Guild Wars 2

Cogswick.5236:

Your use of the word “myopically” is arousing.

Sexy, sexy big words. Mmmm.

There’s a worthwhile distinction to be made between “rewards” and “content”. Increasing rewards is very useful, but increasing WXP rewards is a very narrow avenue in which to do that- It only affects the behavior of people who are already invested in WvW. Increasing ‘real’ rewards, and by that I mean things that also take place in the PvE world, is a good way to reduce the divide between PvE and WvW. This does need to happen; there’s huge hubbub about PvE being a gold gain and WvW being a gold sink, for example. There’s a huge argument (not in the sense of devon shouting at everyone else, but school of thought) about rewards, incentives, and corresponding behavior.

Rewards are a pretty rubbish substitute for actual content, though.

Also the metrics could be “how many people entered WvW today”, and that’s no good. I enter WvW just to use the karma vendors and then leave, but I’d still be counted.

Presumably they’ll use their twitch.tv address; http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2

And isn’t there the Unsteady Ground change? That seems huge for eles, at least in WvW.

A very lazy thought; what if there were a Baby’s First Makeover Kit available for REAL LOW CHEAP, which you can only use below a certain level, like the Transmutation Stones? Exactly the same as the regular Makeover Kit, but costs 50-100 gems each, and you can only use it while you’re under level 30.

Vol.5241:

styx.7294:

The banners would be cool. Heck, if you could skin the warrior banners with guild emblems, how neat would that be?

That would be nice, but the items would be exclusive to warriors and I dont think that would do well.

Instead, Anet should introduce a new consumable for banners, which provide minor aoe buff as long as it is equipped – let’s say, +10 to all stats. These banners are huge and have generic designs that can be used by everyone. However, exclusive colors and the ability to embed guild sigils would be available through the gem store.

I don’t think having a stat boost is necessary; at least, not without some kind of drawback.

A lazy thought; what if it were a skill available to everyone and it operated pretty similarly to a kit? Could even put WXP into it to make it better.

IMHO, it’d be easier and better to just cut the cost by half and call it a day.

If we want to get more complicated; remove Supply Capacity as a line. Add another 5 onto Supply Master;
10: Increase supply capacity by 1
15: Increase duration of the 2 and 3 by 50%
20: Increase supply capacity by 2 (3 total)
25: Have a chance to grant yourself and nearby allies (1-2)Supply when depleting supply
30: Increase supply capacity by 2 (5 total)

I had two thoughts.

Thought 1: Shortbow. In essence, it’s a reverse axe; it’s a very potent weapon when you have high life force, but isn’t too great at generating it. It complements Death Shroud rather than fuel it.

1: Spectral Arrow (900); Deal damage to the target. If you have more than 50% Life Force, the attack deals 20% extra damage.
2: Deathchill Shot (900); Fire five arrows in a spread, applying Chill(1s). If the target is already Chilled (before the ability is used), deal double damage.
3: Spectral Volley (900); Fire a volley of eight arrows. Each hit applies Vulnerability and generates 1% Life Force.
4: Bone Mark (Point blank) (Mark); Place a mark at your feet. When triggered, deal damage and apply Bleed and Cripple.
5: Wailing Arrow (900); Fire an arrow at the target, dealing damage and immobilising them. Enemies near the target are Feared for 1 second.

With a few traits for it;

Unyielding Blast now also affects Shortbow abilities.
New Master Major (Soul Reaping); Haunted Arrows: Increases the duration of conditions while a Shortbow is equipped by 20%, and reduces Shortbow ability CDs by 20%.

Thought 2: Hammer. Necros don’t seem to really have a dedicated, close-range AOE weapon which controls its opponents. It works pretty good for Guardians, and it works fantastically for Warriors; why not Hammer? There’s also that cool dude in Cliffside fractal who’s more or less a Necromancer who wields a hammer.

1a: Bone Smash; Deal damage to your enemy and apply Vulnerability.
1b: Bone Crush; A longer attack which deals more damage.
1c: Sickening Vapors; Smash the ground, dealing damage and leaving behind a field which applies poison(1s) every second. Lasts 3 seconds.
2: Tainted Smash; Leap forward and smash the ground, dealing damage and applying Poison (8s). 6s CD; Blast Finisher.
3: Power Leech (600); Drain your target at range, gaining Might(12s) and 3% Life Force each time it deals damage. 8 ticks.
4: Bane; Smash the target with your hammer, dealing damage, knocking them down(1s) and removing up to two boons. For each boon removed, the knockdown lasts .5 sec longer. If no boons are removed, apply Cripple and Weakness for 5 seconds.
5: Unleash Power (Well); Channel life force through your hammer, consuming 20 life force over every second for 5 seconds. Every time you consume 8 Life Force, create a well in a random nearby location (up to 600 yd away), dealing (light) damage to enemies. After 3 seconds, these wells explode, causing Weakness, Vulnerability and Poison and dealing damage to targets inside them.

For traits, all of the Well-centric traits affect Unleash Power. Vampiric Wells, Ritual of Protection and Ritual Mastery work as stated. Focused Ritual lets you target the central point from which the spawned wells radiate. A few new ones, as well;
Diviner’s Hammer(Master Death); Critical Strikes with the Hammer have a chance to grant Fury to yourself and nearby allies. Reduces hammer ability CDs by 20%.
Anathema(Grandmaster Death); Increases the duration of your Poison fields by 30%(Or one tick, whichever is greater). Blasting a Poison Field will now also cause Crippled(3s) on enemies.

kuora.5402:

Actually I can think of a couple that will sell like hot cakes that isn’t p2w.

-cosmetic siege skins
-cosmetic guild banners that you kite around in battle
-cosmetic keep/camp/tower decorations
-commander tags
-commander tag colour changer

Cosmetic siege skins would actually be super cool, like being able to make all the catapults you put down throw quaggans or something.

Dunno about commander tag/tag color changer, though. The changer seems like a feature that should just be there.

tigirius.9014:

You know what would be even more useful? A spec for each aspect of the game. sPVP, WvW, Swim combat, Dungeoneering. But you couldn’t monetize that so…..

Sure you could. Spec templates that you can change to when you’re out of combat, same way that WoW does it. 500 gems a pop. I’d buy a few of them for my main.

Vol.5241:

The main reason WvW loses to PvE is because MMO fanbases are generally PvE.

And WvW can’t get much in terms of the gem store, unless you want to start introducing P2W items.

Most of the stuff in the trading post doesn’t really apply to PvE specifically, either. It’s either a variant of the BLTC chest/key, a toy of some kind like the kites or boomboxes, or cosmetic items that really apply to everyone except for sPvPers. The only thing I can think of that might be really desired for PvE content is the boosters and well… I personally don’t see much money being made from them with how unnecessary they are.

There are a few exceptions, like the SAB Infinite Coin, but I don’t know if that even counts as PvE seeing as it’s a completely different style of game/focuses on a different aspect from PvE entirely.

There’s no real way to boost WvW gem sales. There’s only ways to boost gem sales in general, and that’s by providing cool things that people want, regardless of preferred playstyle, on the gem store.

Vayne.8563:

Well, unless you work in Anet’s accounting deparment, I submit that you have no clue at all about what it takes to run that business. I think you don’t know how much they have in place and how much what they have in place makes. You don’t know their overhead, you don’t know how much money they’re taking in. You don’t know how much profit the parent company or investors expect to pull in either.

Essentially, you’re talking in a complete absence of fact or information.

Complete absence? NCSoft is required by law to publish quarterly earnings reports. They’re kind enough to include individual games. They include their general overhead costs in the reports. It’s not hard to get a rough estimate of how much each employee at ANet would earn, and how many employees they have. I haven’t done this legwork because frankly this is an internet argument and I don’t care enough about it to somebody who thinks they need to explain to me the concept of money, but it would be conceivably possible to piece together a very good analysis of how much money ANet needs and how much of a profit it’s making.

It is your opinion they have plenty in place to make a profit that will keep the company sustainable. It’s not a fact.

And, of course, I don’t know either. The difference is, I’m not accusing anyone of anything.

Again, earnings reports. And I’m not accusing anyone of anything either. If you mean me asking you whether you suggested that their design decisions are driven by incompetence rather than stylistic choice, that was not me accusing you of calling them incompetent, and my apologies if that’s what you took from it.

Mattargul.9235:

Sarrs.4831:

SWTOR’s cash shop model is more friendly to consumers than GW2’s in most places because of how they’ve set up their account-wide unlocks compared to GW2’s.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAAAAH!!!!

TOR is a game built around hotbars. I had 4 up all the time, 99% filled. For the F2P conversion, they were going to give you one (1) hotbar, which is not even enough to get all your class skills on. After a humongous backlash from… pretty much everyone, they caved and gave you 2 to start with.

Yea, I agree some of the ANet calls on what’s account vs soulbound are questionable, but saying TORs cash shop is more customer friendly? Really?

I said ‘most places’; the hotbar area is the most painful spot. Even then, you pay $5 and you’ve got your hotbars. If I were to think of the things that SWTOR’s cash shop really crushes you for, it’s the very early account unlocks; hotbars, legacy name, colorswapping, all of which you can buy on the GTN with ingame credits, or you can spend less than GW2’s box price to get.

Just about everything costs less in SWTOR than it does in GW2, and it has a swathe of QOL features. Those hairstyles I was talking about cost two dollars to permanently unlock on your account. A friend of mine on here accidentally deleted a character to which gemstore gear was soulbound, so he couldn’t access it- That wouldn’t be a problem in SWTOR because of the systems they have in place.

Rush.8253:

Then you could earn WXP on your main and rank up an alt.

Or the other way around. I think that’s part of the intent of these new WXP consumables. It doesn’t make alting viable; it makes levelling less painful for your main. If you have an alt exclusively dedicated to farting around in the middle, then maybe that works… But you may as well just play sPvP if that’s what you alt for.

If you’re levelling, you’re probably relying on karma train, and you’re probably not being let on arrow carts to get tags on zergs, so you’re not gonna pull that many WXP consumables, so it… Doesn’t quite work.

Vayne.8563:

Nope I’m saying that the reason companies exist is to make money. People seem to forget this. Now you’d say box sales cover everything. Well no. The game was in development for five years, during which time they paid hundreds of devs, office space, etc. The box sales usually covers the cost of the creation of the game. So where’s the profit.

Companies do not exist to produce a profit. Companies exist to produce a product, and the profits are there to keep the lights open. If you truly believe that a company, and every worker within it is there just to make money and not to provide a service, especially in a luxury industry like video games, then you really should withdraw your patronage of that company.

In a game with monthly fees the profit often comes from monthly fees. In a game without monthly fees, profit generally comes from the cash shop…and that’s not unreasonable.

Now, if Anet wasn’t working on the game at all, and they weren’t still paying programmers, coming out with new dungeon paths and new mini games and new content for free, maybe you’d be right. But considering they’re working on the game, they need to pay programmers and electricity bills and telephone bills and rent, and corporate taxes.

If they had a subscription for the first several months they’d have an influx of coin to pay staff that they don’t have. It’s not unreasonable to think they’d want to make money.

I’m pretty sure they didn’t list their company as a non-profit organization.

How stupid do you think I am? Yes, I am aware of the existence of money. I am aware that people need money to survive. I am aware that ANet needs money to keep the lights on. What’s wrong with you?

I’m saying that they already have plenty of mechanics in place to generate money, like character slots and hair stylist kits, which were already in the game, and that forcing people to buy hair stylist kits for new characters is overly ambitious of them and will cause more damage when it comes to their reputation with the community that it will generate cash. 95% of the people using these new hairstyles are already cap level, so you can bet your britches that they paid for those hair stylist kits- so what harm would it be to open the hairstyles up for fresh characters?

And I’m not even suggesting that they give it up for free to everyone! I’m suggesting they offer it as an account-wide unlock, and not for free. If they had it as an 800 gem unlock I would probably cough up the gems as soon as it went live. Chances are, with the current implementation, I will never use these hairstyles on any of my characters unless I manage to pull a hair stylist kit from a Black Lion Chest. Nobody wins there- I don’t get to play around with fancy new hairs, ANet doesn’t get my money.

titanlectro.5029:

I would prefer this too, but Devon has made it quite clear that account bound WXP is off the table. (Even in that quote I posted at the top of this thread).

Instead of arguing for what we can’t have, I’d like to see Devon be successful on his “personal goal to improve the experience for playing alts in WvW.”

I honestly doubt that it’s truly off the table. His reasoning doesn’t make sense when it comes to not allowing account-wide ranks, and it’s a position that doesn’t match up with just about every other system in the game. Either there’s something in the code that prevents doing it easily, or he’s got some other reason for not wanting to do it.

I have a better idea.

Make WvW rank/abilities account-wide.

Ta-da!

Vayne.8563:

The relevance is the huge influx of money for the first 9 months. There’s no way you can convince me that a game that charges a monthly fee is less profitable than one that has a cash shop…if the game has enough subscribers. If SWToR had box sales of over 2 million and most of those people paid for subscriptions, I’d say that they had a lot more income. A lot meaning A LOT.

That’s relevance. It means a bigger programming team, and more money being thrown at problems.

There’s no way you’re going to convince anyone that Anet is a bigger company than Bioware, or that NcSoft is a bigger company than EA. Bigger company means more resources to throw at problems.

So you’re saying the reason they don’t add the new hairstyles to the character creation dialogue is not a ‘decision’, but something they are incapable of doing. Granted, it might gel with some of the other nonsensical decisions they’ve made, like replacing TA F/U rather than just adding the new dungeon, and not adding account-wide WXP, but… This is a pretty terrible defense of what they’re doing.

LHound.8964:

There is a way to make the change Traits ingame @ lower price (3,5silver). Therefore being ~4g it’s ok, as having and using this item is a pure commodity.

I would be happier with a “PERMANENT” item (600-1000gems) that would add +1 character bound template (to a maximum of 3):

Base : 1 template (As everyone have now);
+1 BTLC template item: 2 templates;
+1 BLTC template item: maxed @ 3 templates.

This would allow to use several gears for several playing roles for different situations (different dungeons, World PvE “grind” and WvW).

/cheers

Why limit the number of templates you can have in total? It really depends on whether these are “in the field” trait changes or just templates you can change to at the vendor, but I still see little reason to add a hard cap for any reason other than mechanical.

Vayne.8563:

Maybe because SWToR charged a $15 fee to every single player for 9 months or more. And maybe because event now, SWToR’s cash shop is pay to walk. Give me a break.

Relevance? They are both currently relying on their existing customer base and not box sales, effectively reducing them both to cash shop sales.

SWTOR’s cash shop model is more friendly to consumers than GW2’s in most places because of how they’ve set up their account-wide unlocks compared to GW2’s. Mind, I’m considering the system as it currently is, compared to how it was when it was released- At release, it was a pretty serious mess of a system, but they’ve added a lot of things that make me go “I’d love it if GW2 had this”.

skullmount.1758:

Cause that’s what they’ve been doing constantly?

Previously it was mostly just “misguided/poorly implemented ideas”. This would just be outright malevolence.

skullmount.1758:

Sarrs.4831:

I’m not entirely sure what this line even means. ._.

Well the way I take it is that you only get one chest for each rank, no matter what character achieved it. So if you start doing an alt, you won’t get any rank up chests for any ranks up until the highest one you’ve achieved on your ‘main’ (which ever has the highest).

That would be hilariously sad and pathetic if it’s actually the case. I haven’t tested to see if it is, but why would someone even do that? “Yeah, let’s make WvW even less friendly to alts.” Funny stuff.

Atherakhia.4086:

Because they expect you to spend $10 on a makeover kit.

It’s more like 3 dollars.

Still a pretty sad joke though.

Blow it up. Then make a fractal about blowing it up! The Castle Lord can be the last boss!

I’m not entirely sure what this line even means. ._.

Latinkuro.9420:

also very true what you say, but this is a start at least you know.
but yeah I wanna see templates implemented a well

There’s no mechanical groundwork laid for templates by introducing these items. They’re a stopgap. Hell; if you could use GM manuals to respec it’d be cheaper than these new items.

Menaka.5092:

how does it make the rank being per character even worse? the notes say the item is account bound, you can use it to rank up your alt…

At the expense of not ranking up your main. There is no net gain from using it on an alt.

Really, I’m not finding these attempts at making WvW more alt-friendly to be very convincing. They’re just… More WXP. No fundamental changes to how WXP will work, just more of it.

If they really need to suck money out of the playerbase with new hairstyles, why not do what SWTOR did and have them as permanent unlocks in a pack? Seriously, I’m not going to pay more gems on top of the character slot when I roll an alt. This is kind of a kitten thing to do.

Usually eat Dragonfly Cupcakes; will switch to Candied Dragon Rolls during fights.

Amplepiper.7580:

It was BROKEN people so they got rid of it. arena net is just responding to the probably thousands of players complaining about this obviously broken path. if you want a challenge run arah. F/U wasn’t a challenge anyway if you run it right the first time but it was broke so they fixed it by getting rid of it. I love this game except for all the whiners who play it. besides maybe this new path is the challenge you are looking for. I am looking forward to it and will definitely be on when it comes out.

The solution to “my car has a flat tire” is not “BLOW IT UP”

i mean

blow up the car not the tire that’d make sense

They do need to play about with how exactly scores and rewards are determined. Give people a huge chunk more reward for targeting the top dog, for example, and the “2servers jump on topdog” might actually happen. Really depends on which demographic you’re going for, though; the fight-people or the casuals.

Jayne.9251:

What I don’t think people are factoring in is the pve crowd and their need to complete any achievement meta that anet releases. Almost every server will see an increase in participation, and the top tier servers will likely see their wvw population at least triple overnight as everyone races to get their points done. Imagine three times the current numbers playing trying to get into the map? How long do you think the queues will be then? Heck, look how many turned out for Teakettle. As well, a lot of these pve folks will be geared in yellows and greens and (gasp) glass cannon builds that are used to NPC fighting.

I really really hope you’re right; new blood is a serious problem in WvW.

Topher.1684:

Gamadorn.2659:

I wouldn’t mind it if it was similar to grinding to 80….you can hit 80 in one day of crafting…you can get to 80 pretty easily in a week or so hell lets say a MONTH….how long does it take you to get 14,000 WvW levels to max out ONE character…you could log into WvW everyday for a month and still not get to it…..in fact as of the release I have not heard of ANYONE maxing out the cap on WvW levels….GW2 had people hitting level 80 in 1 day through crafting.

I don’t mind them making it a character progression, but they made maxing it out WAY too high for character progression (just like they did for some WvW achievements that would take years to kill enough yaks to achieve…lol) and the dribs and drabs of WxP and the boosters are STILL not enough to make up for that…

If they want the grind to get to max wvw level to be this long it needs to be account bound…..if they want it to be character progression they need to make it much more achievable, and much more than they have been..

I think the average people have reported is about 1 level per hour. If you take that into account it will only take about 19-20 months of 24h playing to max out on 1 character.

Add another 10 months if you want to actually sleep/bio/eat (8 hours/day)….

Turn gold into character slots and get Birthday Boosters to halve the time.

Aberrant.6749:

The chance of getting the rewards if you’re not in the top servers is 0%. The chance of getting the rewards if you are is far higher even if you need to complete some monthly for it. You’re gaining some chance while losing nothing… thus there is no risk.

Lets take my server, TC, for example. Rank 4. Unless we’re put into one of the other tiers that doesn’t have the top 3, we have no chance of winning. If I transferred to one of them, I would increase my chances of getting these rewards. I won’t do this because I’m loyal to my server (a rare thing now a days because of the rampant lets transfer to win mentality).

This really depends on the rewards structure, which to the best of my knowledge we really haven’t heard anything about. If winning is literally just “grats on your gold dolyak stomp”, and any other rewards are just baked into participation, then I don’t see a problem.

Really wondering what the reward schema is though.

I have a concern. What if they decide to make it based on sPvP gearing rather than PvE gearing? I doubt anybody would actually want to have that.

Bit of a slow response but pretty much exactly what I expected. Maybe a bit longer than I expected.

Andele.1306:

Morons try to play a unsupported game mode, get trolled by a quite humorous asura with power, come and complain to the source of said asura, because kitten logic.

Really hoping and expecting this to be a sockpuppet.

GK and DAG aren’t worse than orbs because they’re non-exclusive. Stacked Server X can’t deprive you of your stats of AV/GL; they can deprive you of your orbs.

That’s not to say they’re balanced but they’re certainly less imbalanced than bloodlust.

covenn.7165:

I like that the ranks are character bound. Getting rewarded for playing a character instead of jumping to whatever the next flavor of the month is is better …..

Getting rewarding for playing a character then being useless because your class got gutted*

lemora.1304:

Why don’t you actually tell us what you’re thinking of making changes to so we can tell you early on what we think so you don’t end up making yet another stupid decision that kitten es your players off more? Wow….

Yeaaaah. I don’t mean to come off as rude or anything, but if there were less beating around the bush we’d really appreciate it. This really comes off as “cleverly marketed”.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/world-vs-world-season-1-begins-october-18/

SykkoB.9465:

1. the top ranked server r gonna have no issue getting the achievements.

I think what he’s trying to say is that there are personal achievements and if you’re stuck on a queue all the time because you transferred to Stackgate you’re never going to be able to get them.

Of course, whether this is actually the case and whether it actually acts as a stacking deterrent is yet to be seen.

Not sure where Kamikaze’s from, but I think three of those commanders are from TC. I think a bit more spread might be nice to have.

Still good interview, though.

Well this was a surprise.

On topic I don’t really like this idea of letting different chars take different traits. That pushes down the overall number of points that you can actually meaningfully get; if that entire sheet is across your account, then you need to get 1000 or whatever number ranks to get everything, and that’s part of the reason- It’s supposed to be a very long-term goal to fill your sheet. If you can have each different character with a different setup, that’s cut down to about 350 to comfortably get everything on at least one character.

Nuzt.7894:

You can actually craft to 375 in each for roughly 100 gp, you will be within 10-12 levels of 80 depending on how you do it.

No it won’t; not since ascended crafting was implemented. It’ll get you to maybe 50.

insanemaniac.2456:

wvw isnt dying, they have numbers they wont let us see that say otherwise

Au contraire. If WvW was thriving, they would be shouting it from the rooftops.

What do we have instead? Almost complete dev silence.

Nuzt.7894:

If you feel you signed up for a job your doing it wrong. Its a free game that you choose to play, and massive grind ? who are you trying to fool ? You can achieve 80 in 5 hours.

Okay, there are a few fundamentals in this post that’re broken.

1. It is no longer possible to craft-level to 80. With crafting broken between 400 and 500, 5 professions are unable to reach cap and therefore only provide 7 levels, not 10. Even with this in mind, the amount of gold it costs to reach 500 with each of those weapon professions is quite high, about 150g. Converting from gems to gold, that’s probably at least $150.

Assuming you get the rest of those levels from CoF alt cycling, and each CoF run takes 10 minutes, that’s another 3 and a half hours. You need to be earning $100 an hour to be able to do what you claim.

2. There’s a link between “job” and “choose (not) to play”. Whether this is intentional or not, I don’t know, and I don’t know about you, but most people would probably go with “choose not to play”. This is not a healthy state of affairs for a video game.

Cactus.2710:

I can understand why people think the score is meaningless because quite honestly it is, but where we’re at is like turning off the scoreboard at a football game and just having both teams run around tackling each other for their own amusement.

If nobody cares about the score at a football match, then sure, that analogy works, but people actually are very interested in knowing whose team is winning. Scoring in football is fundamentally tied to skill and ability.

Scoring in WvW?… Eh, not so much.

Nuzt.7894:

again if it should be account bound why do alts not start at level 80 ?

1. In sPvP, alts do start at level 80.
2. In PvE, there are eight different classes which each have distinct playstyles and systems. There is one WvW levelling system.

Ricky.4706:

the question is can you keep it t1 without the blob….. ^.^

Why would anyone want to leave t1 if they lose a stat bonus for doing so?

Are we trying to coax the fairweathers into playing more, or are we trying to coax PvEers into playing at all?

I think a strong (50%) WXP boost would be enough to get the fairweathers to seriously consider playing in a matchup they might not otherwise do well in.

To get PvEers to play, they need some other kind of bonus. In my opinion, add XP/Karma/MF/GF to the buff. However, I think it will be very difficult if not impossible to coax PvEers into WvW unless the reward scheme is changed significantly. PVE projectile vomits rewards at you in a constant stream, WvW does not.

Sir Tripsalot.1803:

Great idea, although it would most likely lead to players letting their servers lose for the first day or so of the matchup in order to get an increase in WXP later in the week.

Perhaps you can only get the buff if you’re in third place, or have 85% or less the score of the first server, whichever comes first?

Sir Tripsalot.1803:

Would totally be down for this if I didn’t have to spend money/wait a month to switch back to my home server.

Free week-long trial coming up in a few days… /whistles nonchalantly