Guild Wars 2

What I predicted would happened with free Tournaments once paid became available has…. The bottom line: sPvP’s design caters exclusively to the best of the best and only provides hot-join for casual players.

The problem is with GW2 most people in the PvE realm who want to cross over are not casual players, they aren’t really dedicated hardcore players either. They are somewhere in between. I call them serious recreational types. They take game the game seriously, but just don’t have the hours to put in to compete with best of the best. Occasionally due to inherent skill some do cross over.

You want to make sPvP more accessible. It’s not that hard

Logged in today just like the day before and spent about the same amount of time. 20 Minutes running around Brisband Wildlands. As I try to play through doing each heart and following event chains in this zone I find myself constantly either blocked by content that’s too difficult or too boring.

The problem is the map is practically empty and this is a game that is by design very lonely when you play an empty map.

To be honest it’s a miserable experience. This is the experience a lot of newcomers are having now. Empty maps. Empty events. It’s just good. I know because I talk to them in game. It’s also a very different experience than what I had when leveling my Human Guardian to 80 during the first month post release. I can not over stress the need for something to happen to restore that experience.

That something may be server consolidation. That something may be retooling events to make them all soloable by design. I don’t know, I just know leveling a new character though this game has been a lot different experience than it was right after release. Night and Day different. It’s all related to lack of server population being unacceptable low. This is not my problem it is a problem felt and expressed by many.

ArenaNet please do not take my word it. I asked you guys to assign a few developers, qa, whatever. Have a few people attempt to take a new level 1 toon on Yaks or Emhry, try to zone clears + events + personal story. Fuse them together, work a character up to 20 and you will understand the problem. Level 1-20 and then internally talk about what you can do to save newcomers from hating their experience.

I’m not trying to be negative. I’ve logged over 400 hours in this game. I love it, I’m also quite confident in the very negative changes I’ve observed and I’m telling you now how to reproduce. You can ignore my request, You can approach it set out trying to prove me wrong or you can create a new toon and try to find my perspective.

This is critical guys.

Regarding this bit about GW2 is a WvW focused game or GW2 is a PvE focused game, etc… The game in its current state is most certainly PvE focused. Go to one of the GW2 guild registar sites and browse all guilds. On almost all of the servers you will find heavy focus on PvE with WvW being a side-line item and not exclusive.

While it’s true WvW is one of the most compelling form of end-game content (it sure isn’t dungeons and sPvP, [snicker]) the reality is WvW still has a very long way to go before it becomes entertaining and challenging to those who enjoy strategic team play. In it’s current state it feels like an endless loop of defending and capturing structures. Very long durations between resets and not enough satisfactory rewards between those resets. It is the part of the game that has the most potential, but it also feels like it needs to most development.

Stabbing the PvE crowd in the back to produce a fix for a problem with a part of the game [WvW] that still needs so much effort all around doesn’t make sense to me.

If they are actually proud of all the mechanics in WvW right now and don’t see any room for improvement then that is very sad. I’d like to play it more often, but it needs to be a lot less formulamatic and require a lot of strategic play. As with many other aspects of the game a win-scenario can be had with a zerg rush and that turns any game (yes, even this one) to garbage pretty fast. Fortunately it can be fixed and the underpinning work that went into WvW is overwhelmingly good.

The bottom line with GW2 is the game shipped way too early and many aspects of it continue to feel unfinished. This whole server transfer lock-down without guesting is very unpleasant. Hopefully the guesting option will arrive sometime in November so this will be a short lived annoyance.

Wittle.5473:

To all the people who are saying that limiting server transfers to 1 per 7 days is going to ruin their game, I would like to point out that having people able to transfer every day (and even more often on release) was ruining the game for people like me, who play this game primarily for WvW.

I understand the WvW people who were angry…. What I don’t understand is why ANet couldn’t just make a restriction on a player who’s just transferred from entering WvW instead of stopping the transfer altogether. The way they have chosen to deal with this problem I have I have issue with.

Sadly, server transfers are are only a tiny problem for WvW as a whole. It needs a lot of work in general to providing any compelling reason to continue playing long term.

XxTAFxX.6741:

Once a week is a good start.
But to be honest anet should make it once a month.

Also i agree the only ppl that QQ about it are the farmers or nods exploiters.
I have never needed to change servers at all,and never will.

In most MMOs you are bound and a guesting is not free (if offered at all), but GW2 has never positioned itself in that way. They made clear up front that guesting would be a big deal and encouraged players to join multiple guilds enabling cross server guilds and sold all this as a innovative feature.

I am aware of that droves of players from WoW and many other titles came into GW2 and have ignored this aspect of the game, but many of us have embraced it. Now we have to be punished, hurt feelings of others and make decisions we were told we wouldn’t have to because ArenaNet’s programmers can’t figure out how to lock a player who just performed a server transfer out of WvW for seven days.

It should work the other way around. If WvW means that much to you then you shouldn’t be doing server transfers. This whole lock-down is to deal with a WvW issue yet they are punishing those of us who are just using the cross-server guild feature and have been doing multiple transfers a week just to play with our various guild members.

Ready to uninstall. I don’t like being lied to and I don’t like feature restrictions that just don’t make sense when alternative paths to solving the problem seem easy enough. It’s very easy to store a value in a database table to timestamp when the player transferred to the server and only let them enter WvW after a certain interval as passed. A fifteen year old who’s read a few books on the C++ programming language could probably add this feature in less than a week.

Any response ArenaNet? Why have you done this?

Nihao.1527:

Make it once a month transfer or cost 1000 gem. A server should have its own nice community. If people keep hopping around, this game will never feel like MMO to me.

Playing with friends is such a fallacious argument. You can still talk to people across servers, can still in the same guild, can still do dungeons together. The only thing you cannot do it farming DEs. If they are such “dear” friends that you have to stick with them every minute in game, well get to the same server. I hope you don’t have to cuddle with friends once every day across multiple servers.

So very wrong you are. Consider there are three components to story delivery in GW2. Dynamic Events (story of the world), Personal Story (your story, which friends can join in on) and Dungeons (general end-game play and roughly two every ten levels to tell the story of the Destiny’s Edge in story mode)

I would expect to be an active member of any guild to participate in more than just dungeons. Your generalizations reduces the entire play together experience to dungeon runs. If that is really the only place in-game to play with others then it truly is garbage isn’t it?

I think the game is quite amazing and that the guild experience is something that absolutely must be experienced beyond just dungeon runs. I would be fine if ArenaNet had said up front “you’re limited to one guild” or even “you can join multiple guilds on the same server” but they didn’t. They said

hey guys, we encourage you to join multiple guilds and we’re enabling this cross server -oh- and not to worry about being home server bound because we’re providing a guesting feature

I’ve went into the game day one with hard decisions about which guild(s) to be part of and made decisions having faith that ArenaNet would make good on their word. This action by them is the most significant failure/let down on their part IMO as it forces those of us more social players to make decisions they promised we would not have to make.

If running around in the endless loop that is WvW in it’s current state is your thing, then gosh darn kitten it I hope you have yourself a swell time after this goes in tomorrow. Still disappointed and in disbelief that this is ArenaNet’s solution to a this very simple problem.

Eridani.8317:

ShadowBlaze.2573:

I hate WvW. I never cared about WvW. I only like to PvE

Lol. Then you’re playing the wrong game.

Oh really? Where do you think the majority of the player base is? WvW is just a never ending loop. You go in, you join whatever fortress siege is occurring (or defend). That battle comes to its end and you move on to the next structure. You just keep doing this over and over and over again. There is no clear entry point or exist point. It is great fun the first 30-40 hours of play after that you realize how incredibly hollow of an experience it is. Then you start to think about all the ways you hope they improve it to give it some long term meaning…. It does seem ANet has plans (I assume Badges of Honor will be of more use down the road), but honestly WvW is not a lot of fun right now. It feels more like a technical preview of something than a well thought of game of substance.

What a horrible solution to a problem. How difficult is it to code a check to see when last server transfer was and simply block a player from entering WvW? Instead they decide to restrict the transfers without having a proper guesting feature.

ArenaNet has done all of this knowing they have many players who are in multiple guilds across many servers. After all, they did design GW2 to allow cross server guild membership. I have a primary guild one server and another guild that’s still getting off the ground. I like to balance my time about 50/50 between them. I embraced this because through the design and promised guesting feature ArenaNet has encouraged it. But because they don’t have guesting ready yet and WvW is suffering they are making a decision that severely impacts play styles they initially encouraged.

I can not overstate how bad this is.

Again, considering how simple it should be to just block a recently transferred player from entering WvW I think this is a very poorly thought out, haphazard solution. I think the community deserves a better answer. It’s made me loose respect for ArenaNet and faith in them as a company to always do the best thing for the community.

One only has to look at the focus of guilds as published on the guild forum sites to see an overwhelming majority spend their time in PvE. Here we see ArenaNet stealing features from PvE to give to WvW. Makes no sense considering strong alternatives exist.

@teviko.6049 very well put. This is a very real problem and it’s in the bones on the game. It a core design flaw that impacts the fun….. The reason no one has broken from the holy trinity isn’t because they are all copy cats, it’s the same reason soliders positions on the battlefield haven’t changed much in a few thousand years, it’s because IT WORKS. If you’re going to come out and say “we don’t want a holy trinity” then whatever it is you come up with to replace better not take away from the strategic team play dynamic….. Unfortunately what ArenaNet came up with is not as good.

Don’t tell to go play another game or whatever. Just because I acknowledge the zerg-centric design of game and the shortcomings of that design doesn’t make me a hater. There is a lot to love, but it has some core faults.

15-20. Since it’s max level content, I’m thinking of it as a mini-raid

The Mad Kings Layer is a theme park of fun. This far exceeded my expectations for what would occur.

While I see a lot of forum hate for the clocktower jumping puzzle (never been a fan of the jumping puzzles myself) the mini-dungeon is incredibly fun, even raid like in some aspects. If this holiday mini-dungeon is a preview of what ArenaNet is thinking for future endgame content then I think they are on the right track!

It would be nice to cap the number of players allowed into an instance (perhaps that is already happening) other than that it’s perfect.

tasaunders.3746:

Respond to this recent Gamespy article. I think the writer of it was kind of sensationalizing the problem. I also believe ANet is due some criticism on the handling of the bot and racist jerk problems, but this writer makes it sound like there’s going to be a planetary collapse if these problems aren’t addressed in some meaningful way.

Anyway, article link: http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/guild-wars-2/1226506p1.html

The author is wise. There is a reason for the insanely high failure rate of MMORPG games and the story goes something like this

• Game studio spends millions of dollars and several years developing game

• Game studio spends nine months testing game and believes they have ironed out critical bugs and exploits

• Game releases to high sales volumes and balancing issues and exploits surface very quickly.

• Game studio is still riding high from the praise revived from positive reviews, puts a sizable number of resources on fixing the problems. Their confidence remains high in the product they delivered. So exhausted from just getting across the finish line they don’t pay attention to or simply don’t have enough resources to deal with the huge problems at hand.

• Hackers ramp up as well. Creating new exploits as soon as old ones are patched. They exploit critical parts of the game such as PvP.

• Players in the meantime find non-exploit general balancing issues the game studio didn’t find during beta testing, they begin using these combination which start to dampen the fun (e.g. what sPvP meta has become) this forces the studio to tap additional resources

• General bugs continue to be a problem

It is critical that a game not ship before it’s ready. It critical in the same way it’s critical for an ocean liner not to go out to sea before it’s construction is complete, because when the water starts to come in from the cracks you can only fly in so many engineers. The level that water is rising at becomes out of control and it the ship can’t be saved. This is what happens with so many MMORPGs. There are a lot of signs it’s happening now with GW2. I assume the author wrote his article hoping to sound the alarm

Good list. Agree with all your points, some are a bit more cynical than you might suspect. For example, the three currency system has been carefully designed to prevent the perception of pay-to-play with most of what karma buys being soul or account bound and karma being only earned through play.

Gems must exist separate from coin because it gives ArenaNet the ability to control the market. $10 USD may buy your 32s in game coin when the gates first open and nearly two million people are on-line. Moving forward as the launch rush crowd has died down ANet needs a way to entice the ones who are playing still to spend more in the cash shop to make up. It’s simply math really, Instead of having 100,000 people all spending $10 a month in the gem store suddenly yo only have 50,000 people and you need them to spend $20 a month in the gem store to keep the income current.

How do you do this? You make it so $10 USD now buys 62s instead of 32 and next week when only 32,000 are playing you increase the value of gems even more and make it so $10 USD buys 80s, etc…

This is what they have created. I don’t have a problem with it as it gives us reason to watch the market and it allows them to get some stable income from the gem store.

So sad to hear three professions are dominating sPvP. The fact that this has happened shows how poorly the professions have been balanced for head to head team play. The outcome of course will be a rebalancing of the professions breaking builds and play strategies on the PvE side of the game to balance on PvP side. We don’t need to go down this road for months or years. ANet please do what you did in GW1 and have the option to make certain skills behave a bit differently in PvP

I know the grand vision was that all professions would be balanced, but the meta proves this isn’t the case.

In regard to the sPvP exploit giving players who utilize it the ability to cheat by always being able to see the location and (presumably) profession of all opposing team members, there is nothing that you can do to protect yourself.

Its up to ArenaNet to make changes to better encrypt data packets and obfuscate the client. Regardless, I feel it’s absolutely their responsibility to protect the integrity of the PvP aspects of the game. Would anyone want to play a game where cheating was rampant and brazen? Only frustration in the defeat and not much pride in the victory.

This article went up recently exposing just how widespread the hacking is for this game. While PvE hacks are upsetting I feel PvP hacks are having the most devistating effect on both WvW and sPvP
http://gw2hub.com/features/editorials/underbelly-hacks-cheats-bots-and-exploits

Do you think ArenaNet should patch these well documented security holes before bringing for pay Tournaments on-line? Or do you feel like occasional hacked PvP matches is the norm. and should be ignored or forgiven by the community?

I’ve made peace with it. Yes, it looks as if the holiday events in this game are going to drive you to the gem store for black lion keys, tonics and themed clothing. They are going to make that a big part of these events. They are a company and they have office space, staff and severs to pay for and they have said from the beginning GW2 is a micro-transaction business model and not a subscription fee model.

You can ignore the holiday events, you can also grind for coin to convert to gems to buy the needed items to compete.

Bottom line is yeah Halloween in GW2 is really micro-transaction heavy, but it’s also completely optional to jump in.

P.S. The micro-transaction models general pull in more these companies than subscription model sans micro-transactions.

Cogbyrn.7283:

What’s stopping you? Well, a few missing mechanics such as custom arenas, so yes, GW2 still has some work to do. However, expecting them to set up matchmaking is like expecting one single authority to regulate all matchmaking between all Football teams in the entire nation.

Once ANet gives you the ability to have your own playing field, it’ll be your own laziness alone that inhibits your ability to enjoy sPvP.

If an NFL player has a string of bad games what stops him from going and joining a high school team and doing some ganking? Shame. His time commitment and inherent skill at the game has been branded on him also his age would make it difficult. In real world spots you having pairing provided through leagues and safe guards in place that generally prevent a group of players from one league of crossing over to other

Being able to pair the teams in a given tournament is critical to opening sPvP up to the non-hardcore crowd. If this doesn’t happen it will die and it should die. It effects the fun for everyone accept the hardcore crowd.

@Ostricheggs.3742 What I said not only makes sense, it’s a proven system in real world sports. In real world sports you have amateur/local leagues, high school level, college level and the pro. You could even break it down more than that. Each of those leagues has their own monthly and yearly reward system. A high school football team would never be paired against a pro NFL team.

So juxtapose that against what ArenaNet has in the works for sPvP. In sPvP there are qualifier points that must be earned to get into the monthlys and (eventually) yearly. It’s best of the best mashup and since qualifier points can only be earned in for pay tournaments it is a single league system.

Once paid tournaments are in place there is only a single path for monthly and yearly rewards. If you’re in a PvE focused guild and you want to bring some guildies over to sPvP and play serious but at a recreational level (i.e. you aren’t planning to join a dedicated sPvP guild and commit 20, 30 hours a week in game devoted to sPvP in GW2), if you fall into this not-hardcore, but very interested in structured sPvP demographic then what will sPvP in GW2 offer for you?

It will only offer hot-join experience (which is not really structured since the team strategy is all ad-hoc, un practiced and not coordinated on voice chat) or it will offer free tournaments that only provide very short term objectives. There is no real advancement path for the GW2 player who wants to spread his time among WvW/PvE and sPvP in the system they are planning to deliver. Again, it caters to only best of the best. Going back to my American football analogy, this would be like a system with advancement, reward and recondition features designed only those who want to be NFL pros of GW2.

I don’t give a kitten if every other sPvP game on the planet works that way, it’s not good enough. To say just roll up your sleeves and put more time in is an ignorant response

There is plenty of research out there to qualify that one’s ability and commitment to practice and also inherent skill comes into play. We don’t all have the same amount of time to practice, we don’t all have the same inherent skill when it comes to playing but yet we’re all pitted together. Again, in real sports you would never take a recreational mens baseball team and pit them against NBA players. We all can’t be an NBA star but some of us are quite good at the game of basketball and we can form our own league and have our own monthly and yearly awards.

Private Tournaments wouldn’t go far enough either as these would require a third-party to put up the rewards and would provide no leaderboards in game. There needs to be a separate league for the more recreational type of player simply because that’s majority of the GW2 player base! The recreational, but serious types need their own monthly and yearly rewards and ladder and the best of the best need their own.

GW2 has two strong needs for sPvP. It needs to be taken seriously as an eSport but it also needs its sPvP side to be cater to it’s primary player base. A Player should not have to give up spending many hours a week in PvE in order to go to monthly or yearly sPvP tournaments. A league system that categorizes players and keeps the best of the best away from the recreational serious types would solve this problem in a proven way.

Without this here is what you will have

• sPvP recondition and monthly, yearly rewards limited to those who commit hundreds of hours a month in sPvP
• Mostly financial obligation to contribute to private server for practice time with team
• A sharp division between the players who do PvE/WvW and the sPvP crowd (do you really think there will be players winning the monthly and yearly tournaments who continue to spend any time in game outside of sPvP)?

You can’t argue it’s a closed system. You may disagree with me and prefer it that way (bad for the game, again it’s clear most of the player base is PvE or WvW and you want a system that entices these players to come over, not makes them feel like sPvP pointless beyond their occasional one free tournament victory)

On max settings without HUD that’s what it looks like.

Proven.2854:

If you want to tr something more competitive, you solo queue up for a free tournament, get matched with other players, play. You have friends? Then you group queue. The stakes won’t be as high, the pros won’t be stomping you, and you still get your taste outside of hot join

What most likely will occur is the hardcore teams will use the free tournaments as a testing grounds. Not avoid them. In fact with paid Tournaments in place I would imagine you’ll see a lot more activity from the hardcore sPvP teams across the board filling up both for pay and free Tournaments. Why would they not do this? Until ArenaNet implements some kind of algorithmic pairing best on the combined, evaluated skill level all teams in the tournament it will be gank fest for any non-hardcore player to even apply paid or unpaid.

I suppose the priority they are tackling this with does make some sense. Right now sPvP is kind of useless to everyone. I mean, you get glory points, but without the qualifier points in there has been no larger goal.

Just read the latest info from Jonathan Sharp. Not happy. We know the best players will want to participate in paid tournaments With that statement ArenaNet immediately closes the door to the non-hardcore sPvP crowd.

I believe Jonathan Sharp’s history in sPvP makes him a great person to be heading up the hardcore aspects of the game, but what GW2 desperately needs is mechanics in place to make sPvP fun for all. With GW2 most of the players are PvE crowd, they don’t want to cross over to sPvP and only be given the choice to do hot-join ad-hoc matches without any real structure or go full on hardcore and devote many hours a week to sPvP.

This is not good for GW2.

In the sPvP intro video up on this site where you hear him say it’s about you bring your A game and I’ll bring mine and one of us goes home licking our wounds I cringed and realized he is not the right person to head up sPvP in this game. That is not a personal attack, it’s an opinion I will qualify.

My A game as a casual MMORPG player is entirely different than the A game of someone who’s trying to compete at pro level. If I want to organize five members of my PvE guild and go into sPvP and play to win I should not be paired up against a five man group from a hardcore sPvP guild like Team Paradigm.

To make an analogy, this would be like a local community organized mens basketball team going up against NBA pros. The answer is not to have a single league system where only the pros can participate in the for pay Tournaments. This is a closed system. Coming from a pro background, Chaplin seems to only want to cater to this group.

Someone who plays 8-10 hours a week and wants to split their time between PvE/WvW and sPvP should have an sPvP system that accomodates that and not one that forces them to sPvP 100% of the time and be devoted to an sPvP guild. When they do enter a Tournament, They should be paired with similar skilled teams so the competition can be fair. That type of player represents the majority of the GW2 demographic. It’s very sad that sPvP forces players to devote 100% of themselves to that aspect of the game so often with these type of games. The more recreational serious type of players should have their own monthly and yearly rewards separate from the best of the best. Yes, I am proposing a two league system, I just don’t think the qualifier points should be an exclusive thing given out to only the pros. I don’t think newcomers who want to do paid Tournaments should be paired against a team in a hardcore sPvP guild.

If there are things planned to stop this sort of thing that I’m missing I would like ArenaNet to talk about it.

I think the sPvP side of the game would do good if Jonathan Sharp would either consider this other group of perhaps have a peer on the sPvP team with him that understands the dynamics of casual sPvP. The non-hardcore players don’t want to be treated like second class citizens just because we have other time commitments and can’t practice as often as the pros. We should have a league of our own with our own Paid Tournaments. Without such a thing, the real structured five man sPvP will remain a very niche, closed aspect of the game. Who is that good for? Why can’t there be a more open design. Why can’t games like Team Fortress 2 serve as an example?

Here’s my contribution to this discussion

Q: Why doesn’t ArenaNet disclose the algorithm they use to determine GEM to Coin conversion? A: Because it isn’t static algorithm, it’s more like a dial they can turn up and down to bring in revenue.

GW2 is not a free to play model, it is a micro-transaction model. Never forget something has to pay the bills at ArenaNet HQ. Box sales with any game begin to slow a few months after release. For a micro transaction based MMO it’s important to keep revenue coming in through micro-transactions. ArenaNet has to find a way to make micro-transactions appealing. Holiday exclusive items are one way to do that. Turning up the dial to increase the value of gems to coin exchange is another.

There are probably quotas to meet each month on micro-transactions (again, keep in mind these pay a portion of the bills). They know some people purchase gems exclusively to convert to coin and will buy when the price is right so they turn the dial when more funds need to come in.

You say but that makes no sense, the holiday events is going on and should be bringing more money into the gem store. Actually it does, they need to decrease the value of coin during the event so customers with a lot of coin can’t easily obtain the gems in gem to coin conversion.

If you think about this design it’s brilliant for ArenaNet because it allows them to make the Gem store appealing at the time of holiday events for those who would use Gems to buy festive items and also for those who want to convert gems to coin. It’s a win-win for them.

I would not be surprised to see 2-3x the number of holiday events in GW2 over GW1

This is why so many MMORPGs fail. The developer ships the game with critical bugs, features they expected to behave a certain way break due to exploits. Acting in panic mode they make hasty profession, skill modifications or they change foundation things…. The result is always failure.

How is GW2’s player base now compared to SWTOR two months into SWTOR? If it’s dropped lower then I would say you have your answer. The problem is you’ll never know because BioWare has those numbers guarded and ArenaNet has their numbers guarded. You can’t go by server load being marked High either because ArenaNet controls that variable and can shift it by adding or removing overflow servers.

@Player.9621

I’m just going to pretend this phase of it isn’t happening. I’m not going to whip out my credit card to buy keys for chest (see other post here on the chance of getting something good on that). From the perspective of the MMORPG vendor the cash shop is tool, it’s a virtual casino. The game is free to play and fantastic in many aspects, they have to make money somehow. I just don’t like system the casino aspects of how the gem store is being used for this event in regard to chest items.

For ArenaNet I’m sure it’s an opportunity to see what works. If people shell out and this is a very financially rewarding holiday event for them then I’m sure we’ll see even more focus on the gem store next time around. The best thing you can do is put some caps on yourself or better yet only buy gems with converted coin. If you can’;t afford something avoid buying it instead of pulling out your credit card.

Notice the portion of the patch notes that address this phase of the Halloween event is mostly concerned with COMMERCE and leads you back to the gem store in one way or another (through tonics, keys or style costumes).

The second part of the patch notes discusses the costume brawl which you can play for free in LA (if you can make up through the jumping puzzle) to play in the open world you have to spend gems. Although it states you can also play in the open world using town clothes (which is true) you will have no weapon skills if you do not have a costume.

They have to pay to keep the servers going. This event is designed to bring in revenue through gem store.

Just noticed in the patch notes that this update is very heavy on new Black Lion Trading Company (gem/cash store) items. Considering how much comes from chest, everything is leading back to the gem store. Seems this is a big part of their Halloween patch… Disappointing.

How difficult is it really to run some load test? You know how many users are signed in across x # of servers. You know roughly how much bandwidth (y) you need to accommodate all your players. You know every one of them is going to be downloading the patch…. A 15 year old with an Microsoft Azure cloud services account could setup load balanced downloading and scale and meet demand for customers…. Pathetic. I imagine moderator will infrag me for this. Speaking the truth tends to get people in trouble.

There is crazy talent @ArenaNet no doubt, but there is no excuse for these kind of problems. Should not be that kitten hard

/ragequit.

@Red Falcon said Btw it’s curious you did not mention your class, level, what events you were doing, etc. It doesn’t seems like you’re looking for advice, it sounds a lot like “I already made my mind up and don’t want to hear anything beside other one-sided complaints, I will never consider I’m doing something wrong”.
I lvl’d 3 chars to 80 completely solo and didn’t have any issue; perhaps consider you might be in need of help?

Going to address these two points in reverse order. Starting with your boast about soloing the game with 3 characters and not having any issue. There’s a lot of room there. You obviously didn’t solo every dynamic event. You played through your personal story solo, that’s understandable. I did that on my level 80 as well. It seems you’re trying to make a case that this MMORPG was designed for solo play and that’s simply not true. If they wanted to make GW2 a solo game it would have been. Group events are designed for group play. The game world is designed to come alive and feel a certain way when it’s populated with other players. This is core to the games inherent design as an MMORPG. GW1 was by design a soloable experience. GW2 is not. The developer has gone on record in interview stating GW2 is different from GW1 in this regard. If you want to believe otherwise you are free to, but this is not something I’ll be continuing a discussion around.

Regarding my intent with the OP. I did not want to make the original post long. Aside from its purpose of generating discussion being a forum post it’s primary purpose was to document an experience for the ArenaNet developers. This experience is not a positive one. I don’t give a kitten about all the players telling me how they were able to solo this or that or that their servers are full or that the problem I’m having doesn’t exist in sPvP zones all of this occurs above. Some fans love a product so much they will fight anyone who expresses an idea or opinion that negatively positions something they believe in. GW2 has some very serious cracks in it’s core. Running around the game world on a weekend two months after the game launched and having this kind of issues and obviously I’m not alone it says a lot about where the game is right now. Do you really want to try and attack the messenger? ArenaNet already has the data. They don’t need me to tell them a server is empty, but as a player I can type out my experience. That’s not something that can be generated on a report from collected data. That’s a human experience with their product, a rather negative experience at that. I appreciate the healthy discussion.

@Jnaatha.6549 It’s good to hear the sPvP portion of the game is not suffering from lack of players. Keep in mind sPvP matches are not bound to specific worlds/servers. Also sPvP portion of the game is a sandboxed experienced (using the term sandboxed as in isolated, not as in a game definition). With its own armor and weapon sets and glory replacing XP as the metric of progression it is a very different thing.

Once they add: leader boards, rank pairing, leagues, private servers and fix the speed hacks so people can’t cheat sPvP will be something I look into. For the time being I usually go back to TF2 if I just want to hop in on some random PvP match where I don’t really make much difference.

@tolunart The problem I have is that ArenaNet designed GW2 to be dynamic event centric. They tell the story of the world and they require a group to complete. In a traditional MMO you can peck away at quest. If a certain location is empty, you just move on to the next thing in your quest log or you go back to one from earlier you did not finish.

ArenaNet’s stated intent when designing dynamic events was to create a better system. From the book Making of Guild Wars 2 they state From the early stages of development we wanted to have a living world with no quest log.

Dynamic Events suffer from this unique problem when zones are empty. Players being stalled by empty dynamic events is a design flaw. Suddenly the old quest log doesn’t seem like such a bad design.

If you’re going to be bold and make a manifesto video telling the world you have a better approach I just think there should be some accountability when that approach is proven to have some serious design issues. Dynamic Events suffer from multiple design issues, but not having enough players or having too many is game breaking for many.

Xericor.9103:

With the exception of World Events, most Dynamic Events are playable solo. Even some champions can be killed solo.

No. Dynamic events were not designed to be solo-able. This has been stated many times during the development in interviews when ArenaNet made reference to their scaling mechanics. The minimum number they scale down to is three and most scale up to accommodate ten, but some up to a hundred. They are group events. Certain professions can solo some events, others have a much more difficult time.

The bottom line is dynamic events were not designed to be solo-able. So when other players are making very valid complaint about not having enough people to do them it’s a bit annoying to see some one continue to say oh you can solo those. Regardless of what profession you are you can not solo all of them, they were not designed to be soloed at all. Please stop trying to defend a very serious flaw.

I’m quite sure there are many staff at ArenaNet with selective hearing when it comes to the problems. The bottom line is they know and we don’t. They have the numbers for many people are signing in. How long people are signing in an playing and how many people are actively playing vs how many people bought the game at launch.

They also have the numbers on how many new copies of the game sold last week vs its first month. They have the data on how well their game is doing and that’s not data I imagine we’ll see.

As players all we can do is use these forums to report what we experience and how we feel. It’s up to them to take action and not selectively hear what they want to. Don’t let your game be the unsinkable ship in your mind. Don’t let it be the Titanic of MMORPGs

That’s all

Xericor.9103:

Maybe try..

Saturday Night, 0230 still drinking beer in the club

Sunday, lunch time, waking up.

Honestly 0730 on a Sunday morning and there are no players on? Who would have thought that…

Right because the times you are able to sign-in to play should dictate your play experience… If you don’t intend to play in peek hours, don’t expect to have an enjoyable experience silly.

Players log
2012-10-21

07:30

The three guilds I’m currently in are empty. I take a survey, four people respond when I ask in map chat who’s out there I run around through several empty dynamic events. The game is built with dynamic events being a critical component of story delivery, but they aren’t designed to be solo-able.

I could try my luck, crack my armor, spend my in-game savings. This is so frustrating. I do a few heart quest, one has me gathering items and taking them back to an NPC, I get bored quickly. I try for the next chapter of my personal story but fail it. It wants me to be two levels higher than I currently am. My armor isn’t good enough, have to grind….

08:30

I’m in Lions Arch selling loot and doing a little crafting. My loot is mostly whites and blues. trash items. I take what bronze I can get. I’m bored, going to check out the human starter area maybe there are other players there in zone for my level.

I arrive in Divinity’s Reach. Mostly a ghost town. I step outside. I cross the bridge and run past the sprinklers on the hill. Other players! Rangers with bears! A lot of rangers with bears I run with them, but they don’t respond to my local chat. . I don’t like this group, I move on.

In the swamps I see a very large creature spawn. He’s huge. We have three others players here trying to take him down, but simply not enough to make it work. We all die many times before giving up the fight.

09:30

Signing out…

FoV issue is resolution dependent. Looks great at 1680×1050, unplayable at 1366×768 on my notebook. Not good. I really hope they don’t alter the way at looks at 1680×1050

Colorox Sour.5142 said Now, like Guild Wars 1, I will take a break and come back every few months. The game is good, the combat is great, but it just doesn’t feel the same. Guild Wars 1 felt much more epic. I would go as far as to say a lot of the script in the story needs to be rewritten and slowed down.

Warning mild-spoilers ahead

GW1 like all great books had a monolithic story. From start to end you were moving forward through a single story arch. The result was the story lasted long enough that you cared when players died and when you got to the end of each campaign you cared a great deal. _Killing Shiro was much more rewarding than killing Zhitan, the fight was more challenging and when I killed him I actually cared. With Zhitan it didn’t really matter… Here’s the main baddie flying over and my personal story (completed all chapters leading up to him) has left me not giving a rats-kitten what happens. I’m enjoying it purely for the visuals. GW2 is not as challenging of a game. The final battle with Zhitan is a testament to this. Play it through several times and come back and tell me it’s amazing. It’s not. Where is the challenge? Where is the strategy? Without these things it’s just a visual show really. How is this considered a success?

GW2 progresses along multiple story archs. It’s like a collection of ho-hum short stories about the same character you based in the same setting. I don’t think this was a bad idea, but the way it was implemented fails. Several characters die in GW2 and I could care less about them due to having not experienced much with them. 3-4 story chapters and I’m suppose to care that my mentor is dead? No. Did anyone QA this game with a critical eye towards story or flow? It’s obvious they did not -or- perhaps the writers had too much political clout inside ANet to be disputed. Bottom line in GW1 and well, in many games I did care a great deal when characters passed on just like reading a good novel. In GW2 I didn’t and I would say this is a failure on the writing team. I’m not the only one who feels the story is weak.

It really does come down to some pretty bad writing in GW2. The story is very shallow compared to the first. The first held up with Dragon Age or Elder Scrolls. This one is incredibly weak compared to modern games.

They need better, dare I say professional writers.

ColinJohansen said: Long term we’ll absolutely be adding more activities as well, but we want to make sure we’ve got loads of stuff to do at level 80 in PvP, WvW, and PvE using your characters core skill-bar first and foremost, and we’re dedicating our focus in that area.

What? core skill-bar what does that mean? Many fights including the grande finale involve morphing that skill-bar into other things. I find this comment very vague and I bit frustrating but massive November release sounds very promising

If you’re telling us that the focus is creating new content to do with the max level builds we worked hard to create instead of mini-games I can greatly appreciate that.

Overunity.4273:

After reading various forums ,It seems the players loved the game ,but after reaching level 80 they felt there was no obvious challenge or further fun things to do so they simply returned to other games with well defined goals .

I started playing on August 25th at midnight. I’m in three guilds. In two of those there were around 100 players by August 28th. One of them hovers around 15 players in peek hours, the other around 8. It was the same pattern in both over the month and a half the game has been out, first three weeks the level 80s piled up. They finished personal story and defeated Zhitan and got bored so they are off doing other things until more content comes in. Many feel there are just better games to play that aren’t so bugged that can challenge a player at endgame.

My thoughts and contribution to this thread

• I don’t agree that legendary’s are intended to be grinded for. I think the distance you see between the exotics and legendarys was done in part to help weed out the type of player who has a linear play mentality “must meet next objective quickly”. The game has its share of that, but if you are only signing into GW2 at max level so you can grind for weeks, months, whatever to get that legendary weapon skin well, that’s really really sad. I believe Legendary’s are intended to be earned without grind over a long period. Their expectation was that people would simply enjoy continuing to play the game over time would eventually earn Legendary’s. They did not account for two things A.) A lot of people don’t consider GW2 really that much fun on replay, not yet anyway I have hope! B.) Some of their systems are counter to their design philosophy. For example, they expect you to take you level 80 and play with others at much lower levels but way point cost impose a sort of tax on you for doing this often.

• Dungeons explore mode and WvW are the things you do after you’ve finished the game. ArenaNet has admitted both of these things have some real cracks and need work. The problems with dungeons are around loot, balance, etc.. WvW continues to see speed hackers stealing Orbs. It suffers from design issues. New players enter WvW and it’s unclear what to do. Go defend keep, go capture keep. WvW is a never ending loop and you have ad-hoc players just coming in for the first time and you have other team who do nothing but WvW trying to approach it in a very structured way. It’s a giant cluster-kitten. It’s a mess. So it’s difficult for me to judge ArenaNet’s intent for endgame when the dungeons and WvW still feel like beta.

• Even GW1 had more endgame though hard mode. You had less dungeons in GW1 but a monolithic story arch composed of primary quest and cooperative missions. The missions were the primary story delivery vehicle and this content was repeatable in a hard mode environment. This combined with yearly campaign releases provided years of endgame play for fans. GW2 does not have anything like this. My optimistic side takes the stance of Surely ArenaNet knows what they have delivered so far is not enough and is working on improving this my pessimistic side says They should have known all of this from their expereince with GW1. They released the game with only core features done and a lot of those even buggy to meet a date on a calendar set by NCSoft. I imagine the truth is somewhere in between. I love this game and will continue to wait.

• ArenaNet’s design philosophy for endgame is heavily rooted in their belief that level scaling works. That is a level 80 can go back to an entry level zone and still be challenged and well rewarded…. Level scaling seems to work ok the problem is it’s not a real replacement for hardmode because it doesn’t challenge a player beyond max level. Also the loot you get is not that great.

TL;DR: Regardless if you are in support of WoW type raids being added to GW2, the game certainly does need some additions in this category for long term success.

Warning This post will contain very detailed spoilers. If you have not finished your Personal Story line or completed the final dungeon do not continue reading if you wish to be suprised

So I finished the final dungeon in story mode. Killed Zhitan and then completed the victory celebration. I have done all dungeons story mode, completed all dynamic events and completed all personal story chapters. I began playing on August 25th at midnight and have clocked > 200 hours in game, here is what I would change regarding story in future expansions.

• Better story – Kid gloves off, you need better writers. You might hate me for that, but here’s the harsh truth guys, when I watched characters die in this game I had no emotional attachment. I did not care. I’m the kind of personal who usually does care a great deal and I came into GW2 biased in a good way, I loved GW1 so when I say I think the writing in general could use some work I’m saying that with positive fan boy blinders on. I do however love a lot of the dialog between characters, again it’s overall large concepts that fail for me.

• Better editing and better scripting. The final boss battle was uneventful and honestly just a giant mess. It wasn’t even difficult.

• GW2 has a lot going for it in terms of UI, graphics, action combat, etc… but the game itself feels very unfinished. The first GW series of games had a story I was engaged in and cared a great deal about. This one feels more grandiose but has much less depth. Honestly it’s pretty weak. My priory mentor died and I still felt like we had just met. There wasn’t enough content and dialog between when I met him and when he died that I would give a care.

It seems some very basic elements of plot are missing here. I suppose you could say the game plays out through a series of smaller story archs, like a book of short stories about the players character that leads up to a final confrontation. After playing it I imagine that’s how it must have been originally envisioned I also feel strongly it fails because the smaller story archs aren’t long enough and again I just don’t care when the darkest hour of those archs occurs. The game needed a monolithic story arch through personal story and needed cooperative missions sprinkled in between personal story chapter levels. That’s a system that would work.

How do you implement cooperative missions in GW2? From a UI perspective they would work like personal story instances but should be repayable and not bound to character at all. These are for every player. Special icon for the map would indicate where they are located in the world, party runs up to zone and is prompted to. They should be repayable and their should be a hardmode option for those at level 80.

If you’re wondering what kind of things I would have liked to have seen? Well, in general just better story telling I guess. Something bigger to fight for. For example
I was envisioning perhaps The Grove being destroyed by Zhitan and the Pale Tree (Sylvari god) stepping in and transforming herself into a giant creature to assist in the final battle. As the cannons are going off she’s up the air fighting too. Zhitan overpowers her dragon form and ultimately she sacrifices herself for the party…. Along those lines…

Ranger. For fun roll one with a Bear as your pet, give your character an ambiguous name and then look for the other rangers with bears. Follow them.

I agree. You have identified what I feel is the weakest aspect of the games design, it lacks enough strategic-team oriented play to keep me happy. I don’t see how your proposed solution would work. When you have a popular event, you have scenario where 20,30,40 players are participating (sometimes up to 100 in metas like Claw of Jormag or Shatterer). Think about all the action going on. If you are in party, think about how you can barely see your team mates. There is no strategic play in the dynamic events. None. The combat and guard event types can all be won by spamming weapon skill #1 and throwing up the occasional heal. So beyond not having any strategic team effort, they require very little independent effort as well.

The solution is to put crowd control on how many people you let into a given event. Even your proposed solution is crowd control to an extent. At this stage and have run literally thousands of event with over three hundred hours of game play in GW2 I can tell you feel the dynamic event system as implemented now desperately needs this.

I’d like to hear a convincing design that allows for 30 people who aren’t in group to coordinate at a strategic/tacical level. It’s simply not possible in an open world setting. Don’t tell me it works in raids in WoW there are a lot of factors that going into putting together a raid group, it’s tactical by design and organized from the beginning. Open world PvE dynamic events in GW2 are not.

In interviews with the dev staff as recent as last year ArenaNet was pretty firm on an anti-party design philosophy. That is, they worked hard to remove the need for people to have to party up. As part of that design they removed most incentives for people to party up.

Without partys Guild Wars 2 gets the benefit of being largely a solo-able experience and the team required situations like dynamic events end up either abandoned or zerged. When you play with others you’re all after a common goal, but you really are completely detached from their actions in the open world. For combat oriented events or guard events, You’re all trying to DPS the boss or incoming mobs to get the event cleared. Let’s be honest, this is horrible design because there is no challenge. If you disagree then explain where is the challenge?

The solution is to provide reason to party up with people without destroying the current play mechanics. I think providing the option for a party of five to enter a private instance of any given event would be a solution. That would allow ArenaNet to use existing scripted content and simple provide a new layer on top of existing design to accommodate those looking for team-oriented play.

To maximize the benefit of this effort they could lock it down to only max level characters. Buff up the monsters and make the loot generally better. Effectively make the instanced events, endgame hard mode content.

For the big events like Jormag or Shatterer, allow three partys of five to enter a given instance (15 players) considering these large events scale up to 100 players, it should be pretty challenging for 15 to go after a win.

IMO this is all they need to do to create endgame content. My suggestions would allow them to recycle existing content without impacting current design. It doesn’t break anything so it’s low-risk. For the players crying for endgame content it would provide reason to go back and revisit hundreds of existing dynamic events in the game world. It creates a hardmode without requiring enter maps to be instanced.

I would suggest they do they long running chain events first and allow the instance to continue through the event chains. This would creates cooperative missions for max level players, again we’re talking about giving the game the endgame content it deserves without bowing to the hordes who want WoW type raids.

[sigh] the problem is that dynamic events get either mobbed (15-20 players+) or you’re stuck with one or two and it’s not achievable…. I don’t think implementing hard mode instance of zones properly address this exist crack in the foundation.

So with that said, my idea of hard mode would be the option for players in parties to enter instances of dynamic events. The instances will always be for max level. Make the enemies harder, require level 80 team strategy and make the rewards great as well.

I think having an instance option for the individual events makes more sense the having an entire zone be hard mode, but if you do them by zone you’ll still have the zerg rush to the events…. Why not address two issues with one feature.

If had be in the entire zone instanced that would be better than nothing.

I would like to know where they will draw the line… Will we have to pay money to fight the next elder dragon (likely Jormag in the Far Shiverpeaks)?

I don’t think ArenaNet has decided this themselves.

Sales are over two million as of a few weeks into launch. They’ve added two additional servers since that number was made public. Regarding “active accounts”, accounts don’t become inactive because there is no subscription fee. The only way an account becomes inactive is if it is banned. We know from two reports they’ve banned at least 28,000 accounts.

There are no metrics you can have to really judge a subscription free MMO against a subscription MMO because to look at the success of WoW people look at subscription numbers. With a micro-transaction MMO the question really is how much revenue are they pulling in from the gem store combined with new account sales and that number is easy for NCSoft to guard.

The gems to coin exchange rate may be one indicator. This is seeded by undisclosed internal algorithms. The exchange rate for gems to coin is the only mark we really have for the value of gems in GW2. The value of gems have been rising, going from 23s for 100g up to peaking around 70s for 100g yesterday.

ArenaNet is in control of this increase in the value of gems. Why would they increase them in value? For the same reason retailers run sales, to make them more attractive to you. But it’s more like the stock market when it comes to gems. So the goal is probably to slowly raise the value of gems to coin to a certain threshold and then let it begin to drop so people will buy.

The rising value of gems could be an indicator they are trying to pull in more revenue from the gem store which may be because less people are spending in the gem store and they want to make gems more attractive to those who are spending there.

There is no question to it, It simply wasn’t ready…. The question now is what is the fallout of releasing a game too soon? Generally it’s a sure death of a product. People get very upset with bugs and leave…. MMOs are given a bit more grace.

I love it for what it is. Play it all the time, but hate it for what it could have been but wasn’t…. That said, I am hopeful some of the things players want make it into a future update.