Guild Wars 2

Gotta be spontaneous combustion.

Always bet on spontaneous combustion.

I wasn’t too keen on this event, but I really like how Gaile (and a bunch of other people, I assume!) have handled it, especially on a weekend. I felt like the communication was quick and clear, and while I didn’t necessarily like all the answers, I understood where they were coming from.

Way to salvage a problematic situation with communication. +1

I try not to leech off other people most of the time. I might not give Silverwastes or Tequatl my complete attention all the time, but I do try to do my part. There’s a place for idealism and community.

With the mordrem invasions, however, it seems pointless. The rewards are too low to be worth the time/effort, even if you tag and run, and the gameplay isn’t fun enough to make it worthwhile to play it for anything but the rewards.

(I gave it a try on Friday, then cashed out my blooms to actually enjoy my weekend.)

You can see the full math here, but if you get the map bonuses on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and get MAXIMUM rewards from tagging events (15blooms/invasion,) it can’t be done in less than 18 invasions.

That’s 9 hours just for doing events, not counting the half hour gaps or the hour-long cycle break.

That’s assuming you get all three bonus maps on all three days. If you missed Friday, that’s 60 bonus blooms missed, which means four more invasions. (With their included half-hour breaks, and hour-long cycle break.)

I don’t know how Anet came to these numbers, but, yikes. I’m not saying it should be easy to get multiple high-end rewards, or even one of the potions, but considering you’re losing something like 17-20 gold for one potion (waypoints + gold cost) and not getting any loot or karma in return, it goes beyond “difficult.”

I think I speak for most people when I say, “There’s a cap?”

I guess it can’t be too much of a problem.

It won’t be removed.

Season 1 isn’t available because the content was almost all open-world events, rather than instances like Season 2. Anet has said that they’d like to rework Season 1 into some instances that people can replay, but there’s no timetable for it, and I wouldn’t hold my breath for one. (Which is fair. It would require a ton of resources they could be devoting to new content, so it’s hard to find the time/budget for it.)

There’s really no reason to remove Season 2. It helps lead people into Heart of Thorns, and it’s a source of potential income that requires no additional resources.

The map bonus is the only way to make it close to worthwhile, but even then, I’m not planning on playing it any more than I already have. Cashed out my blooms for Scarlet boxes, and I’m done.

It’s just too tedious and lacking in fun. Rewards aren’t everything, but I’ll have more fun playing Silverwastes, world bosses, or just about anything else, regardless of the reward.

Shame for all the people who want the Selfless/Selfish potion.

Let’s say you do all three maps for the bonus each day (60 blooms per day,) and get the full 15 blooms for event tagging.
Fri(60 + 45) + Sat(60+45) + Sun(60+45) = 315

You need another 135 blooms to reach the 450 needed for a potion, so that’s another 9 invasions if you get 15 blooms each. (135/15=9)

At this point, you’ve done at least 18 invasions, which is 9 hours of pretty active play. Not very challenging or interesting play, but you can’t shut your brain off if you’re constantly tagging events and waypointing to the next one.

Speaking of waypoints, you’ve lost something like 7g on waypoint costs (~2s / waypoint * ~20 waypoint / invasion * 18 invasions), on top of the 10g it costs to buy a potion. Besides blooms, you’re not getting any gold, karma, or loot from this event besides the Vine-Covered Chest. 18 invasions = 18 Scarlet Boxes, so you might get lucky…but I wouldn’t count on it.

On top of the 9 hours of play, you have half an hour between events, plus the hour between cycles. If you play through 6 invasions a day, you’re either padding your time commitment enormously, or you’re dropping in and out of the game for half an hour at a time. I’m glad the devs realize things aren’t going as planned, but for a weekend event, these numbers are absurd and insulting.

Just message the person and apologize. Chances are pretty slim that he reads the forum, unless he’s mentioned it before.

Beyond that, I don’t see the need for a public apology. Make it right with the person, if you can, and don’t beat yourself up over it. Learn from your mistakes and do better in the future.

Oh, I didn’t realize it was one of the vendor items. I stand corrected.

Although, I’m still not sure that really fixes anything. Does it need more value?

I mean, it could use more value, but after a couple of years of the same, it seems a little odd to change it, when they could introduce a new reward item that does what you’re asking. That might be a good reward to build up to HoT with.

I don’t think it’s a good idea or a bad idea, really.

The trouble is, it doesn’t really incentivize or reward any particular behavior. The people who have a Krait Shard earned it a long time ago, so they don’t need to be encouraged to get it. If the reward is improved to make it more attractive, people who want it now can no longer get it.

If spirit shards are too hard to get, this can’t be relied upon to fix the problem, because it only helps for players who played a release two years ago.

It doesn’t break anything, but it doesn’t fix any real need, either.

I’m skeptical that they will. While I like cultural armor and the differentiation they create, a lot of people don’t, because they want every option available. It’s a matter of preference, but it does make more budget sense for Anet to squeeze maximum return out of a design by making it available to all races.

Of course, they did do the wedding attire, and that was a surprise to me. So, who knows?

I haven’t tested it, but how is the Hero Challenge version any different from the Skill Point version?

I suppose you can’t spend a Hero Point on something if you’ve already bought everything, but it’s not like one skill point per character (not per day, per character) was super valuable before.

It’s not so bizarre. It’s just a broader use of the word than you’re accustomed to.

After all, words can have multiple, related definitions without needing one to be wrong.

I think, to the people who use the phrase with regard to PvE, the idea isn’t that players are playing the meta(game) against each other as a layer on top of the game, but that there’s an outside awareness of what the larger pattern is in how people play the game.

In that sense, the “meta” isn’t “What strategy will my opponent be using, and how can I counter that?” but the entire expanded culture of people discussing on forums, writing guides, streaming their strategies, etc.

“Meta” and “meta-gaming” are new enough, loose enough terms that I would hesitate to argue with anyone about what they mean, but it doesn’t bother me to see “What/how everyone else is playing” used as a basic explanation for it. Indeed, you could argue that “What everyone else is playing” is the metagame, and trying to counter that is you playing (against) the metagame.

For anyone who’s curious, I made my ascended armor back in July, and in the process I did some estimates for how much the different armor weights cost. I don’t remember if these were crafting costs, buy costs, or sell costs, and the prices have changed since then, but you can look at these as a rough comparison:

Light
393g damask+12g leather= 405g
Medium
262g damask+40g leather= 302g
Heavy
273g damask+56g steel= 329g

(Other materials drive the cost up from there, but they’re consistent across weights.)

If you want something more intense and difficult that fails frequently…

…why not do Triple Trouble instead of Tequatl? Or is that swinging the pendulum too far?

I’m all right with where Tequatl is now. It’s more intense than normal world bosses, without being a difficult as Triple Trouble. You can setup and be really serious about it, or you can map in the last ~8 minutes before spawn and wing it. They could tweak it a little one way or the other, but I don’t want to see it failing frequently, either, at least not at the daily reset.

That’s true, but for people who do WvW, the current state seems even worse, since they’re actually involved with how well their server is doing, and care more than I do how well their team does.

There’s a very good chance I don’t understand the Power of the Mists reward table, or how World Score is calculated, but it seems to me there’s a reasonably strong incentive to be on a high-ranked world, in addition to the expected “people like winning” incentive.

Is the rating on the WvW rankings table not the same as world score? Does the bonus not change depending on what rank your world is overall, just how well you’re in that week’s match?

:D

For what it’s worth, the Hexed outfit was earned in-game last Halloween, not through the gem store. HoT coming out on October 23 could shake up Halloween this year, but I’m still expecting it to be available again.

I’d be surprised if they sold it in the gem store at any time, simply because it was an in-game item when it was introduced.

I’d be okay with them bringing it back. It’s not like these hats are super common among players, or wildly coveted, so I don’t think there would be much blowback against their return.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I’d prefer for ANet to add some incentives for people to leave high-pop servers — right now, it costs money to do that, so I can’t imagine that anyone would willingly leave.

Some incentives for moving to low-population servers would be good. It’s extremely rare for me to enter WvW, but thanks to PvE bonuses given to players on winning worlds, I’d hesitate to switch off of my current server (Jade Quarry) even if it were free.

I realize there’s already precedent in Spirit Crafter, and Spirit Crafter is more expensive as a set, but I’m not too keen on making these more expensive than they already are by increasing demand for them.

Like Mjölnir needs a reason to be more expensive.

Titans’ Vengeance : 130g
Cragstone : 235g
Wintersbite : 249g
Wintersbark : 419g
Mjölnir : 1410g

It’s not a big deal for me, because the birthday blaster is a silly (but fun!) toy to goof around with occasionally, but I don’t see any reason for it to be account bound, either. Generally, I think soulbinding is okay on ( < ascended) weapons/armor, and beyond things should just be account bound.

Serious.7083:

briggah.7910:

Do you share your IRL birthday gifts with all your friends or do you keep them to yourself?

Obviously you used the straight to lvl 20 booster on the same toon?

Nailed it. “They’re not 2 years old!” isn’t a sensible reason to prevent me from passing the birthday blaster around.

It’s hardly what I would call a trial. Tons of services offer a free basic version, as a way to get people using their ecosystem, spread positive talk, and convert people into paying users. As an example, my Dropbox account only has a couple GB storage, but that doesn’t mean they should call it a trial account instead of a basic or free account.

Some people will use it as a trial to later convert into a paid account if they like it, and that’s half the point of a service offering a free account, but I think it would be odd if they called this setup a trial, given the scope of what’s being offered.

I’m not going to get into a dictionary fight over the meaning of the word “trial,” but I think it would be less accurate to call this a trial than a free-to-play option. It’s certainly not a goof on the part of the marketing department.

I kinda like that there’s a decision to be made whether you want to focus on res’ing someone, or take out a mob to let them rally instead. Going for the kill is more efficient, but risky if they’re already taking damage and low on health, and you have to determine if you can make the kill in time. Meanwhile, the downed player has to decide whether they try to heal, or go for the kill, and they have to figure out which enemy is more likely to go down in before they die.

This would all still be true if low-worry mobs didn’t res, but I think it would be less fun. Whether you survive or not would depend on someone helping you, or the main mob going down in time, while you just ignore the minor mobs and hope they leave you alone.

I just don’t see any meaningful benefit, and I think it would make gameplay less fun. People might be opting to go for the rally more often than a straight revive, but isn’t that just as fun or more so, even if it’s riskier?

It was confusing when the first-year level 20 scrolls didn’t stack with the level 20 scrolls from the second year, but it wouldn’t make sense if level 30 scrolls stacked.

I mean, that the level 20 scrolls don’t stack is still dumb, but this makes perfect sense. I’m just glad it’s not level 20 again this year. (And I’m happy with the other goodies in this year’s present.)

Whenever I do a “casual” group, I certainly don’t mind a more experienced player (or multiples) along for the ride. There are places they know the run better than I do and I’ll learn something, and they can help carry the weight from anyone who’s unprepared or just not very good.

It only bothers me if we’re clearly labeled as a casual group, and they moan if we stumble on Cliffside Fractal, or if people aren’t stacking. Beyond that, if you’re making an honest effort and don’t bail out when a run takes long than you’d hoped, I’m happy to have you in a group.

Right!

Play the game the way you want to play it, and if that conflicts with what certain other players want, find the players who play the way you do. Everyone is happy that way.

If you’re looking for a casual party, start a group yourself and toss the words “Casual” or “Not speedrun” or “No stacking/skipping,” in the group description. I do fractals more than dungeons, but I never have trouble getting players to join me when I do that, and they’re usually pleasant, easy-going people. I’ve gotten newbies as well as skilled players who tell me they joined specifically because of what I wrote in the description.

The important thing is to find like-minded players. Some people like to speedrun dungeons, and that’s okay. If you find the majority of groups doing dungeons like to play differently than you do, start your own party and find players like yourself.

I’ve never understood the “it’s just pixels!” argument. It’s a virtual (non-physical) good. Saying it’s just pixels oversimplifies what the item actually is, implicitly (or explicitly) devaluing it. Unless you consider an mp3 “just a bunch of bits,” call it what it is, whatever your other feelings about virtual goods are.

I don’t think Anet’s artificial scarcity practices are heinously unfair. While it’s unclear if some items (bunny ears) are ever coming back, with most off-and-on items, it seems pretty clear that they come and go semi-regularly, even if it’s just for anniversary sales and holiday sales. (Using “sale” here like a bake “sale,” not like a Black Friday “sale.”)

There’s no technical reason why everything can’t be available all the time, but if what they’re doing is good for business, I don’t think it’s unreasonable, as long as they let people know when things are about to disappear for a while.

Also, they’ve never fully mapped out what was going on sale when, or had a regular pattern of storage discounts, so I wouldn’t blame that on the Jump Start packs.

Short version: If you like something enough for it to be worth your money/gold, buy it. If they introduce something new, it’ll probably be around long enough for you to get it then. No need to overcomplicate things.

I think it’s a little unfair to make that assumption about Lahmia. The warning serves a definite purpose, not just for children, but for everyone, but I don’t see a problem with turning it off if people want to turn it off. (If it’s on by default and you turn it off, you probably know what you’re getting into.)

An alternative would be a larger buy option (like Icy Runestones have), or even a flexible buy option. (Which I’m sure would be appreciated on a wider range of items that haven’t gotten the Icy Runestone treatment. Yes, I mean you, Sun Beads.)

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

ANet has made it possible to obtain nearly every item that originally required having to be at the right place in the right time. There are so few exceptions that it provides a sort of nostalgia connection for those who have the item.

I do not think ANet needs to make it easy nor possible for every collector in the game to get every novelty or skin ever released, as long as they don’t add more than a few of such items each year.

This is basically my stance on it. If it’s supposed to feel like a living world where things can change permanently, then it’s going to be possible to miss out on things. I think that’s just the nature of the beast.

Generally, I want people to be able to get everything they want, one way or another, but I think it’s reasonable to have some items that are unobtainable. (There’s also the possibility of doing variations, like Shattered wings in another color, or when they introduced Desert Rose as an alternative Fervid Censer.)

It seems necessarily complex to me. Wouldn’t it be easier to just give existing accounts a certain bonus, like extra gems or a character slot, when they add an expansion to their account?

(I’m not going to get into what that reward should be, whether current players deserve a bonus, etc. That topic has been done to death, and I’m only interested in the proposed methodology of this idea.)

Danikat.8537:

MetalGirl.2370:

Absolutely NOT ! I have 9,3k hours played! I, just as people like me, DESERVE to have something which will show how long we,ve been playing ! There are very few items that show since when are we in the game … that’s also why I’m against Bunny Ears being added back to gemstore.
Only achievements showing that is not enough, people don’t see them unless they party with you or add you to friends.

Except they don’t show that at all. I have just over 2,000 hours in the game and I’ve got them. People with less than 100 hours could have them.

The only thing they prove is that back in August 2013 you completed 8 achievements. That’s it. You may associate them with other activities from before or after, but they don’t prove you did that to anyone but you.

Exactly right.

I wear the Mad Memoires frequently, and does that tell people how much time and effort I’ve put into the game, or just when I started? Especially considering HoT is likely to bring dormant players back after a long absence.

There’s still value to “I was there!” rewards, as an incentive to do content when it comes out and as a nostalgia trigger, but let’s not confuse it for something it’s not. It tells people some very specific things, not how much of an “old school vet” you are. If it was a difficult prize or title to pick up, that tells others you were capable of completing that content, but many items (Holo. Shattered Wings) don’t really fall into that category.

This won’t help you if you haven’t unlocked the skins in the wardrobe yet, either because you earned them after HoM shut off or you just didn’t use them yet, buuut, if you do have them in your wardrobe, they’re free to apply that way.

I was pretty blown away by the visuals at the time. Divinity’s Reach is still my favorite scenery in the game.

Each of my beta characters have become live characters, sometimes with class changes, but not this guy. Maybe I’ll have to turn him into a Revenant when HoT releases.

(BWE1)

If you’ve completed all the maps, try checking the jumping puzzles. A lot of people seem to overlook Griffonrook Run in particular.

There aren’t usually points of interest, etc., in jumping puzzles, but they do sometimes have named areas in them that you need for the achievement.

Aleksander – I think the OP is asking to be able to do partial trait lines and mixing them, like we used to do, rather than asking for more than three complete lines.\

I actually prefer the new system. I can’t say how it impacts the strategic depth of the game for PvP, but I like the simpler, clearer choices available here.

An option to change ring stats would be awesome, considering how frequently we get posts about people who buy two of the same without realizing you can only wear one.

Reeaally happy they let us change armor and weapon stats now.

It’s highly irregular to donate money directly to a for-profit company, rather than a non-profit. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but they probably don’t have any fixed procedure for it.

If it’s really something you want to do, and it is “thousands, perhaps tens of thousands” of dollars, then you should get in touch with them directly about it. (Although, to be honest, I’m not sure how you’d do that. Mail them at this address? Call 425-247-2500 and ask for someone from sales? I don’t know.)

I don’t know if they’d even accept it, because of all the potential complications, but maybe you could ask to sponsor their internship program or something?

You’ll need to convince whoever you talk to that you’re serious, and not just a fan with an idea of doing a Kickstarter/fundraiser to donate money to a business. (Which is what Anet is.)

I wasn’t happy about the supposed 10% increase, so keeping it the same is good news, and there’s going to be a way to change stats on ascended gear?

This is fantastic.

Just be aware that the official guidebook came out when the game did, so it’s definitely going to be out of date in places.

I’m sure it’s probably still interesting, and doubly so if you’re interested in its historical value, but it’s something to be mindful of. (Which is going to be the case with most MMO books, really.)

I’m not sure there will be a boxed edition, or at least a boxed Collector’s Edition. Now that they’re selling pre-orders on it, we have all-digital Standard, Deluxe, and Ultimate tiers, without a physical or Collector’s one in sight.

They could still do a boxed release, but the problem with doing a Collector’s Edition is that some people are going to buy the Ultimate ($100) right away because they want the biggest version, and then find themselves in a pickle if Anet announces a boxed Collector’s Edition for $150 or whatever. Cue mass refund requests and order-switching.

I mean, they could still do that, but it would a pretty boneheaded move due to all of the customer service calls they’d have to deal with. There could be a “Heroic Edition” or something down the line, like they did with the base game, but it would be silly to burn that initial purchase hype and then announce the REAL ultimate edition a month later.

It’s a business question, so I have to ask myself: Who knows better where that balance point is, me or the employee(s) at Anet who actually make that decision?

I’ve always purchased outfits I want with gold, rather than real money, and only spent money when I wanted to expand my character slots, so from that perspective, maybe it is too expensive. I might be more willing to buy, say, the shoulder scarf if instead of $5, it cost $1. Probably wouldn’t pay $3.50 if I’m not willing to pay $5, though.

You can see how I’m just operating from my own situation and experience. Meanwhile, Anet has the benefit of seeing how many people actually buy a given item at a given price, which is a lot more valuable that my anecdotal information.

I’m not saying the pricing is perfect, but it’s worth considering that the people deciding what is most profitable have more data to make that decision with.

I would be very, very surprised if you could use one copy of the expansion across multiple copies of the game. Look at account unlocks and expansions from other games—There’s just nothing that ever works that way.

Probably with good reason, too: If I can share a copy of HoT with an alternate account, how is Anet going to distinguish between me sharing it with alts and me sharing it several friends?

I would count on HoT being tied to a specific account.

Knighthonor.4061:

And now the Dagger was added back to the gem store. Is that a hint of a new Dagger Elite Spec?

Seems like it would have to be for the Warrior if that’s the case, since Ele, and Thief can already use daggers in either hand, and we already know the Engineer→Hammer and Ranger→Staff. I suppose it’s possible Revenant will use the dagger, although I’d be surprised if they revealed the new profession’s Elite Spec in the middle of the sequence.

I don’t think it’s an intentional pattern, but we can wait and see~!

There are guilds.

They go to war. Against each other, against strangers, against themselves, against dragons.

Don’t overthink it. MMORPGs almost always have guilds, and they always fight something, whether it’s as a complete guild, as parties, or individually. The name is not a promise that your guild is going to square off on the battlefield against another guild in a dedicated game mode.

They worked the name into the lore, and into the original as a game mode. (Although, again, 8v8 is less what I would picture from the name than WvW is.) While it’s possible one dictated the other, and the name of the game itself, it’s more likely it all came together as one big jumble of ideas during the development.

To give a little context to Chris Cleary’s explanation:

Recently, an update introduced a bug that caused new characters to get a ton of Hall of Monuments rewards regardless of how many HoM points they should actually have from Guild Wars 1. Obviously, people who worked hard in GW1 to earn those rewards were more than a little upset.

Anet shut the problem down fairly quickly, but they have to write some new tools to undo the damage. The Hall of Monuments is disabled to keep the problem from getting worse in the meanwhile.

It’s frustrating, but I can’t argue with it. It is what it is.

I have no interest in GvG, and I didn’t do GvG when I played the original Guild Wars, but I am left wondering: If that game mode was so important, why didn’t it make the cut for GW2?

I didn’t realize it was, as Diovid says, 8v8, instead of the large-scale combat that comes to mind when I hear the phrase “guild wars.” I’d almost say WvW captures that flavor better than 8v8.

I don’t think it does any good to get hung up on the disconnect between the name and the game modes. Even without a dedicated GvG mode, it wouldn’t make sense to change the name of the game when it is a direct sequel to Guild Wars. The brand name might have started with the GvG mechanic, but that doesn’t mean it ends there.

Looks like I have the oldest non-Asura, non-Charr face so far: 67! And still out adventuring.

I think of The Storyteller (middle) as being an old man, but he just doesn’t have the wrinkles that make The Young Coward look so sad and pitiful.