I feel the same way completely but he simply cannot just spoil it. Since a lot of people are making their bets and assumptions, even if nobody is going to get killed (which is my guess, and certainly hoping for) he can’t just tell at this point
I completely understand. I would hate it if story was spoiled before I see it first hand. I was just voicing my concerns regarding killing characters we get attached to, since that conversation been coming up more and more recently. That was (Spoiler)heartbreaking seeing your mentor die for *absolutely no reason*. And I would hate to see it happen again. Because throughout the story you see many NPCs (Spoiler)run into their deaths just for the sake of making the scene more dramatic, when there are so many alternatives it doesn’t make any sense at all.
By the way, still taking bets on who’s dying this time when we do take down Scarlet. Rox, Kasmeer, Hobo-Tron, or Taimi.
I guess you’ll have to wait and see what happens.
Why? Why do you guys find it necessary to kill off characters? Given Most of the NPCs mentioned been around for a while, but (and it’s a big BUT) you just gave us any kind of connection to the characters in question. We just finally see their deeper side and we’re slowly connecting with their personalities. And you just kill them off right after you gave us something deeper?
If that’s the case, why should we bother connecting with characters to begin with? Why care for characters when you just gonna kill them off at any time in some kind of pointless sacrifice… And yes I am referring to the mentors from personal story. That was the only and (at least I was hoping till now) last time I personally cared for any character in this game. After I got to that scene in that mission I turned off the game hoping I did something wrong, maybe I picked a wrong line. I replayed that mission 4 times just to find out that there was no way around the fact in matter. Personal Story died for me then. And even though I finished PS 7 times now, everything past that moment is just more of a chore.
Now with Living Story we finally (after months of them being life-less NPCS) meet characters that have some depth into them that we can connect on. Some stories that we had no idea about until now are finally surfacing. And we already thinking which ones Anet will kill off?? What’s the point then? Why make characters that are deep, interesting and we finally learn to trust after what happened to our mentor (whichever one it might be) just to get hurt again?
Living Story is finally getting interesting. We’re practically starting it at this point when it comes to story part of it. Don’t make me regret it once again…
Easy fix. You being a lone Tengu selected by your clan to prove yourself are being sent outside of the city walls to marge with the civilization to find out if the outside world is worthy, in doing that you get mixed up with the “ongoing” Zhaitan’s debacle, resulting with you becoming a member aiding the group in fight against him.
You’ll have to wait and see how we integrated story into the release. I think it works pretty well but I’m biased. I am looking forward to the feedback we receive next week.
In that case I’m definitely looking forward to it even more than before.
The Edge of the Mists is upon us. While it’s a great addition to WvW and overall to the game as a whole new area is being added, it buggles me how it is involved in Living Story at all? It’s practically WvW update, which in a way would be considered as a Feature Update rather than Living Story. With promised 4 living story patches to wrap up the whole story, I can’t feel but being a little cheated out of the story part. Understandable that the deeper details regarding any kind of lore and how EotM fits into it all have been left out makes me wonder if it was on purpose to surprise the players, or was it because there is none.
As Anet took a break to “polish” the last 4 patches of the Living Story, it’s kind of a downer in a way that one of those polishes was a content that’s already existed in testing phases for months now…
Regardless, I’m not saying EotM is a bad thing, but I would see it more of a add-on to the actual Living Story patch.
Now draw a picture of Average Joe.
Would you want him at your side?
I would take an average Joe all the time
Right, but then in theory Average Joe is a middle class player. So there’s 50% of players that are way below Average Joe. And possibility of getting Joe and rest that are above him only is quite slim. What about all those Not-So-Average Joes that are taking part in it? Because most of the Above-Average-Joes are already done with the content and are back in WvW, Dungeons or wandering around Bloodtide Coast waiting for the next Wurm to spawn.
I honestly don’t get the hate toward average or sub average players. They have every right to participate in the content if they choose to. It’s up to the more advance players to get out of there bubbles and help them out. If you aren’t willing to work with them then the player base isn’t going to get any better. Quite franky I have more fun playing with the average joe, pugs, lowbies, newbies, etc than the guys that are always screaming in your face about something not going right, or people that are only there for the first day and then never come back….
I have no hate towards new players, hell, I teach new guildies fractals and dungeons every day around the class and build they choose to play. I’m not an elitist that tells you that you have to play this way or you’re not playing right. My problem is directed towards the dependency of achievements on a group of people that you have no control nor influence on. People that are cursing you out when u trying to explain them something or ones that completely ignore you, following the failure of the entire line are a problem. And Anet putting that dependency toward those people when you’re trying to complete your achievements and get some goodies and shinies along the way is down right unfair on their part.
My problem is directed towards the dependency of all the platforms succeeding while you just stand there watching them fail, even if you did everything right towards your personal achievements (Dodging while fighting wardens). I prefer average Joes and lowbies on my dungeons / fractal runs, because it’s more fun and they’re actually learning their way, but then again those are controlled environments. You can’t teach people that are not willing to listen nor are listening at all, especially when a whole map is involved.
Lately all boss encounters are based solely on DPS. Mechanics are being mechanics, but the timers they keep slapping on every encounters does not leave a window open for many to play various classes. Because even if you’re great with mechanics and do what you gotta do, if you can’t get their Health bar down in X-Amount of time, you fail.
So it’s great that the mechanics are there, it really is, but the timer makes it all about DPS in the end, creating another single minded objective…
I don’t understand why you only want things YOUR way and no other way. You can have both casual content for the average player AND harder content. There is no need to limit things. Luckily Anet has seen the light and is not just sticking with easy-mode, ZZZZ go to sleep, press 1-fest shatterer-like content.
Rather than that they designed contents where as being accessible to all skill levels, players are now responsible to teach people that don’t know how to play their characters, rather than designing some way to teach them through playing the game. And how is that possible with people that are a)Ignorant stating you can’t tell them how to play this game b)Have map chat turned off because they spent too much time in Queensdale Champ Train? The fact that teamwork of every player on the map is required is very frustrating.
Now draw a picture of Average Joe.
Would you want him at your side?
I would take an average Joe all the time
Right, but then in theory Average Joe is a middle class player. So there’s 50% of players that are way below Average Joe. And possibility of getting Joe and rest that are above him only is quite slim. What about all those Not-So-Average Joes that are taking part in it? Because most of the Above-Average-Joes are already done with the content and are back in WvW, Dungeons or wandering around Bloodtide Coast waiting for the next Wurm to spawn.
I’m really kind of irritated by some of the comments in this thread claiming this content is “elitist” or “why can’t we have content that average players can do” in response to devs saying they want something a bit higher then average so people will grow and push themselves. Seriously? There is already content for the “average” folk. The whole open world for the most part is for average folk. So there is an issue now when adding something that pushes you a bit out of your comfort zone and now we must get rid of it because YOU don’t like it? Well, there are plenty of us who do like it and why shouldn’t we get content too.
And my server beats Marionette all the time. There are a number of servers that are the same. Even some of the overflows of late have been beating it. It’s really not that “elite.”
It’s all understood that they trying to help players with lack of skill grow and expand their gameplay, but don’t do it at the cost of fun of above average players. Being dependent on people that are either refusing to listen because they play “how they want” or are simply completely ignorant is down right frustrating. Especially on low pop servers where we don’t “beat Marionette all the time.” And that’s not because of difficulty, but because of players that are simply refusing to listen. Getting achievements done while being completely dependent on people like that is a non-sense (in reference to the dodging achievements at the pads).
At the same time, I have to thank you for creating the reward system that actually benefits players overall regardless if they beat the boss or not. This is much more satisfying than the Wurm or Teq reward content at this point.
Not at all. The Marionette was not designed to be beaten only by “elite” players.
-SNIP-
At least make it doable by small amount of people that scales accordingly. If we have lower than required amount of people doing the content (which is almost always the case in overflows) make the difficulty adjust accordingly. Given that less champions spawn in each lane with the number of people we have. But (and it’s a big one) when a champion spawns when we have 4-5 people in a lane, we might as well let him go because it’s not going down.
Understandable that we have tools available to us, but at the same time the skill average is not everyone’s skill level. It happened multiple times when I was the only one standing at the platform trying to finish the warden with everyone dead around me because of either traits missing as mentioned by you or simply running the Berserker Meta without being able to take a single hit from the enemy.
At the same time achieving specific achievements based on your land performance is down right cruel in many ways. Dependency is becoming more and more of an issue when you’re playing with people that are below the average skill level and taking it from simple math understanding, should be about half of the players in the world (given it’s evenly distributted and the skill gap is not that high). I think it would be more wise to use either Median or Average depending on which one is lower to create these types of events.
Regardless, the Mari event cannot be completed with less than desired amount of players, giving us the “well we’re definetly gonna loose now” type of feel. Teq was the same way. 80 players can defeat him, but the 80 players have to be either skilled at what they do or be willing to listen, which unless you’re in a very dedicated group is never the case. And last but not least, Wurm. From what I’m seeing, a vast amount of players in the world of Tyria will never see it go down. Not without everyone following orders. Which again, if you’re not skilled nor are willing to listen you will not only fail yourself, but you will drag a whole map of people with you. That kind of dependence is what make people turned off to the content, not the difficulty.
I myself slayed Mari few times. From what I saw, if the group is very well oriented and strategized, it’s quite simple and easy, but the moment a casual player wants to try the content out we seem to fail every time. And given the debuff of 5 minutes makes it so the players that could help out, simply can’t.
1st day:
Precursor crafting – It’ll definitely come!
3 months later:
Some things such as precursor crafting might get delayed.
6 months mark:
Precursor crafting – Definitely within the next 6 months!
Seriously Anet? That’s your upgrade?
Just to be clear I have Game messages turned on, so it lets me see clearly what I received.
Regardless, I’m quite disappointed with the “upgrade” you guys did.
Regardless, Anet, you guys have outdone yourselves. While Boss fights are ok and everything, the story is finally there! The story is finally connecting us to the characters on a level that we thought we’ll never get from Living Story. I know that your fans give you hard time now and then, but when you give us something like the LA story instance… It… That… Thank you. That’s all that really needs to be said. No boss fight or dungeon would make it any better than that small little area in LA with lore practically leaking out of it! Thank You!
To be honest the most fun I’ve had in this update was this one instance. It made my day and practically gave me hope for future LW (LS) content.
Aside from that, waiting around for an hour at the time for 10-15 minutes of fun is well… not very engaging.
The fact that most of these items ever existed is just blatantly a bug. The decision to throw cooldowns on them were for server performance/stability as the patch notes said, not for balance. Period. This was something that was long overdue.
Think of it this way: Between the embers and whistle, those items were effectively doubling/tripling the amount of players active in a map.
As for the Charrzooka, I’m not sure what the reasoning behind that change was. That wasn’t part of the change to summons, or at least that I’m aware of.
The bringer of bad news,
-Bill
Just a suggestion, since it’s a server performance issue. Keep cooldown lower in instances? Such as fractals or dungeons? Those wouldn’t affect server performance in any way because of instance owners. Would you consider this alternative?
How would that work with players barely starting the game and still adjusting into the battle system. All the opposite guild would have to do is roam around starter areas and wait for easy pray to appear. That wouldn’t be balanced at all. At the same time during World Bosses and Champ Trains it would cause chaos making people practically quit the game or at least the Guild they’re in.
When talking about 20man guild vs 400man guild, and their rewards, you simply stating that the 400+ man guild will never have a better rewards because it’s big. While small guilds will always have a chance at winning. That could be easily exploited with 1-2 man guilds where they kill one or two people and simply switch tags for remainders of the “challenge” so you’ll never find them.
Nice idea, but it won’t work in GW2 with the system we have in place. At least not without frustrations and headaches. Last thing I want in this game is for every jumping puzzle to be like WvW jumping puzzle where you have a group of campers waiting for you at the very end. No thank you.
Mentors dying was more than enough. Leave Kasmeer alone. Kill off Trehearne or Logan. In other words characters we have no sympathy for. Hell, I had to look up spelling on the salad dude’s name because is so badly spelled out. But do not kill Kasmeer.
You can only ever have the effect of one particular food on you. It will simply extend the duration of the buff, nothing more nothing less.
I understand how things usually worked, but as this is something people are spending GEMS on why would it be out of the realm of consideration that the primer added a new functionality.
I assumed that it did not, but I bet a few folks may have bought them thinking you could ADD more boosts as it says “any food”…
It says “any” because it extends “any” food item. If it would stack foods, it would become game breaking, especially in WvW. Plus they would describe it in the product. you have 12 hours of food you eat, if you eat roasted lotus root 2 hours later, it will replace omnom bar and you’ll have effects of roasted lotus root for 10 remaining hours and so on.
What makes me feel like a hero is picking up the people off the ground who either didn’t dodge in time or misjudged how much punishment they could take. That and the one time some random person and I snuck a tower in WvW.
Exactly my point. You definitely don’t feel like hero when there is 50 people around where 20 of them is dead. You feel like you’re a soldier on duty. Nothing more, nothing less.
I’m of the opinion any soldier good enough to both do his/her duty and keep people alive around them is a hero.
But there’s no story behind it. No feeling of playing a bigger part in the picture. The only story we have at the moment that our characters can tell is: “Yeah, I’ve been there when that happened”.
I’m not saying the World Bosses or zergs are a bad thing. But it’s not what makes me excited. It’s not something that glues me to the screen while going “Wonder what we can zerg this time around”. There is no cliffhangers, no bigger picture that been shown to us.
I’m trying to word it right not to omit the whole idea behind it, so I apologize if I’m not clear enough.
It’s like watching a tv show or a movie, when with every “episode” we are left with a cliffhanger. Something that not only makes us speculate on ideas, but also makes us extremely excited as to what we gonna see two weeks from now. What was that that we just seen, who was that person, why did she/he do it, is she/he gonna do it, why was this area shown to me, how is that part of a bigger picture, what’s gonna happen now that I know of XYZ.
Those are some of the questions we’re normally left off with at the end of every great movie. Having that somehow incorporated to the Living Story would make it much more exciting. But incorporate it in the game. The trailer on the site is fine I guess, but with a scene shown at the end of story instance or an item that drops from a creature that we killed but has no value of meaning to us till next patch where it’s revealed to be a bigger part of something else.
That’s what I would love to see in terms of Living Story.
I’m going to throw a final post in this monstrosity before it’s closed forever. I’m glad to see the latest proposal is worded in a way to include the Orders as mechanisms for delivering meta-events. I do hope, however, that these events are flavored in a way that captures the personality of the Order they’re tied to (large scale battles for the Vigil, etc). And with that, I’m out. See you all next CDI.
Please note items in a CDI proposal are not a promise of inclusion in GW2.
Chris
I was also wondering since apparently the team members are following the CDI (at least in general) what do you do with the said proposal?
I mean it’s not a promise list or a wish list. Is it more of a discussion list? And if so, how much discussion do you guys bring to the table? Is every member prepared with some kind of basic background information about the topic before the discussion starts? Or do you guys sit down and bring it up and brainstorm? If that’s the case, isn’t more detailed proposal needed to show what has been discussed and how it was met with others responses?
I’m not questioning you guys or saying that you do not follow CDI, I’m just interested who’s the proposal for and how does the whole thing work.
What makes me feel like a hero is picking up the people off the ground who either didn’t dodge in time or misjudged how much punishment they could take. That and the one time some random person and I snuck a tower in WvW.
Exactly my point. You definitely don’t feel like hero when there is 50 people around where 20 of them is dead. You feel like you’re a soldier on duty. Nothing more, nothing less.
I’m going to toss a new idea in here even though the proposal is already out there because… well, because I just thought of it… sorry Chris. It may seem a little strange (and feels a little strange to me to be honest) but it feels like a potential horizontal progression path…
Right now with the Living Story we’re seeing a changing of the guard as far as the heroes of Tyria go. Destiny’s Edge is settled back into non-guild, non-adventurer life with some influence and we’re seeing the latest quintet of Braham, Rox, Marjory, Kasmeer and soon the new Asura who seems about to become significant as well. To me, this could be the beginning of a new guild similar to Destiny’s Edge. I think that I think it would be interesting if, through the Living Story, players could also become a part of that guild and somehow through their actions and accomplishments in the LS progress along a path to possible rewards, unlocks, etc.
Conceptually it’s still a bit vague, I just thought of it, but possibly there could be skills or traits unlocked, unique weapon or armor skins, minipets, items to display in a housing environment (guild emblem or crest for example), etc.
It’s a fledgling idea, but there you go.
Yep this is a really cool idea. Something we have been thinking about and something I am unable to comment on.
Feel free to explore it among yourselves though.
Chris
That idea is just… wow. Instead of us watching the story unfold, we take part in it. Become one of the heroes rather than another Trahearne’s sidekick. Maybe it would be more of a episodic personal story missions.
The choices would be well… not as important as they were (which in a way they really weren’t). We could party up with our friends and “watch” another episode of Living Story by taking a part in how it unfolds. It wouldn’t just create the story more interesting, but it would have us sitting on the edge waiting for another “episode of our favorite show”.
I like how you do Open World stuff, but to be honest I’m more excited about how the story unfolds and how we affect it or take part in it. With the new content announced yesterday I was a little underwhelmed with the idea of World Bosses being a major focus on the update. I mean those are fun and challenging, but I don’t feel like I’m being a part of the Living Story at all. It makes you feel more of a drop in a sea of water. That your character doesn’t really matter as much when it come to full out zerg content where you have to rely on a group to complete the content to receive any kind of recognition for a character.It doesn’t have the feeling of us being heroes of Tyria, but more of a soldiers in an army of Tyrians.
Don’t give up on instances as you guys mentioned many times over. They’re what make us feel like heroes, not a huge zergs of random characters depending on a group and about 10-20% people that are there to troll or are afk. At the same time in order to complete these numerous amount of people is needed. Those things don’t scale to 3-4 people, limiting the accessibility.
If I had 1g for every time I see one of those posts…
Play the game. If you haven’t figured out what to do the entire time you were leveling, you weren’t really enjoying the game to begin with.
I just wanted to inform all of you dungeon sexies that the next CDI thread will be on fractals. I encourage you all to keep an eye out and to participate. I will post a link when it’s ready, I’m guessing that will be in a week or two, but if any of you catch it before me, let folks know.
I’ll be working up something for the “subclass CDI” whenever it comes out. Any idea on what the next one is so I can start studying?
I think we should discuss that in the CDI Process Evolution Phase 2 which will start on Wednesday 22nd. Among other things we need to chat about what topics to discuss in the next CDIs and how to go about choosing them. I would personally like to have a week long PVE CDI on Fractals next (Running in conjunction with a PvP and WvW CDI) but we should discuss it as a group first.
Profiting is in the other side of the spectrum. The only thing this does is help partly with daily gathering. 800 gems for part of a daily achievement is not reasonable. Especially since it’s so easy to get anyway. It’s like buying that Royal Terrace Pass for the daily laurel achievement, but at least that saves you more money in the long run since it’s a free-travel item, and it also includes every NPC you might need.
There’s always a way to “justify” a price, but that doesn’t mean it’s reasonable. I don’t want future content to be as meaningless and overpriced.
Meaningless and overpriced… to you.
Other people will find the convenience of hitting those nodes to far outweigh the cost of acquisition and those people will happily buy this item.
You can’t even get a daily out of it. You need 20 gatherings for daily. The three nodes will give you 9 than if you include Quartz and Candy Corn (which were acquired the right way IMO), you end up with 15. Any way you look at it, you still need to go out and gather.
We have a way-point system. Which worked for way over a year now. It is not broken. It works as it was intended. The only thing about that system is making mounts redundant. Upon bringing the idea of taking way-points away, it shined a light on the whole mount thing making sense, therefore sparking the argument. It is completely pointless to take out what is already working just to put in something that is far less convenient for the sake of a small group of players that want a shiny horse. If you want to explore (and I mean explore, not running from point A to B faster than normal) nobody is stopping you. You blame waypoints for taking that away from you? It’s like blaming your TV set for keeping you at home.
It saddens me that the whole conversation turned into another argument about “mounts”. It’s as interesting as player housing. The first game was mostly about lore. Give us some of that. New areas to explore, new enemies to face. If not lets go back to the old unanswered things such as Wizard’s Tower. Make this game great for what it is, not for what other games are.
Like I said before, running to a list of locations (poi, vista’s and so on) crossing them all of like you do now and not going somewhere else because it takes so dam long kills exploration more for me.
So mounts would fix that how? Make that “cross-off” of yours a lot faster? True meaning of exploration… You’re not exploring, you’re taking a taxi. You have an option to use waypoints, if you take that option, don’t complain that it kills “your” exploration.
Mounts is not a fix. It never was. In any game. Trying to push the subject on something that actually made quite a lot of sense once it has been cleared up of the whole mounts idea by original poster, is quite selfish. They don’t bring anything new to the game. At all. All they’d do is make it look like one of tens of other MMOs out there. It’s practically asking Anet: “Make GW2 like WoW!!”.
By adding mounts you are not making it much more inconvenient. If you would just remove all way-points (or don’t add them in a new maps) yes then you are correct but if you replace it by something else it’s not that big of a inconvenient anymore. Of course it would always take longer then a way point but does that mean it’s better?
We could also just give you everything in the game from the start. No need to level or do events or explore or collect or whatever. You have everything from the start. much more convenient but that does not make it more fun.
And to come back to don’t fix what isn’t broken.
Maybe that is exactly what Anet did here. Many mmo’s have a good solution for it and then Anet did try to fix it while it wasn’t broken. Now some people do think this new system might be a little broken.
How is it broken? You keep saying that mounts will fix it. But fix what exactly? The need for Role Playing? The need for faster movement so you don’t have to fight anything on your way because you can simply just outrun them? You’re not giving any examples or reasons beyond having a shiny mount.
Exploration is a choice. It is not forced upon you, but waypoints are not taking it away from you either. I don’t understand your definition of exploration since with mounts you’re not exploring, you’re running everywhere at extra speed. And “maybe” something catches your eye as you’re steamrolling through the map. That’s not exploration in any means. It’s like taking a drive through the major city and saying: “Yeah I explored it”.
Mounts are nothing more than unnecessary clutter that would make it like every other MMO out there that had no imagination to create what Guild Wars 2 created. One more extra thing to render as you’re loading the map. If you want mounts ask them to make a town clothes that have mounts attached to them. Don’t tie it to exploration.
I hope I’m getting the point across. Waypoints exist for a reason, but their utilization is by people with a variety of reasons for using their convenience factor. Removing them for the sake of exploration (which a lot of players might not even want to have forced on them) seems . . . to be adding some fresh new vibrant color to the Mona Lisa.
I see what you’re saying.
I do not want to REMOVE waypoints.
I want to add new content built without waypoints in mind.
I understand the idea you have and I think you have a right thing in mind. But eventually I want them to go back to the point that it will eventually become a regular map with waypoints. Because frankly from experiences we’ve had till now, unless the area is some kind of amazing new zone that’s everything we’ve ever wanted, it’ll become another Southsun Cove. A dead area. Putting in waypoints, points of interest and Vistas in addition to a jumping puzzle or two will make it much more enjoyable. Hell pop some hearts in there for verity.
I have never said anything even remotely in favour on mounts- I think they will not work for GW2.
I do think way points give us the option to explore or not
Right. And to take away that option would be game breaking. Sadly, the second people saw “no waypoints” they jumped on the mount-train discussion…
What I Absulotely do not want to do, is to spend my 1 hour play time running to where I want to be- I want to get there and play.
thing is I have a choice now you see?
I totally agree. The idea here is that the journey is the gameplay. You don’t travel to reach the endpoint, you travel. Period. That’s it. The exploration is the gameplay.
You spend your 1 hour exploring. And then you’re done.
I feel like I’m failing at explaining it, sadly.
The problem isn’t your idea. The problem is that some people use your idea to push their love for mounts which would in the end completely go against the idea you have in the first place.
They see “exploration” as getting though the map on a shiny mount. I see exploration as going around, jumping on boulders and mountain sides while falling down cracks and holes. Two worlds clash unleashing an argument we’re having right now.
