Guild Wars 2

can mods maybe edit the OP to say when this is closing?

topic 1)Rewards

related points:
DR, RNG, time gating, once per account per day, gather 10,000- 100,000 X to trade for a skin or mini, grind X till its nerfed to become more tedious, non viable alt gearing

topic 2) Endgame progression design

related points:
ascended+ future tiers, vertical vs horizontal progression, play the way you want vs play how you tell me; one build on one class doing vacuous temporary content before its gone, and farming gold to mitigate rng to get items that will never return odd choices in account based or character based progression ie wvw ranks, fractal levels, spvp rank etc

3)Consistency in manifesto/current aims

related points:
i actually have no idea where this game is heading, every single statement made pre launch about the type of game this would be and what the devs plans for it were seems to have been thrown out, what are the plans now?, where will we be in 5 years? is all content going to be replaced like the TA path with “new versions” making the size of the game the same? is currently broken content going to be fixed, there are several well known dungeon exploits that haven’t been fixed in a year, why is that ok compared to other exploits?

1) power creep and alts/ new players

up lvled players were essentially a free kill before you added ascended and WVW ranks, the disparity will be larger now and also affects 80s that lack ranks and ascended, i have scraped through 1v1 and 1v2 with 200 hp and less, i see no point playing against players that have at least a 10% stat advantage at all times, before even including ranks etc consider converting wvw to spvp or scrub gear so new players dont need to be free kills to the detriment of their server while trying to gear/ lvl up to play competitively.

2)rewards for defense/ support/control

if you run around healing/reviving people and dropping support/control fields you wont get any wvw exp/bags, neither will you guarding an empty tower that no one attacks

3)pop imbalance/ matching

atm there is a massive incentive for everyone to pile onto the few top tier servers, as a result lower pop servers have 0 chance of ever winning match ups and only ever acquire keeps when a server abandons them so they can get points for recapping it

1) rewards and progression.

spvp rewards are more quickly obtained through living world and achievement point chests which is absurd design,

to get rewarded in the content i like i should not play that content.

rank finishers are nice and all but why cant we have emotes or exp/ karma or anything that can be used outside of spvp, if other gameplay gives rewards for spvp it should likewise reward wvwxp and PVE

2) game modes
capture the points is fine but there needs to be variation. more asymetric maps rotating defenders and attackers in rounds best of 3 etc you could also reward a small amount of glory for activities as atm, people seem to only pop into them for the daily unless they are farming to clear the associated achievements

3) trait/ gear saving
if i want to swap to a build ive already setup i should not then spend a few min running to the npcs to get all the items i need to change to and clicking through traits

on collaborative improvements

communication is key specifically WHY most of the changes of the last year have boggled my mind mainly due to not understanding what you were thinking when you implemented them, given my immediate reaction is generally why haven’t they implemented it this other way, ill give three specific examples

the fervid censor is a living world rare backpack that has an infusion slot and cannot be ascended

its existence is presumably justified by the desire to give players easy access to a backpack with an infusion slot for fractals. HOWEVER why was it part of the living world? would it not have made more sense to reward it for defeating the jade maw for the first time? or sell it for a small amount of fractal relics etc making it easily obtainable to those who want a backpack with an infusion slot?

its actual implementation gave players who have no desire at all to experience fractals or the other forced vertical aspects of the endgame a backpack with half the stats it should have, that needs to be transmuted to be useful outside of a small corner of the game, if it was intended to be cosmetic it could easily have been rewarded as a skin as many of the items are, but it was not…

the pillar “play the way you want” is frequently referred to, but each patch changes it to "play how we tell you"

currently you are pigeonholed into one build on one class due to time gating on gear, and progression in general, because if you want to change to another class or build you are looking at months of effort just to get back to the point you are currently at, while being weaker and more poorly rewarded while you do so given that reward is calculated based on damage(support=no recognition) and progression level ie fractals, which leads to that build being direct damage ie berserkers in most cases. this is essentially leading to the point where you will have to enact balance changes that will ruin carefully devised and constructed builds for some players, faced with months or rebuilding to get back to the same point with no guarantee you wont just re-balance again, many players would just quit.

as the proverb goes “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” while you may aim for some ambitious goal the implementation leaves much to be desired. and in many cases runs counter to your stated intent

the curse of game development is that you spend more time making games than playing them, this is one thing you really need to address, primarily because missteps and decisions you have made, have been done before by other companies, you just need to look at the competition and see why feature X didn’t pan out or what the solution they implemented to problem Y was to inform your development.

as an example companies like blizzard stopped resistance gating the better part of a decade ago, did you ever wonder why before you implemented it in this game?

mixed messages/ no solid design

it was only a few weeks ago that you guys were telling certain staff not to communicate with us and now you want to improve communication, its complete 180s like this that are never properly explained that lead to people having no clue as to what the game is about where its going or if we can even trust anything you say

a more specific example from a little over a month before the game released, the presumably finalized design lasts about 4 months

Colin and Eric on endgame design last year

“these legendary weapons are really cool looking and like we said, there’s no, you wont get a game-play advantage out of these things you’ll just look really cool and people will be like hey where did you get that.” (comparing them to exotics)

to last month, just over a year later

Changes to Legendary Weapons

Legendary weapons now have increased stats to keep them in line with the new ascended weapons as “best in slot” items.
Legendary weapons now have functionality to allow their inherent stat combo to be changed to any other stat combo when out of combat.

even if you argue that there is no stat advantage over ascended the functionality to change stats and avoid having to get another ascended weapon is a game-play advantage, not to mention they have been explicitly stated to always upgrade to BIS so when there are more tiers you wont need to grind for them.

but seriously make with the non ascended servers, if jagex can do it for runescape so can you

Vayne.8563:

The implication is in the phrasing. Saying “people want something” implies most people, because if only a minority of people want it, there’s no much point bringing it up that way.

The entire post implies that there’s this huge group of people who want this. I submit that people don’t really know what the majority wants.

Please stop trying to pick apart other posts, your just embarrassing yourself and derailing the topic given “people don’t really know what the majority wants.” you dont know if the majority do or do not want this. (a good reason for well designed polling) the number of people on the forums has nothing to do with whether or not it is an accurate representation of the player base, as an example political exit polls on a fraction of a percent of the voting public can be incredibly accurate.

the implication you claim is non existent, the usage is as a plural of person not as a collective usage this is obvious from reading the text. further i would submit that 100,000 is a huge amount of people but that is less than 3.33% of the population hardly a majority, so even if the implication were there you would still be incorrect.

back on topic:

feedback for Chris/ whoever cares to read the wall of text

i believe responses “from the hip” are generally more favored as you don’t have to pick through three paragraphs of text the essence of which can be summarized in three sentences, with the remainder being ambiguous verbose dross that doesn’t really tell you anything, but which will be picked over and bickered about as its all that we have from you, there is also have the benefit of being able to respond and clarify things more rapidly ie 2-3 to the point blunt responses compared to one long one that is carefully ambiguous

on polls
you will need to track how accounts have voted if you have polls in multiple locations ie forums and launcher and in game, to ensure people don’t game it and decide if you want to allow people to change their votes before voting closes ie players may initially love content then run into problems or the reverse and want to vote another way.

having a comment field or the forum polling thread open to comments would allow people to elaborate on why they have voted as they have, this is very important as binary data from polls doesn’t give you insight into why people respond or act a certain way ie are people logging in because they enjoy content or because they don’t want to be left behind?

+1 to

Simple enough, let the pigeons do the dirty work.
You can advertise a new function via an e-mail and dedicate it a separate section.
The new icon may change color once a new survey is available.
No one will be forced to respond, and invasiveness will be minimal.

i was picturing something like that which leads to feedback tabs etc for the in game implementation, perhaps with a recent history tracker so you can leave feedback about events you have recently participated in. if you put it in game defiantly do it like that as opposed to a popup, im hesitant about including rewards for completing surveys as that may lead to people just checking YES/ 5* for everything without reading it to get the reward, the reward should be the interaction and the knowledge that the feedback is hopefully going to better the game

on forums
in regards to duration of forum posts, i think it really needs to longer than 2-3 days, im picturing something like a week, you could add additional topics every few days but if you don’t come to the forums that often you’d miss out on being able to give feedback for that point you’d also have less time to consider the feedback you are giving, as a result i think a longer forum life is needed to catch the most players. you should also announce what the next topic is and when it will be available, it would be terrible to have to travel for real life commitments and miss the opportunity to participate

in terms of topics have a separate thread for upcoming discussions where players can suggest topics to be focused on, you can then include a poll of the most favorable/ suggested ones to decide which is next, this would probably be best implemented in the suggestions forums with a moderated sticky.

Shockwave.1230:

It’s incredibly exciting that ANet does listen to forum goers. It’s important to understand as well that ANet will not act on some feedback, because it is in conflict with the game’s direction or because they simply don’t have the time/money/resources to have acted already on some feedback.

ascended gear says hello

i dont think Anet really cares about feedback at this point, its all about what will benefit game/ gem sales the most positively, and damage control/ spin, the Anet brand is already severely compromised at this point.

if they did care they would give us something like 3 months notice of major game changes rather than 3 days, you know enough time for feedback to be given, considered and acted upon.

but if you want collaborative development consider implementing some of the following

Test servers -since you seem to having problems fully testing releases also faster feedback
Non ascended servers – at least half the population would probably move to these
Fix Jewel crafting – its currently obsolete (will probably craft infusions in a year)
remove DR and diminish RNG – reward players for effort not luck
Less gold based content – end game is basically farm gold to bypass RNG
Better communication- actually communicating without PR spin and pointless embellishments

Mathias.9657:

I sure hope so – personally can’t wait for that non salvageable non tradeable pair of exotic condition boots at the top of the clock tower.

you mean ascended right, exotic as BIS is so last year….

We were hoping originally it would take days/weeks for players to defeat Tequatl instead of 12 hrs.”

kind of gutted i didn’t notice this at the time as i would have def asked why they’re now designing content to not even be completable in the short time the living world is available for.

tbh i kind of tuned him out after the first few responses were PR BS

a server transfer to a shard that follows the original manifesto and lacks all of the BS gating and once per account per day restrictions and VP that was introduced in the lost shores patch

artsed.9702:

Yes it does… It takes a lot of wood and metal (both in solid numbers and in the form of orichalcum plated dowels), which overlap with the gifts of metal and wood. It uses crystalline dust, used in many legendaries. It uses a bunch of obsidian shards, used in legendaries, and they even use fine materials.

In fact, literally every material that isn’t an ascended material is also used in many legendary weapons.

also the 2 or so STACKS of ectos for gifts

BobbyStein.2315:

we have to take every post with a grain of salt, and also compare that with posts from other sites, and then compare it to player behavior in the game.

what does comparing posts to player behavior actually tell you? that players are completing the content for achievement points? you cant infer that they enjoy it just because it needs to be cleared before it vanishes forever…

anyway on topic:
best
Halloween (best overall)
SAB (april not back to school)
bazaar (fun mix of jumping and scavenger hunt )
clockwork chaos (a reason to actually revisit zones)

worst
lost shores (everything was bad, pretty much ruined the game)
Flame and frost (tedious start)
cutthroat politics (bad design to ensure split vote, nothing worth voting for)
dragon bash ( whole event was basically kill x00 click y00)

i hope we can vendor the ascended boots at the end of it

Grand Theft Auto five

i look forward to asking why they are systematically making alts non viable and why we should trust anything they say given the number of complete 180s they have done with no real explanation or notice

anything else people want asked if i get the chance to grab a dev?

akamon.2769:

i don’t think it’s pay to win. it’s pay to have an easier life, if anything.

could there be someone out there, who can buy 10,000 infinite continue coins and still be unable to complete a single given TM zone? i want to say, yes. there just might be.

so does that equal pay to win?

and sure Shadow, but choosing to leave and not continuing to try does not equal “winning” either, whatever you guys are arguing winning is here with the ICC.

bottom line having ICC does not equal winning and conquering SAB, regular or TM.

i didn’t say choosing to leave was “winning” its also not failing, its choosing to no longer make attempts/play the content at that time.

failure isn’t a choice, it removes you from the box and resets your progress

this is probably a bad analogy, but its the best i can think of;

lets make a comparison with say soloing any legendary boss, in that context it “doesn’t let you win”, you still have to use your attacks etc, but it prevents health resetting and it leaving, so regardless of if all your Armour breaks, you die 10,000 times you win simply by repeatedly chipping away at it, as long as you keep trying

it doesn’t equal an automatic win so much as trivialize the content by removing the ability to fail it, you just have to be persistent.

Adamantium.3682:

Shadow Blade.1324:

imho the problem is it removes the possibility of failure

What you’re saying is that it’s impossible, given the ICC, for any player to not be able to complete SAB TM. Really? It doesn’t give super powers for crying out loud, it just saves you some time.

you have infinite attempts from your last checkpoint, the only way to not eventually complete it is to choose to leave and not continue trying, or possibly have a client crash etc(which is a general problem the game has) however, you still have infinite attempts when you return, compared to someone who has lost progress and continue coins

imho the problem is it removes the possibility of failure

with it you
*have infinite attempts from your last checkpoint

without it you
*have to buy more coins with baubles/ fight rng at puzzles

*have to start again when you run out of coins

*have the possibility of actually failing due to using your coins getting to the same point you are having difficulty with when returning after getting more coins

imho i think its because if you want to “finish your collection” your better off not playing SAB at all and just farming dungeons for gold to buy them off the TP

you can get 9 BB for w1 + cart once per day , another 9 for w2 (2 per chest +1 for cart/ bandits +2 for digging etc) 18 total

this translates to 3 days per skin unless you want the utter tediousness of farming honeycomb + chests to speed things up

compare to running 4 15 min dungeons for 4g+ drops and buying a skin outright(prices may vary) 3 days vs 1 hour

so lets say you want to collect one of each skin for pve and pvp
so 2 × 9 skins x 50 BB +1g each
thats 900 BB and 18g

not including any reductions for outlay on continue coins due to deaths

if you clear both worlds every day, thats only
50 days before you can earn all the skins, which is only 20 days more than the content will be available for at most, if it doesn’t leave with the arrival of tequatil

that’s before you even consider spending BB on coins attempting TM

its confusing as raw opals are an upgrade component that drops, i doubt they would have them be + all stats like runes then change to assassins when made exquisite as even when crafted they are still an upgrade component, so that really needs clarification

still no idea whats happening to medallions/crests, same as runes or same as drops?

are we basically out a rune/ gem set due to this change. or is there some other form of compensation for runes/gems already in Armour?

also which of the ascended crafting things can i sell, as i have 0 interest in climbing the vertical progression ladder

for over a year now we have had the problem where
if you disconnect during an event and you cant get back before it completes and earn the event credit again you get nothing

given that events are playing a greater role in living story etc this is becoming more of a problem.

while other events cycle more frequently, thus while it is frustrating to clear say claw of jormag from pre-events and have the client crakitten 25% and then log back in to find it died and you have nothing for the sometimes considerable time put in, if you have the time you can try again in 3h

not so with the invasions as they are random and even if you do log back in you’ll be placed in an overflow where the event isn’t occurring, the Que to get into a map with the event finishes when the event does

so a-nets previous solution to this was to give everyone credit manually for the southsun event (i still haven’t received my 1s or whatever for defending lions arch btw)

doing this for every event isn’t really practical

however what they could do is create a checksum for each account composed from info on the event and credit earned (bronze /silver /gold). as many events give the same reward (karma silver exp )by level, the resulting hash tables can be fairly small provided they are designed correctly, the exceptions being those that generate chests or other specific rewards which can utilize the existing system of ui chests.

thoughts, improvements, alternatives?

make these materials tradable, as while i enjoy jumping puzzles i have no intention of ever crafting ascended gear for any of my characters, alternately let them vendor for more than the blues/greens we would have gotten from the puzzle

in regards to parking/ portaling, parking isn’t really an issue given A you have to complete it at least once, and B cant do anything else with that character for 24h, you can also park at dragon events/ cooking farms etc, the only way to prevent this would be to move people when they log, which would screw people who DC part way through(it does happen)

portaling is more of a problem as you don’t even have to complete it once to get the achievement/ reward, it also completely negates the time taken to get there, ie if rewards are balanced around time investment, they cant be any good when you have people who can complete it in less than 10 seconds, a method to counter this would be to make more puzzles like hidden garden and scavengers chasm, where you have to have items obtained from clearing the puzzle to open the chest

also when can we have legendary Armour/ jewelry?
and why cant i transmute trinkets?

Astralporing.1957:

There were dev mentions about all grind being only for looks, never for stats. Devs tried to get out of it later by claiming that the “1000 hours” mentioned should be taken literally, and not figuratively. The same approach has been taken to everything else in the Manifesto and previous dev statements – twisting the wording, or going for strictly literal interpretation, while fully abandoning the spirit of what has been said.

All your defence of Manifesto is also based on those methods, by the way. You keep saying that there’s nothing wrong with Manifesto, as long as the words used can be creatively redefined to match the new situation, even if the spirit of original message is long lost. And it is lost, no matter how hard you might try to twist the wording.

Developers on Guild Wars 2 Endgame 8 min in they start talking about legendaries at 10 min they explicitly state you get no game play advantage and its just for prestige

100% of the player base didn’t matter it was biased from the beginning.
the vote was only fairly evenly split because it was designed to be.

you had to put at least 2 tokens into each candidate to get the daily achieve for them, they could have designed it so that you could have chosen who to support while gaining neutral achievements

ie do X dailies while supporting either candidate instead of do x for keil and x for evon

Vayne i think your posts would be better received if you stopped stating opinions as facts when your statements essentially boil down to

Vayne.8563:

I can’t prove it, but I’d bet it’s true.

while i take your point this is a terrible example

Vayne.8563:

If you don’t get this, then you don’t get it. That’s fine. But the major reason people end up walking away from games like WoW is because they know they’ll never catch up. It’s a big big big reason why people stop. They just cant’ keep going.

you can always catch up in games like wow, they periodically do gear resets with new tiers and make the previous top tier more accessible. imo the reason people walk away from wow isn’t that they wont catch up its that the constant grinding treadmill to stay relevant isn’t entertaining and they burn out.

a better example would be GW2 where you cannot catch up as those players will always be X amount of time ahead of you (assuming they keep playing) in laurels for acquiring BIS or WvW rank unlocks etc so you will never match them because you are time gated from doing so. you can also never experience the wealth of content that’s been removed from the game

i have a few friends who have recently joined the game interested in content i enjoyed and mentioned in previous months, the answer in every case when they ask where they can do that content is “you cant they took it out of the game if you hurry you might be able to do the current stuff before its gone”

its that sense of urgency that the OP is talking about that will ultimately lead to faster burn out and players leaving, and once gone what is there to come back to? the one current event you need to race to complete before it gone?

ultimately this feedback will be disregarded if it doesn’t fit their existing plan, much like the 200 odd page feedback thread on ascended items was locked and discarded for a smaller more positive looking feedback thread in November.

Vayne.8563:

Sorry that I have to provide a basic English lesson here, but this had NOTHING to do at all with the definition of grind. It does have to do with the definition of fun. Obviously to anyone, fun is subjective. No game can make something fun for EVERYONE. It’s not possible. There’ll always be someone who finds something unfun that others find fun, so the subject if fun is not on trial here.

That leaves us with grind. Grind has lots of different definitions. Therefore, I don’t try to define it once it’s ALREADY defined in a piece of writing. That’s because it’s up to the writer to define how he’s using it. That was done here. It’s very specific and it’s very obvious. The only people who can say otherwise are people who are trying to overlay their definition of grind over the type of grind that Colin is talking about. There’s no mystery here. Most people get this. The people who don’t are starting off with an attachement to what they think grind is.

If Colin says: In most games there’s this boring grind to get to the fun stuff, then when he mentions grind a few seconds later, he’s talking about that grind. The boring grind to get to the fun stuff. He’s not talking about gear or end game. He’s talking about the boring grind to get to the fun stuff.

You don’t have to be an editor to understand this. You shouldn’t have to be an editor. The ONLY people who say it means otherwise are people taking it out of context.

The more you post about it, the more obvious the truth becomes. Feel free to keep going.

your reading comprehension is terrible, read what i wrote, not what you think i wrote
this isn’t so much a basic English lesson as a rant that doesn’t address any of the points.
if this is the quality of your lessons, I’m glad your not employed as a teacher.

He does not define grind, if you look at my post you can see several instances of the definition of grinding in this context, unless your arguing hes using the definition “To crush, pulverize, or reduce to powder by friction” or similar then its clear hes using the definition i cited from 3 separate sources. that is the definition PERIOD. he uses combat as an example of grind not the definition. he broadly referred to grind in other games. as what you do to get to the fun stuff. that is also not the definition of grind, it is a statement of where you find grind in other games.

if fun is subjective that means gearing and endgame can be fun too, understand?
that means when hes talking about grinding to get to the fun stuff hes also talking about fun in those instances. and any other instance where there may be a grind to get to the fun stuff, he does not at any point in the video state he is excluding areas of the game from this statement. you are projecting that.

where are the sources you cite? do they even exist? you repeatedly state you have them on hand yet when i asked you for them you have failed to provide them. if you have the links please do post them.

Being an editor has nothing to do with this, as i stated before that has ZERO bearing on this discussion, it does not support your arguments despite what you may think. it actually gives the appearance that your arguments cant stand on their own merit so you need to use that as a crutch. to attempt to convince readers you may know what your talking about. i have yet to see any evidence that you are a reliable authority on this in even the most miniscule sense of the term. so kindly stay on topic and stop giving irrelevant details of your personal life to strangers on the internet

If you’d said you were a Lexicographer that might have had some bearing on this but your not. so i will reiterate; look in the dictionary, you will find something similar to the examples i gave.

Repeatedly broadly stereotyping everyone who disagrees with you isn’t helping your argument, it just makes you look petulant.

Your attempts to derail this topic into arguments on semantics aside the OP is correct in the 3 statements indicating that the design philosophy has veered sharply, this is easily seen in the repeated use of monotonous repetitive tasks that you have to grind through to progress living story meta achievements which are further exacerbated by time gating.

Vayne.8563:

Out of context means taking one line from the whole and assigning it a definition. I’ve done that nowhere. But people quoting the line “we don’t want people to grind in Guild Wars 2” are most certainly taking that line out of context. How do you know?

Because they’re ignoring the reset of the paragraph around the sentence. That’s the definition of taking something out of context.

If I said to you: In most games you have this boring grind to get to the fun stuff and shortly after say: We don’t want people to grind in Guild Wars 2, there’s clearly a link here. I’d be saying we don’t want people to have to go through a ton of boring stuff to get to the fun stuff. That’s ALL that means.

You can argue till you’re blue in the face and it won’t change the fact that the language is supporting what I’m saying.

the language doesn’t support what your saying, you don’t even support what your saying from post to post you say It’s not about certain grinds , but also that fun is subjective and they don’t want you to grind to get to the fun.

So either fun is subjective and it is in fact about all grinds to get to the fun or fun isn’t subjective and its about the grind to get to what you personally consider fun. please clarify what you mean as you are contradicting yourself.

Throughout this thread you’ve been arguing the definition of grinding in the video
as you claim to be an editor, which actually has no bearing on this discussion and does not support your arguments in any way, you should have a dictionary on hand which should give something similar to the following:

The Little Oxford Dictionary of Current English:

noun grinding; colloquial hard dull work

Free Dictionary:

4. Informal A laborious task, routine, or study
laborious adj.
1. requiring much work, exertion, or perseverance: a laborious undertaking.
2. characterized by or exhibiting excessive effort; labored.
3. industrious.

Merriam-Webster:

4: drudge; especially : to study hard <grind for an exam>
drudge
intransitive verb
: to do hard, menial, or monotonous work
transitive verb
: to force to do hard, menial, or monotonous work

You can try to redefine it all you like it the definition stands. grinding is not just combat or leveling. grinding is ANY task that fits the definition, and many of the monotonous tasks that gate progress fit the definition. kill hundreds of X or “gather 100,000 candy” as an example.
Just because you personally find it fun and it doesn’t feel like grinding to you, does not mean it is not a grind.

Vayne.8563:

There are other interviews you can quote where Anet talked about other things, maybe, but the “grind” quote in the manifesto is Anet talking about not going through the boring stuff to get to the fun stuff. It’s not about gear grind or end game grind or any other grind.

I see so according to you gear cant be fun or end game etc? they were talking about Any grind. Anything that can be fun which as you say is subjective can have a grind to get to, not everything does, thankfully, but its featuring more and more along with time gating to artificially extend the amount of time it takes to do anything.

Vayne.8563:

And yes, I can produce interviews were Anet has said that there would be things to grind for for people who enjoy that play style.

Please do and link to all those "Clarifications " you mentioned previously if they exist,
there is a BIG difference between grinding for an optional title that saves you money on lock picks or improves some optional skills from hundreds that are available. and grinding for best in slot gear that is also time gated and not available without some form of grinding.

Olvendred.3027:

No clue what you mean here. Were the devs so inclined, they could literally just give themselves as much ingame gold as they liked, with no one the wiser. To go through such a ridiculous contrivance for such an insanely trivial reason… umm, yeah. Paranoid much?

Actually they cant give themselves as much gold as they like as by design they have to play on normal accounts outside of the office, in the office they play on their test server ergo if you wanted to get rich quick you would let a “bug” slip through and exploit it before “discovering” it and patching it.

Olvendred.3027:

Clearly, it was a bug. These things happen. Quite often, actually, if you pay the tiniest bit of attention to any MMO on the planet. They get fixed. It would be unfair to penalise people playing the game in good faith beforehand, so those people get to keep their money.

except they have penalized people before for “playing the game in good faith” see Snowflake salvaging.

Olvendred.3027:

Look at exotic vendor prices, and then tell me you think 60s was a more likely price than 3s.

Look at Personal story rewards and tell me if you think 1g is more likely a reward than 1s

because the living story rewards 1g for a 5min escort quest and a similar personal story quest would reward an item worth 1s or less

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

Anyway – as I’ve said before, one-time rewards should be bound to the character slot, not the individual character, and that would solve any character creation farming problems once and for all.

i would love them to implement something like this as it seems like an ideal solution, but given how they seem set on making one time only per account limited rewards soulbound such kittentered wings/dragon helms etc which should really be similar to the HOM skins where once unlocked you can get a new skin to apply for any character as you please

i just don’t have the faith they wont botch it.

if i had to guess id say probably tier 2 infusions

Conncept.7638:

Are you aware that = is a mathematical sign stating that something is unfailingly factual, essentially translating to ‘is true’ or ‘is fact’? No, I would expect you didn’t. Much like you haven’t been able to prove having any knowledge whatsoever of the issues you have been addressing, even stating yourself that you had chosen to leave and remain ignorant of the content about which you were posting.

Wikipedia:

The equals sign, equality sign, or “=” is a mathematical symbol used to indicate equality. It was invented in 1557 by Robert Recorde. The equals sign is placed between the things stated to have the same value, In mathematics, the equals sign can be used as a simple statement of facts (x = 2), but also to create definitions (let x = 2) or conditions (if x = 2 then…).

you might want to use that internet connection to research before making fallacious arguments on public forums

CryxTryx.9208:

In both your examples I have lost something. Which is not the case when I offer someone a portal.

here ill quote you back to yourself

I don’t loose anything when they skip the content.

so you lose something when others trivialize content at your expense agreed?

in the case of portals in puzzles EVERYONE loses because by trivializing the content you cause Anet to trivialize the reward

many posts in this thread follow the theme of

“who cares jumping puzzle rewards suck anyway”

the point is they don’t have to, but by allowing the content and difficulty to be completely bypassed they cant be improved because they have to balance it around “how much time/effort can the content be completed with?” for every person that takes a portal to the end the answer is none.

Kanto.1659:

Can someone say first world problems?

Edit: http://imgur.com/t6O7WbD

you know this was moved here by mods ….

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

there will be no achievement points resets.

you know this already happened months ago when they cut infinite tracks right?

Once you complete the meta achievement for this release, your home instance will have a daily resource node, allowing you to harvest Quartz

does this mean people who either cant play during this limited event or join the game later will be unable to obtain quartz without purchasing it from other players? or will there be other nodes in the world?

The Ace.9105:

I am not complaining about rewards. Everything in this game is way too easy.

If COF 1 is faster, better, easier and more rewarding why not just run COF 1?

if every thing in game is too easy why does it matter if this is 1/char rather than 1/account

i never said it was better, i prefer more challenging content which is why i prefer EB to COF 1 but you still haven’t responded to the question of why anything should reward anything?

given your main argument seems to be if you enjoy the content you shouldn’t need rewards to repeat it multiple times, that surely applies to all content, and yet we have rewards…

If you want rewards from jumping puzzles then why won’t you just jump those other jps?

I do, i also like this one which is harder than many of the others, why should this not reward me also? this is like saying if you want rewards from dungeons you should just do some other dungeons and dungeon X should have no rewards.

The Ace.9105:

The reason I am running that puzzle many times per day is that I can troll and kill ppl before the chest. Try to find something else that makes eb puzzle interesting.

you really don’t seem to have thought your position through, if you are camping the puzzle for kills, surely you want MORE characters jumping through it…

CryxTryx.9208:

Again, it really doesn’t bother me if people want to skip the content. As long as how they enjoy their game doesn’t effect how I enjoy mine. I don’t loose anything when they skip the content.

apply this to dungeons, your with a group work to get to the end boss and the group kicks you to give their friend a free ride and skip the content. still happy? you haven’t lost anything…

CryxTryx.9208:

You work at a job for years, working hard, earning your raise each year and then a new guy gets hired, and when they hire him they decide that the minimum pay for your role should be what you make, so he gets hired at the same salary as you.

you have this analogy backwards, they hire the new guy and decide to cut your wage down to his starting salary because he doesn’t have a mortgage three kids etc and will be fine with that, and he also has to do less work than you and can leave early

Obsidian sanctum can be harder than many dungeons dependent on various factors. dungeons are not a holy grail of dificulty, people exploit their way through dungeons every day for months and the devs do nothing to nerf the reward levels or fix the content. i wonder how hard people would be crying if there was a 2000% nerf to COF1 rewards.

I think this was intentional so the devs could exploit it before it was “fixed” it makes as much sense as the alternative that they have no QA or testing, and dont think at all before implementing things. It is mind boggling how they continue to make the same mistakes without learning anything from previous efforts

Arguments that everyone should be able to get the reward regardless of participation are flawed, apply that reasoning to every aspect of the game, then wed all start with commander and max rank spvp and have a merchant that gave legendaries for free and so on there would be nothing to strive for, and that’s not what the devs wanted so the locked rewards behind content, and if you don’t do the content you don’t get the reward. why is this different?

Saying we can opt out of using portals is all well and good but we cant opt out of the nerfs that comes with other peoples use of them. that is the issue

They should just make portals unusable in puzzles, just disable all skills and traits like clocktower and then make rewards actually worth getting, don’t want people to farm them with new characters? put them in lvl 80 zones or place level restrictions on them.

if you didn’t want the pauldrons to be worth this much why price them at 60s to start with then nerf it? why not 3s to start, im beginning to think the developers intentionally put these situations in game to exploit them before they remove them for “economic balancing”

and before someone says players were making new characters to farm it, that has happened before and the devs should be learning from the experiences not making the same mistakes and then patching them. seriously do you not do QA? what is the logic behind this type of development

are players who sold the items prior to patch keeping the several gold they may have from this or having it removed?

The Ace.9105:

There is already more jumping puzzles than there is real actual challenging content in this game. Go do those other puzzles if you want rewards.

Why should eb jps be once per day per char when mesmer can port your lvl80 char and you can complete jps in short time? If you really like to JUMP those puzzles you wouldn’t be here complaining about rewards.

you seem to be contradicting yourself.

you can portal or camp the end of other puzzles for rewards and that’s perfectly fine but not EB why exactly? you cant camp the end and have to have a server that owns a keep to even get there, not everyone uses mesmers to skip content, and those mesmers had to do the content to be able to skip you ahead…

why should any dungeon not be 1/day when you can have mesmers portal you through dungeons? If you really like to BEAT those dungeons you wouldn’t be here complaining about rewards,
why should dungeons reward anything?
why should anything reward anything?

also EB > COF 1 in time/ difficulty but not rewards even more so when you have other players camping with traps/ in the darkroom with knock back etc

Vic Viper.1986:

Yes, I have a few questions!

3. How come Arcane Abatement (fall damage reducer) is a Master Major trait in the water line? All other fall damage reducers are Adept and have some sort of theme. I’d think falling to the GROUND would go well in the EARTH line.

^THIS
also what in the dat file do i need to edit to get the old air elemental back?

Kichwas.7152:

Ascended and Legendary are trivially different from exotic unless you’ve chosen to farm high level fractals. And if you have, by the time you reach the level of fractal where you need AR, you can likely afford 10 AR, or 5 on two toons… Or you can be like me and be sitting on about 100 laurels but with no desire to deal with the community of high level fractals, Chauncey Von Snuffles is looking mighty fine as my idea of ‘progression’. Especially since the difference between a level 80 fractals and a level 1 is… um… nothing… the same map, the same enemies… So why bother?

ascended / legendary are not trivially different as you put it, a 10% increase in stats is not trivial, thats not even counting how you can get +6% dmg to WvW npcs from infusions in addition to the stats on them and thats the fine rarity infusion, with the currently available gear add another 6 slots for Armour and its 12% after we have had a few of your so called trivial upgrades, following the trend in rarity increases well end up with 18% dmg to WvW npcs, thats in addition to the actual increase in stats.

Kichwas.7152:

I have, see my comments above. We managed to get all the way that popup chest thing with some loot that blocks half the screen, but can’t seem to get any further. :P

if you mean this

I got my first character to try fractals up to fractal level 3 before she was even level 60…

I did many explorables on characters below level 80.

you know that fractals scales you up to 80 right, broken scaling aside, no other dungeon does that, if your below the level you stay below it, as to doing explorables below 80 the majority are designed for below 80 characters that’s why you are scaled down to 35 for AC explorable 45 for CM etc etc

sorry to break this to you but unless your whole team was under lvl 60 in similar gear to you you were carried through fractals, given other party members who are correctly geared+knowledgeable you can finish almost any dungeon with less than 5, you could even have spent the entire time face down and got to the chest at the end

tolunart.2095:

Shadow Blade.1324:

Hobocop.1508:

Since when did you need to have a maxed out character to participate effectively in anything besides high level fractals?

see any one of the many posts about people running MF in dungeons
or the zerker requirement for various groups…

That’s kitten locking, not the game’s fault.

actually it is “the games fault” as the content is designed around a certain level, but doesn’t enforce it on entry, try a dungeon with everyone in white gear or leveling gear that’s lagging a few levels behind their actual level or characters that are a number of levels below the recommended see how far you get.

while you can play without trying to optimize your gear, the experience is far different than what the developers had in mind when they balanced the content with a specific gear threshold in mind, this is true for all content.

Ratty.5176:

Well I can understand the MF thing. MF is a kitten stat, it makes you perform worse and get more loot than the rest of the team.

Being new is fine with me. Not being level 80, no problem. Not having the best gear yet is fine. Playing with a non-Standard Build is fine (though I may ask why you are running a Rampager Guardian that only uses a staff)…. Playing with substandard MF gear to get better loot, and not caring that the rest of the team is having to do more work because of it, more of an issue.

i would have thought a bad build would be a bigger issue than MF tbh, ie if someone takes carrion and has no condition dmg and focuses on healing …

up/down scaling has never worked properly :/ your always too powerful or too weak

Hobocop.1508:

Since when did you need to have a maxed out character to participate effectively in anything besides high level fractals?

see any one of the many posts about people running MF in dungeons
or the zerker requirement for various groups…

Tolmos.8395:

Players shouldn’t be rewarded for having more free time than others, beyond the ability to play the game longer. Apparently Anet agrees with this stance, and thus the game is designed the way it is.

you seem to be misinterpreting the game design, if you have more free time than me and say run arah explorable you are rewarded for that time with arah tokens to use for Armour that is a reward for time spent running arah, if i do not have the time to do that i do not get the reward, that is the design. most rewards in the game follow this path with the exception of rng boxes etc. the alternative is for everyone to receive everything when they log in so time spent playing gives you no reward which is terrible design.

LilMcGinley.3890:

BiS jewelry takes a little longer but is not a grind since it is tied to dailies and the “average” player can obtain them in the same amount of time as a “hardcore” player through the same method. Hardcore players are given other ways to get them faster though.

so where do you get amulets faster? or accessories? bear in mind not everyone is in a guild large enough to do missions. or even earn the influence to unlock them.
its actually worse than a straight up grind, its a time gated grind, you cant even spend 30h over a weekend to get them, you have to spend an hour a day for 30 days, miss a day? that’s another day you have to wait. with laurels you can only progress towards one at a time, that’s per account not per character, have a different build or character you want to play its another month for one item.

Araziel.7201:

They should put levels in the RNG boxes. I’d buy them if there was a chance to get a potion for 10 levels.

this is what XP and crafting boosters are for

Patrikan Habaton.2548:

There was a Post on a german Forum ( wartower) of a guy that had already 21 precurser Drops ( he even got wisped from admins if he is explointing in anyway ) nooo it’s just luck..

yeah cause if your exploiting your way to 20+ precursors your really going to admit to it and have them taken away/ get banned

emikochan.8504:

pretty much everything else has rewards matching the challenge.

world champions disagree if you recall, anet had to backtrack from “theyll drop better loot” to “theyll drop loot” because it want happening, spending 15+ min soloing a champion where death = start again to get a blue or white item is not matching the challenge or time investment, which is why they are mostly ignored

the problem is not so much rng but that there is no minimum quality threshold, thus one person gets 5 rares/ exotics from a dungeon/ dragon chest and another person gets 5 blues, they both put in the same effort but the reward for that effort is based on luck

Raxus Prime.4218:

you play more = grind for gold to obtain items that are just for vanity

i much rather have RNG than a monthly sub

id much rather have a monthly sub and not have DR and terrible loot everywhere while trying to just play the game. you also seem to have forgotten ascended gear and the explicit confirmation that legendary items will be buffed to the highest tier for the life of the game, better stats != vanity

JustTrogdor.7892:

I politely asked in /map if some of the higher level players would mind if we could use the area we were in for a short bit
…..
We were farming to get some coffers.

your complaint is other players were farming so you couldn’t farm , because the hearts you mentioned all have solutions, (most non combat) that wouldn’t be available to higher level players unless they were also doing the heart, the rest of whats said seems to be you trying to justify your complaint.

calling players inconsiderate because they don’t bend to your desire of how they should play their game and ruin their experience for your benefit… yeah they’re the inconsiderate ones

number of times you mentioned coffers 15
number of times you mentioned leveling 1

this isn’t about leveling players at all…

Vayne.8563:

The answer is in game already. Guest to a busier server. It’s free. it’s easy..people do it all the time.

im already on a high/very high population server, mid level zones are very empty, why should i have to use my 2 guests a day which i would normally use to play with friends who choose other high/ medium pop servers to have a Chance not a Guarantee a Chance that the 2/11 servers i pick to guest on are more active in the zone im playing that day at that time…

Vayne.8563:

Remember, even with the precusor you’ll need a godawful amount of other stuff, so if I have this to work towards (or save towards, because I don’t really work for it) before the quests come out, it’s money well spent.

but is it? you could put that gold toward all those other things, you aren’t getting a gift of might or magic through farming these days, and if they continue the current trend that likelihood grows ridiculously small, where as you are guaranteed a precursor through the scavenger hunt and guaranteed a price drop as people sell precursors obtained through the hunt

why buy precursors when you’ll be able to get them for free in the scavenger hunt?

marnick.4305:

Can’t please everyone. I personally see people with ticket weapons as avid supporters of the game. There’s not many and I thank them for doing what those cheapskates don’t.

i got a weapon ticket earlier today through random luck with 0 money spent to do so and the increasing likelihood of no money ever being spent in the future. in no way was i avidly supporting anet or their implementation of this system. are you seriously thanking me for getting lucky?

marnick.4305:

Dungeon Master is a pretty skill title. Decent rank in either sPVP or WvW points to the same. But lets be frank here.

not really, you can 4 man most dungeons, and people swap out at the last boss to get dungeon titles, it only proves youve seen the end of each dungeon, it doesn’t indicate whether you can do it without being carried or not, similarly wvw and spvp, only indicate you have done a lot of that content, you progress in both even when losing, you get more wvw exp for killing sentries or veterans in small events than players, you even get “ascendant” for 25 HOM points

marnick.4305:

There’s no excuse for not one-shotting every single boss…. Kholer is effectively more difficult than any boss in WoW.

off the top of my head kazzak in outland

He consumes the soul of all beings he slays to heal himself, casts a curse on players that makes their mana pools combust and if he isn’t killed in 3 minutes, goes into his “supreme mode,” allowing him to completely obliterate everything in his path.

as a world boss you had players from other guilds sacrificing themselves to heal him and thats just from your own faction, not even counting pvp servers where youd have enemy players who could take out your healers etc

anyway in response to OP people complain about rng as it disproportionately rewards some people through no merit, effort or in some cases desire on their part while others are not rewarded regardless of how much effort they put in.

take for example dungeon or world dragon chests its possible to get 5 blue items out of them through rng, having contributed equally to the fight you are rewarded substantially less than players who get 2 exotics and 3 rares for doing the same content at the same time

in other games with RNG this is mitigated by having minimum quality thresholds on mob drops ie dungeon bosses always drop “epics” at max level in wow, you may not get the one you want, but you are guaranteed it will be of a certain quality and you can vendor it or trade it or salvage it if applicable

Silentsins.3726:

How many games can claim to have an in-house economist on the payroll? The problem with that is that the economy in this game is pretty poor overall

quite a few actually have economists now, valve has an in house economist, as does bungie but CCP did it first iirc and Eve has a rock solid economy, more games should learn from its implementation for example why don’t we have access to the graphs showing price changes over time? we know the data exists, john smith references it all the time, but we have to go to external websites for many of the features that should be available in game.

Vayne.8563:

I bet if you took a poll of Guild Wars 2 players that have beaten ANY Arah story mode, it would be less than 25% of the population.

i think you mean explorable as there is only one story mode, and it is required to finish your personal story