Guild Wars 2

tolunart.2095:

If you want to reach the top of the mountain, you have to climb. You can’t stand at the bottom and demand someone installs an elevator.

The system was specifically created for players who enjoy this process. If you do not, then it was not made for you.

It seems that a more fitting analogy would be:
If you want to reach the top of the mountain you have to climb half way up it. Then run around the world doing tedious, mind numbingly boring, and entirely unrelated tasks in order to build a climbing exoskeleton to finish your assent.

The problem is that the process of getting high levels of Agony Resistance has nothing at all to do with the process that uses Agony Resistance. AR works extremely well, until you start to reach the high levels of it. You get enough Pristine Fractal Relics while learning the maps on the tier 0 fractals that you are able to easily negate the tier 1 agony with a ring or two. You get enough Relics from running through tier 0 and 1 fractals to have a back piece before you hit teir 2. Throw some other trinkets that you get from running stuff with your guild or just from Laurels and you have the 25 AR needed for their 2 just from the two rings and back piece you are handed along with two other trinkets that are easily acquirable. Running the tier 2 Fractals will likely give you an Infused ring drop or two. You will also get what you need in order to infuse your back piece. Stick the still easily acquirable +5 Agony Infusions in them, maybe get your sixth trinket, and you are all set for Tier 3. You have a very nice, smooth transition that occurs naturally as you progress your character. Getting to Tier 4 is slightly more of a bump, but still nothing at all unreasonable.

Belenwyn.8674:

It is easily possible to reach full ascended equipment within two or three months. This provides you with slots for 70 AR. Additional 10 or 20 AR you can get with AR infusions in the same period of time. Fractals are a perfect “Friedhof” for your gold and your time like many vertical progression systems if you want to go for the highest limit.

‘Easily possible’ is a matter of opinion. To me, it is not easy to remain awake while checking gw2stuff for world boss spawns, then tediously and mind numbingly auto attacking with a massive zerg of people in order to get the ascended materials needed. Likewise, unless you already have a massive abundance of accumulated wealth setting around you will be farming champion trains or doing dungeon speed runs in order to finance the ascended crafting process. Not to mention the daily Laural grind.

If progression required doing challenging, exciting content I would absolutely love it. Until you get to the Tier 5 Agony Resistance progression, they do just that. But instead, in order to ‘progress’ you are forced to go back and grind grind grind away at extremely boring and ridiculously tedious content in order to either finance the very high +value Agony Infusions or else do even more of the boring content so you can dump wealth into Ascended Crafting.

Scrambles.2604:

And then when you add up the total stats for every player in WvW on your server, and then compare it with the total stats for every player in WvW on an enemy server, it evens out again.

WvW does not mean ‘zerg’. There are many other ways to compete in WvW, such as roaming and sneaking around to set up portals. When a couple of roamers in Ascended gear can ambush another roaming party in exotic/Ascended mixed gear and kill them before they have a chance to respond it creates an entirely different form of gameplay. In order to be competitive in this environment you either have BiS gear, which Arena Net said would be attainable for all players (and by ‘playing how you want’, which is an entirely different issue) or else you are feed for those who do.

Khisanth.2948:

If you are staring at numbers all day it might make a difference but in actual play it doesn’t feel any different.

That’s bull kitten. For very high damage builds, such as the OP’s Thief, the differences are very clear, and will make the difference between dropping your opponent in 3-4 attacks and giving them enough time to effectively respond after an ambush and surviving.

This is why the claims that ‘Ascended gear is only a 5% increase’ fall apart for WvW. When you add up all of those minor increases and multiply them by the critical damage increase, you end up with a gear imbalance that destroys the competitive nature that Guild Wars 2 promised.

When I started reading the OP, I was ready to dismiss it as yet another request for stat morphing on Ascended gear. I think that this would be a terrible move that simultaneously devalues existing Legendary weapons and also nixes any chance of getting Legendary Armors. However, this showed more thought than most of those requests:

There are currently 18~ stat prefixes in the game. Once you’ve unlocked a single piece of ascended gear, you now unlock a new category under skill points called “Ascension”. This screen is where you to to unlock stat prefixes via Skill Points. Think about it: how many skill points do you have just lying around, gathering dust? This would be a perfect way to give players a reason not only to spend Skill Points, but to also want ascended gear. How many skill points does a stat prefix cost, you ask? I can’t say! But if it’s anything like ANet’s new skills that they’re releasing, I’d be just fine with 25 Skill Points per prefix.

A simple Skill Point tax seems far too light. Skill Points are essentially nothing for any character that has been around a long time. However, make it a bit more substantial; say a skill point item purchase and the inscription who’s stat profile you want to add to the item. This keeps you from having to grind out tedious Vision Crystal components that do not fit your playstyle (For me, that would be chasing down World Bosses. Other people never seem to have enough from dungeons.) while still making a non-negligable cost associated with ‘improving’ your gear. It gives people a bit of flexibility to change their builds without having to totally start over on crafting a full new set of gear, while also saving them inventory space!

You reference Southsun Cove being a desolate void without any other players, and then you make suggestions that would create even more empty content that is largely unusable. Phasing, which is the WoW system that you describe, is something that is not only divisive to the community, but also counter to the idea of having a living world where things actually progress and change rather than being a boring monotone.

I am rather happy with the way that the Nightmare story arc has gone. It looks like it will have a permanent, meaningful impact on Kessex Hills from now on. This means that people who never ventured out there before this Living Story will never know what things were like before the Krait and a faction of the Nightmare Court joined forces to build the tower there. But there is no point in having an ongoing story in a game if all that it means is a month long episode that goes back to it’s stable state at the end.

I have missed quite a lot of Living Story releases because I was not playing, either because of RL or just growing bored of things. But that doesn’t mean that I begrudge others having an ongoing story to follow, even when I am not able to keep up with it. And while it is certainly not the same, there are always the recaps on the GW2 wiki to help me fill in what I miss.

Bsgapollo.5364:

If this goes through, and I happen to make 1 lousy mistake, then I’ll have all the time in the world to do whatever the kitten I want since I won’t be playing this game anymore.

First, the factual errors. You need to leave three matches before there is any kind of dishonor applied. Not one. Not “Oh, this never happens, but then this one time it did and poor me, I got banned!”
Dishonor is a way to remove people who frequently ruin matches from the pool of players. Either accidentally such as the OP, maliciously such as many of the trolls out there, or negligently. Which brings up….

Bsgapollo.5364:

2 days is ridiculous indeed, even I miss out on some matches because I forgot I was que’d, mistakes happen. You should get punished quicker with the dishonour system but only for a couple hours at max.

Bsgapollo.5364:

If I have to wait 10 kitten mins for a que pop then yes I will brows some on the internet, If I happen to watch a comedy show and I get lost in track of time then yes I might accidently forget and not enter the que, I shouldn’t be punished 2 freaking days for a mistake like that. If things go this way I guarantee you it will only hurt the game because people are just not able to play.

It sounds like the system is working perfectly in this case. I think that it is pretty safe to say that most PvPers would rather have a few less people to play with than having to get so many 4v5s because someone entered the queue and then got busy getting their My Little Ponie fix. This is precisely the type of behavior that the dishonor system is meant to weed out.

Xae Isareth.1364:

By getting rid of class specificness, you open a lot of new doors.

Not really. By removing roles you close all doors that do not carry the highest relative advantage. You certainly could do any of those tasks listed with nearly any class. But there is always one class that is better than any others. So by not using that class, you are only hurting the team in terms of making things more difficult or more time consuming than they need to be.

The idea of removing class roles was an interesting one. But at the end of the day, every option needs to have a relative advantage in some crucial field to justify it’s existence. If you consider the game as a whole, I would say that this is working fairly well in general. But if you are only looking at PvE dungeons/FotM, then not going with a fairly strictly defined optimal lineup means that you are running at a significant disadvantage. And this is a very bad situation for a game to be in.

BondageBill.4021:

In my experience, this is even one of the bigger selling points of expansions in MMOs. I have seen several friends quit MMOs because they cannot keep up with the gear curve, only to rejoin when an expansion is released because they are on par with the rest of the population. Again, this option can be good for the longevity of MMOs as a gear reset may rejuvenate the MMO community.

We take very different lessons from the same thing. Rather than putting players on a pointless and endless race, why not just not have a treadmill? More players have already been pushed away by Ascended Crafting than would be lost from a lack of gear progression.

If you have good, quality gameplay people will play it. They will play it without getting in line for more uberawesome gears. But putting in barriers to entry, such as difficult to obtain gear that you are not competitive without, will keep people from playing.

John Corpening.9847:

Regarding new skills, PvP will continue to have all existing skills unlocked for players. Only new skills will require unlocks. The number of skills currently in the game can be intimidating for new players. We would like to allow them some time to learn the base set while they work towards unlocking the new skills.

This seems entirely backwards to me. The claim is made that the number of skills currently in the game is intimidating to new players, but leaving them unlocked and locking new skills out of PvP does nothing at all to address this supposed existing problem. Nor should this be something that needs addressed, in my opinion.

I thought that the entire point of PvP upleveling everyone to 80 and using separate PvP gear was to provide an even playing field for people to compete. Everyone has access to all of the same things, and they are able to get started and get playing without significant grinding just to be ready to compete. With the new skills requiring unlocking, this is no longer the case. Forget about experienced players rolling up a new profession to play, you will need to invest serious time into a character just to be competitive. And even worse, someone new to the game another year or two from now that wants to step in and play will be given an entire list of skills which must now be ground through and unlocked before they can actually start playing.

I understand that you are looking to make it easier for new players to get into PvP. But the task of preparing themselves for it should be on them. If the number of choices available seems overwhelming to them, then players should take some time and figure it out. So far as I can see, keeping the current skills unlocked and locking all future skills added does nothing to alleviate the problem that it is supposed to be fixing, and it does a great deal to erode the inherently fair nature of GW2’s PvP by adding a barrier to entry of time spent grinding for each character that you want to use in PvP.

Talara.8053:

Has this game seriously come down to this? Are people seriously spam reporting people for playing a game that they paid for?

Sadly, this really does seem to be a fairly common thing. I have never seen such behavior in the FG train on Sanctum of Rall, they typically seem to be much more laid back and accepting of others, but I see it extremely often in Queensdale. In fact, I have noticed in map chat the champion train harassing new players who took on an encounter to the point where that person will log out and simply never be seen on GW2 again.

Patrikan Habaton.2548:

well they could at least add a Special title than they did in Arena item or whatever as one time reward for Player that did this before.. if they would have a horse Jockey he would have least gotten a reward when he was the best horse jokey…

This is quite true. And I have not seen anything saying that they will ~not~ be offering special rewards to those that already have a high Fractal level. Hopefully with more focus on this, the lack of reward for those who raised their personal level before this update to fractals, there will be some sort of prestige title or reward box for people.

All of the crying about the reset to 30 really does not make any sense to me, though. They have said very clearly that the level 31+ fractals will be more difficult and exciting than they are now. Why not be happy that there will now be something to better test player skill against, rather than crying about how this marker that supposedly measures PvE skill is reset?

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

To me, this is like having to ask your spouse if its ok to sleep, or to eat, or to use the bathroom. You shouldn’t have to ask permission to do something that should be considered as part of the natural order.

If you want to eat at 5:30 so you can be finished before you have to be someplace, I would say that asking the SO/housemate/whatever for that is a very good idea. Talking to each other and communicating your intentions is a very important part of getting along with others. It is a very minor thing to ask the train to steer clear of your challenging kill attempt, rather than having a zerg train unaware of your intentions plowing into the middle of your attempt and then getting upset at them simply for doing what they do.

Please check all that apply.

You are:

[ ] Married
[x] Have Girlfriend
[x] Employed
[x] Have Pets
[ ] Have Children
[x] Are an Adult
[?] Have a Life -This is largely consumed by #2, #3, and GW2!
[ ] Have no Manual Dexterity

You Think Living World is too:

[ ] Hard
[x] Time Consuming
[x] Temporary
[ ] Full of Jumping Puzzles

You are Currently Threatening to:

[ ] Quit
[ ] Uninstall
[ ] Kick Colins’ Dog
[ ] Tell the Internet That You are Upset
[x] Continue playing happily, though could be happier

Typically, the argument for the LW being too temporary revolves around people wanting the LW updates to be permanent. I like the fact that the ‘event’ only lasts a short while, though 4-6 weeks (perhaps overlapping) would seem nice to me. When I say that they are too temporary, what I mean is that they rarely have enough of a lasting impact on the world after they are done. It seems quite the opposite of a ‘Living World’ when things are largely episodic and usually go back to a stable state at the close of the event.

BobbyStein.2315:

We’re already looking at ways to leave some LW content behind to evolve Tyria and improve the game.

This, at least to me, devalues the LW content even more. The only reason that you have huge turnouts to the LW content when it releases is because they know that this is temporary. I am sure that opinions are split on if this is a good thing or not, but to me the masses of people all working together on the ‘new stuff’ is what makes the game feel like an MMO. If they can go back and do the content whenever they feel like it this motivation is gone, and it will be just a slightly higher volume of open world content. Which on some Worlds is already quite lonely.

Most people seem to be under the impression that Raiding means Gear Progression. There is no reason at all why it needs to. Why not have technically challenging raid difficulty bosses who drop cosmetic or otherwise superficial things, rather than creating new tiers of gear progression?

Some people would really like a greater challenge. Not everyone, certainly, but I think quite a lot of people. It would really add a new level of depth to GW2 to have large group bosses that offer a very significant challenge to players.