items isn’t for you, or me, or anyone with one or more geared 80s that can just buy another set of exotics with no problem.

That gear is for people who lapsed at L20 years ago, or brand new players using a handful of level up/heart gear.

You know, so that when they use their L80 boost they can actually immediately use that L80 character to farm up money for better gear.

The idea with stations/trays is that you use them in situations where it would be even more expensive to pass out individual buffs.

They’re not supposed to be a replacement for the regular version of the item, or competitively priced.

Lite Ning Strike.5203:

I know we get 5 gold after doing 8 paths of different dungeons but I do wish the payout for each run would have gone back to one gold, it still sometimes hard to get others to see the big picture (5 gold 150 dungeon tokens of your choice). Please consider making each path 1 gold again plus the 5 it would sure help convince others to join.

Thanks!!

They don’t have to see the big picture. Your completions are tracked for you, and it’s not a daily. You could do 2 on saturday and one every other day of the week and after the 8th path you’re still getting the 5 gold and tokens.

The way the tokens are laid out is kind of clever. it means if you can’t find people to do your preferred path, you can do their preferred path and still come out the end with whatever skin you were after.

That said, keep in mind that this change was there to ensure dungeons are a nice companion to fractals, not a replacement. Fractals are still their focus on 5 man content, they just realized that there’s not much of a point having completely dead content in the game, and that spreading people around to different paths results in more players doing every path.

With the old rewards, only a handful of paths/fractals were done because there was no incentive to try new things. With the new ones, unless you run with the same group every session, it’s highly likely that you’re going to find a lot of players doing a larger selection of paths because they can’t just hammer away at the same 3 runs every day.

I get that, but those two concepts are intertwined in this particular discussion.

To clarify though, the concept of “soloable” is the same sort of leaning as “make it easy” when it comes to a genre that has, as its basic concept before all other cosiderations of design, that it is a multiplayer game.

Take a look at a design like No Man’s Sky. It’s a single player game. it’s developed as a single player game, marketed as a single player game, and functionally a single player game because that’s pretty core to its design despite the fact that it takes place in a shared universe for every player.

The MMO, as a genre, has one lement that sets it apart from other genres. The core principal of MMO design is that you are present in a shared world in which you interact, competitively or cooperatively, with other players.

It isn’t that solo = easy

It’s that when you try and shoehorn “solo” in to a genre that derives all of its other systems from the assumption that you share the play space with other players, you’re literally only catering to people that don’t want to play that basic design in the first place, and thus you inevitably erode that basic design.

It’s a matter of degrees, sure. You NEED some soloable content because you’re still talking about a game here, and you can’t expect every player to be able to summon up a perfect party 24 hours a day. However, when the focus of your design becomes “make it a pleasant experience for solo players” rather than “make it a pleasant experience for players to play with each other” you’re simply moving too far to cater to individual players at the expense of the overall design.

I like GW2. I even like the story instances. What I don’t like is the design that says “you, the single player, are the most important person in the world”

When you teach every player they are the focus of attention, they stop being happy to see other player, and start getting upset because other players are an assumed element of the design, like a weapon or a map rather than intelligent entities that you have to interact with on a human level.

That human level is what creates the sense of a shared world. That sense is lacking in GW2 because of an over-reliance on the idea that players should never actually need help as much as just passively benefit from it in terms of efficiency or difficulty level.

IndigoSundown.5419:

PopeUrban.2578:

Personally, I think designing MMOs around solo play does a huge disservice to the genre.

- snip -

I appreciate (and to some degree agree with) your analysis and conclusions. I have to wonder, though, about the trend being a disservice to the genre. I agree it is for the demographic that wants what you want.

We’re living in a time where good MMO’s involve the expenditure of many millions in development costs. The old-time MMO experience that you’re referring to would not in all likelihood draw sufficient players to justify the expenditure in a corporate environment where executives think in terms of how many millions of people they can get to buy their product/service. I’m not sure we’d be seeing new MMO’s at all if developers designed them to be like EQ with regard to accessibility.

Whether some people like it or not, the genre has evolved. Some think, not for the better. However, for the genre to continue to exist it has to adapt to both player desires and current business realities.

I don’t think that’s such a bad thing really. If you’re trying to pull in, say, the single player RPG crowd, then why aren’t you making a single player RPG?

The industry by and large is past the inflates expectations that the WoW population bubble created. Nobody in their right mind thinks MMOs are the future of all games any more.

It’s perfectly reasonable to cater to player expectations, and try to bring in new players, but accessible isn’t the same thing as dumbed down. “Accessible” is simply a buzzword that has been misinterpreted as “make it easy” rather than “make it approachable”

An accessible design is easy to learn, but not necessarily easy to master. PC gaming’s giants fall in to that mold. Games like LoL or DOTA or Super Meat Boy or the Souls series or <insert sim game> or <insert this minute’s latest FPS> are accessible, but not dumbed down experiences. They’re designed to be easy to learn, but difficult to master.

The problem with over-engineering accessibility, which is what Anet has done with GW2 over the years and is only starting to step away from with HoT, is that you have a game that’s equally easy to learn, but without the sense of achievement or communities that makes MMOs as a genre remarkable different from a shooter, or a single player RPG, or a MOBA.

There’s nothing wrong with any of those genres, but I don’t think adding more single player RPG to an MMO garners a remarkable amount of long term users and more than adding XP, levels, and unlocks does to a shooter.

That’s not to say genre bending is bad. It’s healthy to try and innovate, and GW2 does a lot of innovative things, but genre bending solely to attract customers rather than to serve the overall design of the product is a bad idea.

If you’re going to make your game more accessible, do it by teaching new players what’s special about it, and give them something unique to love about it. Don’t do it by simply mistake-proofing the entire game from the beginning to the end.

Shiren.9532:

You actually can break bar him before he teleports up, the window is just incredibly small and most people will only accidentally do it.

We broke him just before he went up top, the ice spikes still fell but he was stunned in the middle of the room for us to DPS.

Woah, game changer.

I think there should be a cast animation before he teleports up top with a break bar. Break the bar, no teleport.

Making it interruptable in that manner would reward skillful play with faster clears, and encourage beople to use CC more strategically rather than just blowing it to get extra damage since he’s always vulnerable to breaks.

It would also be good if you couldn’t just hit frozen people to break them out, but in stead had to get some sort of bundle/torch. As it is the freeze stacks mechanic is almost totally ignorable.

Also, what’s up with the forest section? It’s just a bunch of easily skippable mobs for no apperant reason. Either give people a reason to fight those mobs (maybe they drop stuff you need to open the cave?), or remove the pointless running section.

Here’s hoping for a real boss rework!

Rednik.3809:

TexZero.7910:

So he can still get good. Simple, no ?

It’s almost like, if you avoid the obvious you don’t have to deal with the additional mechanics that are meant to put strain on you. Shucks what a novel concept, and straight forward game design that actively rewards playing good and punishes poor play. Something you should expect from what they see as their end game 5 man content with scaling difficulty.

So, again, who is “you avoid the obvious you don’t have to deal with the additional mechanics”? It’s someone else who doing something wrong and then awesome shadowstep mechanic randomly brings some fat damage spike in your face. Or not brings anything, but you can’t tell because there is NO TELL FOR SHADOWSTEP TARGET before he actually ports.
I still wonder why you keep defending bad mechanics that not rewards your individual skill, but instead forces you to rely on some random person.

It is a five person instance.

It is literally designed for you to rely on four other people.

If you don’t understand this, I question what you’re doing in a group instance.

Agreed. Also, trophies shouldn’t be RNG drops. It’s a trophy. Literally a piece of the boss, and a mundane one at that. Increase the amount required to craft higher tier statues, but the trophies in the hall should represent kills for the guild, not a combination of kills and drop chance.

As for suggestions I’d also love to see a set of dungeon trophies and fractal trophies.

Trophies, or “use of the guild hall as a guild achievement panel” is a great idea. Stuff like the PvP trophies should really be applies to the whole PvE game and even the WvW game. It’s nice to have decorations, but I really want that trophy hall that people walk in to and go “dang, you guys murdered a lot of things”

I was specifically talking about move in nightfall to heroes. Heroes ae a system that makes sense now, with a drastically lower population, but at the time Nightfall came out it was a bad move to create NPCs and give players such intricate tools for directing them.

Through Proph and factions I was always interested in having players in my party. Once nightfall released my desire to connect with other people quickly fell off simply because it was less work and often more efficient to kit out some heroes and do the content.

Before that, I could solo with henchment, who did the job well enough, but forced me to build around them, depriving me of playing builds I really wanted to and often resulting in a more difficult experience, so I felt compelled to hook up with other players, and when a group worked and was fun to be around, I wanted to keep hanging out with them.

Probably one of those things that was part of the more holistic roleplaying side of character creation, like the attitude system that just never really got off the ground.

However, it is still there, and they’ve displayed a desire with HoT to weave character creation and personal story in small ways in to ongoing content so it could still come up in later releases.

Yeah, that’s basically what I’m saying.

If you break it down enough, it’s impossible for that kind of economic equity to be completely fair, but at the same time it doesn’t really matter all that much.

The alternative is to not have actual real people testing things, ar developers actually playing their own game, which would have far more dire consequences for the game than a slight advantage on a handful of high value trades in a game in which gold buys, at most, a shiny new texture for some gear.

So MAYBE its a little unfair, but it’s okay in the grand scheme of things because it’s largely a game about killing stuff, and racking up gold is a by product, rather than the other way around.

ronpierce.2760:

PopeUrban.2578:

This just in: Everything is a conspiracy.

The fact is that, when an Anet employee plays the live game they are always privy in one way or another to some form of insider information. That’s unavoidable.

However, the fact is that those same employees don’t really care to utilize that information in ways that impact the economy overly much, as they are such a small percentage of the live player base that any move they make can only result in negligable economic impact.

You seem to be under the impression that a significant portion of these weapon skins rested in the accounts of Anet employees. Given the cluster-wide nature of the GW2 auction house, it’s inconcievable that Anet employees’ live account make up a significant enough portion of the market for anything to have a notable impact.

When you see speculators buying things up or price fixing, the law of averages indicates an almost direct certainty that it’s another normal player, not an Anet employee responsible, simply because the auction house system serves the entire region

I’m not sure only Devs have access to private test realms at all times. I know for a fact there have been instances of too tier players having access to content early to test the changes and provide feedback. Now, I don’t know how common that is, but if it does happen more regularly than expected (which is never announced anyways, as far as I can tell), it’s not so much a conspiracy as a problem with people using early information to their gain. That’s… Really not that hard to believe… And who’s to really fault them other than ethics police?

@Razor, yeah it can be a big deal. If it is in fact the case (and there has been other evidence of this), it explains a lot of large price swings which affect all players wanting to get in on new content that is pre-rigged, if you will, to cost more and line the pockets of early testers.

Of course, that is, depending on how often these private testing a occur with players close to the devs.

I’ve discussed and understood some class changes, for instance, by working closely with the devs on balance and feedback. Luckily that’s just PvP and has no real lasting benefit, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility.

ALL that said, it’s probably not that big of a deal overall. It’s just really kitten lucky for those players. I can’t blame them though. Especially ones who dump high priced items about to crash to limit the losses coming. It’d be hard to not want to jump at that, knowing the price was soon to plummet.

Sure, but even if we’re talking about people with access to those testing environments, it’s still a small enough portion of the population to be of negligable impact.

What’s interesting about MMO economies in a game that isn’t designed around consistant supply and demand is that nothing is sacred. The value of an item can fluctuate wildly at the drop of a hat. Combine that with almost certain inflation in MMO economies (especially economies, like GW2, where the vast majority of final product goods experience no repeat purchases due to there being no attrition/desctruction of those items built in to the system) and you find an environment almost openly hostile to long term investment.

And that’s okay. The economy isn’t designed around long term investment. it’s designed around short term trading for personal gain, and it expects players to immediately spend that wealth.

Economic fairness in terms of any sort of “investment economy” simply isn’t a pillar a game like GW2’s economy is designed around. It’s important that costs to crate/acquire items are reasonable, not that the payouts for hoarding items and consistant, because the core acquisition structure of the game is modeled around using, not saving items.

GW2 simply isn’t designed to encourage users to save. It’s designed to encourage users to spend. Thus, the “fairness” argument is moot simply because profiting through simply playing the market isn’t a primary design goal as it would be in a game designed with a permanent crafting/use loop. Most items are bought or made once per user, and that’s the model the game is designed around.

Its not a design goal for people to hoard skins, so making sure the system is fair for those people isn’t a priority.

I think its fine as it is now.

It’s necessary to have some selection of decorations at a high price point for scribing to have longevity.

The problem with the old costs was that literally everything rested at an absurd price point. The way it works now, there are a handful of top tier set pieces that are expensive, but the vast majority of items are quite affordable.

The new costs allow people a lot of freedom in how they decorate, but there are still “luxury items” that retain high costs on purpose. It’s important to have those items as otherwise there’s not a lot of incentive to continue to scribe, and no emotional sense of payoff for upgrading from “cool decorations” to “my guild hall smells of rich mahogany”

Redenaz.8631:

PopeUrban.2578:

I like how everyone was SURE this was some big scary dupe as their first mental option rather than “maybe the last patch added something?”

Like, if it’s not on a wiki or a reddit post, it MUST be cheating right?

Does anyone else remember what MMOs were like before wiki culture?

The problem is that things started shifting before the patch. We don’t know how many shields are out there, but it was the increased effort to sell off old inventory that put it on people’s radar. It could have a normal explanation (returning players, for example,) but in light of the new Mystic Forge recipes, it definitely looks suspicious.

People with lots of investment value were told that a number of valuable items were becoming avaliable (legendaries) and certain valuable items were reciving a major economic shift (scribing materials, crafting materials in general)

This looks like a standard pattern of liquidating assets to buy low. It’s speculative behavior. People started liquidating the shields because they wanted to buy up mats to level scribing cheaper and build new legendaries, both activities directed at players with large amounts of standing account gold value.

I personally bought up a lot of wood, and sold several things to do so, as I assumed that a new shortbow recipie would be popular as an alternative to the polarizing pony bow, and that a new shortbow would probably require a lot of wood. I also assumed that with a cust to scribing, demand for wood to turn in to paper would go up and wanted to get my own stocks handled.

In order to get those piles of wood, I liquidated several high value items I’d been sitting on. This is behavior you’re always going to see the moment any rumor starts about high value items or economic rebalances of any kind.

This just in: Everything is a conspiracy.

The fact is that, when an Anet employee plays the live game they are always privy in one way or another to some form of insider information. That’s unavoidable.

However, the fact is that those same employees don’t really care to utilize that information in ways that impact the economy overly much, as they are such a small percentage of the live player base that any move they make can only result in negligable economic impact.

You seem to be under the impression that a significant portion of these weapon skins rested in the accounts of Anet employees. Given the cluster-wide nature of the GW2 auction house, it’s inconcievable that Anet employees’ live account make up a significant enough portion of the market for anything to have a notable impact.

When you see speculators buying things up or price fixing, the law of averages indicates an almost direct certainty that it’s another normal player, not an Anet employee responsible, simply because the auction house system serves the entire region

If you’re going to scribe, you need a guild that wants you to be scribing. The recent price drop doesn’t change the fact that scribing is a profession designed around producing things for guilds.

Scribing’s price wasn’t brought down so people could scribe for personal use. it was brought down so people in even small guilds could enjoy and derive benefit from the profession.

If your guild isn’t willing to give you the permissions to scribe properly, then your guild probably doesn’t deserve the benefits that come from your hard work either, as pretty much everything you make with scribing belongs to the guild, not you, with very few exceptions.

Personally, I think designing MMOs around solo play does a huge disservice to the genre.

I feel like that in the move to be more accessible (and thus more soloable) MMOs as a genre quickly lose what actually makes them stand out as a genre, and as an experience. Adversity and the need to find allies is what breeds communities, and GW2, despite all of its anti-griefing design, does almost nothing to encourage players to develop communities. It just encourages them to run around in giant, silent mobs with very little communication or cameraderie.

This was true of GW1 as well, but in GW1’s defense it wasn’t attempting to create a living, persistant world. It was a group-centric linear RPG.

GW2 is a very solo friendly game, but it’s also a very lonely game for the same reason. You’re often surrounded by other players, but because you rarely need to be sociable with those players to form groups and tackle challenges, you just treat them like background noise or a wave to surf from event to event.

I’d honestly be happier if there were even less soloable content in the game, simply because it would encourage players to actually value the presence of one another as players and form communities rather than value one another like good or bad weather. That’s all other players really are in the open world, weather patterns. Sometimes you can ride a storm, and sometimes a drought makes your life harder, but never do you meet a handful of people and go adventuring together for a while. You show up, there’s a nice breeze at the event, then you leave.

Arenanet has constantly bowed to the “BUT I SHOULD BE ABLE TO SOLO THIS” viewpoint. Release era Orr was the first casualty and throughout the years a large number of pieces of content (even some billed as “group events”) have been brought down in an effort to simply ‘weatherproof’ them.

In my opinion, the PvE game has suffered because of it. There’s noever going to be a sufficient amount of PvE content to match the speed at which players consume it. What creates staying power in MMOs is the effect other players have on one another. it’s infinitely more replayable to do the same content over and over with a group of people, all making unpredictable moves, than it is to repeat the same content over and over alone.

Make no mistake, in the largely role-less open world of GW2, all content is solo content. Some content is just more weather resistant.

I like how everyone was SURE this was some big scary dupe as their first mental option rather than “maybe the last patch added something?”

Like, if it’s not on a wiki or a reddit post, it MUST be cheating right?

Does anyone else remember what MMOs were like before wiki culture?

Shinzan.2908:

The increased event rewards are great, actually makes stuff worth doing. Rather than nerf this back to pre-patch levels they just need to buff the final meta rewards as well.

This.
They’re currently pretty underwhelming when compared to the zone events. They need some kind of unique trophy skins or something. Maybe enhanced drop rates, or a selection of HoT crafting mats or something less random than the normal boxes?

Honestly, all +5 statted infusions just need a buff to +7, no upgrade required.

For an upgrade path you should just allow people to somewhat more cheaply combine the cheap 7s with the +4 infusions from the laurel vendor for a +4/7

Then, your cost range would be 0/7 > 4/7 >5/7(w/glowies)

Additionally, I’m hoping part of the update is to add aura effects to those same expensive crafted 5/7’s, and that what’s holding things up is a GUI interface to select/toggle/combine auras.

Or, even better, if +5s gained the ability to be upgraded with agony infusions so you had 5/x slots. The acquisition of +5s seems like its worth being infinitely upgradable like an AR slot.

Tumult.2578:

I absolutely hate what happened to guilds but that’s not my reason for posting.
I’m wondering why we are not receiving map chat offers of
“a Guild Hall for a price”.

This game is filled with opportunists and this is an excellent opportunity to make gold.
A regular team, setup and designed to gain guild halls for profit would likely do well if handled correctly. There certainly is a market. It might take a while to work out all the kinks and fix prices but don’t think for a second that solo players cant pay. Many have the remnants of the old guild halls and would like to regain all the buffs they have in inaccessable storage.

Because what little persists from the old system isn’t worth the cost. The people who own old solo-bank guilds aren’t willing to sell them off because it’s a non-recoupable investment unless they literally sell it for so much money that they could BUY the same upgrades in the new system.

At that price point, there’s no reason for someone to buy that “classic” guild as they can easily afford to upgrade their hall the proper wayin stead of taking a shortcut from a pre-HoT guild’s upgrades.

Same thing for other pre-HoT upgrades. People are pretty attached to limited edition statues, and some of the scribing recipies are extreme money savers when you don’t have to upgrade the tavern for them.

It’s just not worthwhile to sell an existing guild when you can use it yourself so cheaply. That’s just a perk of being a veteran at this point.