Guild Wars 2

so when will we know how many hours we need to akitten LA to get the hat on each character.

Horns of the Dragon

This unique helm is only available to players who attend an entire fireworks show in Lion’s Arch, which occurs every two hours during the in-game evening from June 14 to June 17.

i have one of each class so even if its just a 30 min event that’s 4h if its 1h long 8 hours akitten if its 2h long 16 hours

Holographic Dragon Wings

This dragon wing back item is only available as a very rare drop in the Dragon Ball Arena and throughout Tyria during the celebration.Ambitious adventurers who collect a large amount of Dragon Bash candy can obtain these exclusive holographic festival wings.

again if possible id like one for each class how much candy do i need to farm per backpack 250? 1000? 10,000? what is “a large amount”? will it be account bound? since rng = not ever going to drop from arena

for these and the meta shattered wings will they have a proper upgrade slot rather than an infusion slot that is only relevant to one part of the game i prefer my items to not have half the possible stats because you cannot itemize them correctly, or force me to transmute them and lose the account wide usability of the skin.

the devs continue to amaze me how they can have a working implementation that should be followed in the game ie triforge pendant and then they go backwards and make future content worse, its not hard if you want infusions ascend the item in the forge, if you want rare quality items with infusion slots have them drop in lower end fractals.

seriously away from keyboard is filtered…

Reloading.3260:

10 Roll new character.
20 Explore starter cities and easy sp’s.
30 Buy shards, stones, crystals and bank craft mystic clover or w/e
40 Delete character
50 Goto 10.

there is nothing stopping you from doing it this way atm

might be that you have to wait 3+h for the metas to spawn to get the one/day guaranteed rare for that event that your not even guaranteed.

Mirta.5029:

Rama.6439:

I can’t wait for this game to fail, been saying it was for awhile now and if they keep up what their doing nerfing all the drops and buffing all the mobs, this games gonna empty when EoS comes out.

I can’t stand a game that it feels like there is no feeling of reward for any kind of accomplishment or you feel like the people running it are punishing you for playing it all the time.

then why are you here? Plenty of grindy MMOs out there. Pick one and play it!

you realize this is the current king of grinding MMOs each patch they nerf rewards so you have to grind more to get anything unless you play with your wallet or spreadsheet the TP

Mirta.5029:

Shadow Blade.1324:

lack of “permanent DR for no reason”
just remove DR now, it only benefits the bots as it just drives prices up and reduces the ability of players to gather items themselves.

So the tool that doesn’t allow bots to get anything besides gray items benefits bots?!
And higher prices benefit players. How do you think anyone could afford to get Tier 3 if powerful blood sold just barely above vendor price? Bots farm, bots bring the price down, players can’t sell anything.

bots are still here and still making a profit, all it does is force a change in scripting so they swap zones or compromised accounts when they start getting grey items, are palyers going to swap accounts or zones if they are working on map completion?

id argue it impacts players more when you have to then go and farm content to get enough money to buy the powerful blood you need because it will not drop for you, higher prices may benefit a few players selling, it doesn’t benefit players buying, and those players selling could still make a profit by re-listing the lower priced blood if it were more readily available.

i imagine players would get t3 by saving for it and not spending all their money on powerful blood.

i have 26 powerful blood with 1000+h playtime, some of those are from attempts at getting clovers in the mystic toilet that’s not even enough to even craft a full set of Armour let alone something more costly like a gift. while i haven’t been farming for them specifically. i know ive not used one since i started playing.

ive seen DR kick in while clearing hearts and doing events where you kill waves of the same creature type. Once i actually made more silver selling the cool stones elementals during the claw of jormag dropped than the five blue items the chest gave me.

stable loot tables

you know like from games where you do a dungeon and are guaranteed loot of X quality

rather than what we have at the moment where you can run a dungeon kill a boss and get 5 blue items which are essentially vendor trash. when other members of the party get rares and exotics for doing the exact same content

or how about
actual world drops

where enemies in the world will drop things that may be unique or even marginally useful.

lack of “permanent DR for no reason”
just remove DR now, it only benefits the bots as it just drives prices up and reduces the ability of players to gather items themselves.

maybe even
new content that stays in the game for longer than a few weeks

tbh id settle for
developers that didn’t push out content they know is bad for the game and will cause massive backlash+ player-base split

Parlourbeatflex.5970:

Rng chests and limited time item deals.

Cheap tactics can net you alot of cash.

Of course, it isnt as cheap as pay2win, so big upps to anet for staying away from that minefield for now.

what you talking about, the game has been pay to win since day one, you can buy legendary weapons which are always BIS

buying top end gear for cash is essentially the definition of pay to win

In the six-plus months since its launch, Guild Wars 2 has added more content and features than any other MMO on this List has in the same amount of time. And there are no signs of the pace slowing down… in fact, they only seems to be speeding up their output.

no other mmo has then turned around and promptly removed so much content either so yeah if that’s his justification its a poor one also speed != quality

this isn’t so much a list of the best mmos as it is the most recent…

so as the title says is open world agony coming?
should i expect it in all areas of the game eventually?

because at the moment its contained in fractals which makes having items such as the backpacks which have infusion slots rather than upgrade slots for gems make no sense

lets compare

rare backpacks have
+20
+14
+14
+upgrade

instead of the upgrade the Fervid Censer has + defensive infusion
this means it cannot take exquisite gems which would give an additional

+15
+15
+25

notice how this doubles the available stats to any player wishing to use this item in PvE and also allows them to customize where they want their stats ie they could gem for more damage or defense or to improve a specific build as desired

given that currently agony is present in exactly one location in the game (fractals) which many players have no intention of participating in (ever) why are the items being itemized for playing in that area of the game being released elsewhere when they give no benefit over normal items in every other aspect of the game?

while im sure many will argue you can just transmute them to whatever other backpack you prefer, the same is true in reverse if they had proper upgrade slots.

this returns me to the original question of why were they itemized this way, should we be expecting every karaka to have agony in the future? should we be expecting it while leveling?will we have items that give “+5% keg brawl knockdown resist” dropping in fractals and dungeons etc? because currently this doesn’t make sense to me at all over say making them a skin like the molten backpack or an item with a normal upgrade.

DevonCarver.5370:

ASAP.

“Players in WvW will be able to acquire Ascended items within that area of the game soon.

Chris"

from the reddit ama months ago, im not sure how many people characterize half a year as soon but I’m not among them so ill believe it when i see it

manbearpig.8095:

if they made it so you could get a daily chest from say capturing stonemist keep that would even it out and pull servers together to try and take it

this would just encourage win trading every few hours so each server can get the chest each day

personally i think ascended has no place in wvw , and while id much prefer it WvW be a part of Spvp and have badges buy skins /siege upgrades or trade for supply/glory.

since that’s not how it is, you shouldn’t be better in WvW cause you love running fractals or have a huge guild it should be due to progressing in WvW so only ascended gear purchased through WvW should be usable in WvW

betting they do this through another terrible mechanic like agony such as +player dmg/defense

the problem isnt so much grind imho its RNG grind where your not guaranteed anything for your effort

x grind = y reward is fine as anyone who puts in the time gets the reward an example of this would be something like getting a dungeon set for tokens

whats not fine is X grind = Y reward for Player A
and X grind = 1/4 Y reward for Player B

or if your stuck with DR X grind = 20 porous bones

it is… perhaps kaya wants the tonics?
also RNG working as intended etc :/

Vox Hollow.2736:

That’s an apples to oranges comparison.

If anything’s comparable to Mario in this game, it’s Super Adventure Box. You notice how nobody ever talks about skipping or speedrunning or fullclearing in Super Adventure Box? Same playerbase, same basic rewards system as dungeons with tokens at the end for purchasing unique skins, no base-breaking culture divide to be seen for miles.

uh actually the rewards are pretty different

the adventure box primarily rewards skins and items that can only be used in adventure box, those that aren’t are
obsidian shards (account bound)
crystals/ philosophers stones ( soul bound equivalent to xp )
adventure box of fun. (account bound consumable toy)

dungeons reward
(fractals)
tokens for BIS gear or obsidian shards/ skillpoints / 20 slot bags
(non fractals)
tokens for consumable: tonics/ runes /potions/recipes rare/exotic armour / weapons karma (bag of wondrous goods)
(both)
tokens for gifts
rares, exotics, exp, coin

so yeah apples to oranges
items that give no advantage outside the instance to tradable goods and stat increasing items

anyway the problem imo is not so much skipping but that its usually done using exploits

you can watch CM solo to see them exploit on pretty much every boss using bugs in the environment to avoid attacks/aggro and to skip past lots of mobs, this has been going on for months, the devs are well aware. so either exploiting in dungeons is OK or they’re monitoring it and bans are incoming once they have fixes ready to deploy.

anything that allows you to completely bypass/ignore an intended mechanic is an exploit and you should get banned for it.

Can you make sure that however this works out its still feasible to do this solo and get rewarded for completion as not having to find a group for it is one of the major attractions.

just got mine, died and bought a continue coin while in 1-3, and it worked, so i may have been right about the lives thing, i also noticed the vending machine at the start no longer drops a coin regardless of whether or not you already have one so possibly stealth fixed.

also i didn’t miss any in previous runs, as i did the exact same route/ count this time.

Astral Projections.7320:

They are supposed to keep up with any increase in stats when expansions come out. This is often put forward like its a major selling point. (Shrug) Considering it costs hundreds of golds to get one, I don’t see any cost savings here but whatever makes them happy.

considering that ascended gear costs gold and ectos ie accessory are 50 ecto each if you cant get guild coms backpacks much more multiply that for having to upgrade to a new tier every year for the next decade or so, not counting the cost of also upgrading them to infused so they are BIS or the benefit of having a better weapon than others can even get for wvw etc for a few weeks or as long as it takes to earn the new currency for the new tier each time and it makes sense to upgrade now

some people also like the idea of bypassing the treadmill to remain competitive if they want to do multiplayer content in an mmo…

Vol.5241:

When I see someone equip a legendary, , I can safely say that for the most part you know your class, the game and some mechanics since you invested all that time to acquire one.

or they really like sitting in LA playing the TP or they had a thousand odd dollars to burn on some pixels

Definitely bugged somehow, have cleared it well over a dozen times now, i know all locations from memory ive done it that much, am wondering if the bug is connected to continuing with previous lives, ie when you start again and have lives remaining from previous days rather than with a fresh 5 or something,

you can build however you like, it really depends on how you like to play and what stats your MF gear has in addition to MF.
ie you may want more survivability if its all power/condi or more dmg if its toughness / vit
youll also want to take flame-thrower for tagging everything

MF is completely negated by DR tho so if your stuck with it MF wont help

capping points from repeatable salvage etc
not capping points from repeatable dailies/monthlys

consistency at arenanet

i think the issue is the order (if there is one ) they prioritise making skins

for example from http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Weapons we can see that the most used 2h weapons are GS and staff both are in (4 proffesions each), but then each other 2h weapon is only usable by 2 professions, which means until they open weapons to more professions these should be prioritised based on a variety of other factors including what other weapons are included, what has been excluded from recent content etc.

for OH weps you have focus usable by 4 profession and all others 3

for 1h weps sword =5 dagger = 4 and scepter = 4 with the others at 3 or less

so thats 6 skins covering the following classes

guardian 6
warior 2
elementalist 4
mesmer 6
necromancer 4
theif 2
ranger 2
engineer 0

that’s using weapons usable to the most classes if we swap scepter and focus (- 2 guar mes ele necro) as the classes that use them have the most skins atm for
pistol
1 engi1 mes+1 theif
longbow
+1 war +1 ranger

with one skin remaining to bump up ele necro and engi, since they all share no wepons we have t we have to focus on ele + necro since they both share 2 weps we can add back scepter or focus to get

guardian 5
warior 3
elementalist 3
mesmer 6
necromancer 3
theif 3
ranger 3
engineer 1

so every profession bar engineers (change to pistol) and warriors (lose shield )get at least one extra skin.

so we would gain
dagger
pistol

instead of
Shortbow
shield

So they got it mostly right, and obviously this doesn’t account for things like they were already designing the shield for the logo and short bow is essentially a scaled down version of longbow it probably takes minimal additional effort and gives +1 to ranger and thief, issues like this are fixed as soon as they open weapons up to more proffesions

are they going to remove all legendaries and all precursors when they implement the scavenger hunt?

because its essentially the same thing removing your progression when they don’t need to. this could easily have been avoided by performing an extra calculation for the rankings

total acheivement points = leaderboard position 1
total acheivement points – infinite repeatable = leaderboard position 2

and then just have 2 leaderboards, one for everything and one for “official” rankings

or just have the second and leave the total progress viewable on their account.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1b2412/spoilers_super_adventure_box_what_we_know/

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1a5g19/when_is_the_new_jumping_puzzle_coming/

Shame none of this was on the official forums.
given its not permanent will you also remove certain fractals and spvp maps and reintroduce them for limited times and see how that works out because clearly people who like doing activities have more fun when they aren’t in the game….

Geotherma.2395:

The cool thing about GW2 is that you have one name (account name). So if you do some kind of kittengery everyone will know who you are unless you spend another 60 bucks. Unlike most games where people do this with alts, take peoples money or items then disappear, you will be hated so long as you play that account. And $60 to get a new account isn’t worth any items in the game that you took.

fun facts with math data from spidy

100 gems sells for 1 g 57 s 39 c .
100 gems costs 2 g 17 s 85 c to buy.
100 gems costs 1.25 USD to buy.
1 g costs 0.79 USD to buy through gems.

$60 / 0.79 = 75.9493G

so in this instance he has enough profit to buy two new accounts and still has ~50g left over if he can find someone willing to trade cash for gold if not and he wants to use the profits in game he gets the equivalent of $158 of cash to gem to gold conversion as pure profit at current prices

access controls exist for a reason, if you don’t use them its your own fault.

ASB.4295:

One of the main points of Ascended gear is that it should not be easily accessible, which is the reason why it’s not sellable or craftable(in a traditional sense). If the gear would have been there at launch, you’d still have to run fractals, do many dailes or complete guild missions to get them. It’s prestige armor that isn’t supposed to be worn by everyone, at least not until the next tier or level 80+ version comes out.

its not prestige gear, prestige gear was stuff like mjolnir, infinite light and legendaries, some of the harder to obtain dungeon sets and cultural armours are prestige gear, none of these are easily accessable, yet gave no stat advantage over exotics

ascended are a cheap crutch to keep some people playing, as opposed to developing interesting new content that isnt just + resist vs +boss dmg. there’s a reason companies like blizzard stopped using resistance gear 5 years ago, it splits the player base.

im hoping it happens at the end of the year after they finish rolling out ascended then they can shove all new VP into it and anyone who doesn’t want that can just not buy the expansion.

even if they fix the scaling, they still need to fix credit so people who DC or crash during the fight and get back just as its dying don’t need to wait another 3+ hours

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Shadow Blade.1324:

@OP laurels did exist at launch they’re called mystic coins and they are tradable so you didn’t have to do your dailies/ monthlys if you didn’t want to, if ascended gear had been in the game from launch this discussion probably wouldn’t exist so im not sure what your point with that was…

Mystic Coins are not Laurels, and while they could substitute . . . that would put people trying to use them in the Mystic Forge for recipes in a bind.

they serve the exact same purpose being a time gated currency, the only reason laurels were included was to reset everyones progress so people with 10,000+ coins dont just get to buy everything and then profit massively as the price spikes.

there are various recipes already using coins, so people have to choose what they want to use them for, or sell them, using them instead of laurels would only have added another choice.

thisolderhead.5127:

I suspect claiming players from outside their own products was MORE important.

these are exaggerated numbers but they demonstrate the point.

lets say 90% of all mmo players like vertical progression and 10% do not

of that 90% the game will pull in maybe 9% due to there being like 10 other mmos with vertical progression, whereas if they stuck with the niche horizontal crowd they’d get 10%

of the 9% claimed from other games some will go back to those games and some will leave for the next mmo with vertical progression in reality making it lower.

thisolderhead.5127:

an almost perfectly closed loop and well planned if they continue a verticle progression

except its not, other than WvW it impacts dynamic events and the economy, we know that damage contribution determines whether or not you qualify for loot when tagging mobs, this in turn impacts your income and ability to use the TP due to inflation.

people with ascended gear have a higher kill contribution than you (through increased stats) and are more likely to get loot at your expense assuming contribution is calculated by % this leads to you being priced out of the TP as players with ascended gear will have an increasing income while yours is diminished, and you will have no way to close that gap other than not playing with players in ascended gear or getting ascended gear yourself.

@OP laurels did exist at launch they’re called mystic coins and they are tradable so you didn’t have to do your dailies/ monthlys if you didn’t want to, if ascended gear had been in the game from launch this discussion probably wouldn’t exist so im not sure what your point with that was…

the number of people arguing that we should completely ignore the past is reducing my faith in the viability of our species

its very simple

1. before doing anything you see what others have done before you, what problems they had and solutions they came up with

2. take info from 1 and use it to improve and reduce problems when your doing it

just because it took X however long to reach a point doesn’t mean it should take that long every time, unless you’d like to go back to living in a cave and developing all modern technology from scratch every generation this argument holds 0 merit.

anything that relates to the functionality of the game should be in the game not on an external site, you should never have to stop playing to go check a website to get a viable LFG and market data.

Shanna.4762:

Not really, just creates a gigantic money sink for the same item a bunch of times.

Not really, just means the money i would have spent on dye packs etc if they were account bound goes towards other things.

lol ectos or laurels, if they become salvageable it will be into relics only, then they will add a consumable that costs relics to spend your relics on

Edge.4180:

Whether you agree or not, characters are idle when they’re standing around waiting for 30-60 minutes or more for a boss to spawn. When I refer to “taking up space”, I’m not talking about other people waiting in line to camp the boss, I’m specifically talking about space that could be used by players who simply have a desire to adventure in that zone. I’m mentioning this because you’re trying to argue that removing these “boss campers” will actually hurt the zone, an argument which is difficult to take seriously when most of the time these idle campers are not helping the zone in any shape, way or form.

not sure i understand what your trying to argue. new players in an overflow not playing to do that event and just adventure can do so in the overflow with no problems, in fact they have a better experience because there are less players zerging events. the whole community argument is BS as their friends can join them in the overflow and you can guest on any server ergo communities are cross server anyway, additionally you get dropped in overflow even when there are no big events going on or in LA. due to population numbers.

if i could add one elite per class id make sure it was usable underwater so classes with one underwater elite have options even if its only X or Y doubling the number of underwater elite abilities for those classes

might be upgrade slots or it might just be a new tier, they haven’t clarified, i wouldnt put it past them to copy other games and see ascended t2 etc its easier than implementing a new upgrade slot for all tiers and redoing all the current items.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Shadow Blade.1324:

to those who seem to be misinformed about ascended gear, its is the final rarity, not the final tier, it was stated there would be additional tiers within rarities in the future.

Dig that quote up and link it, because I really want to read the context from which it was taken.

reddit AMA following lost shores

[–]ArenaNetTeam[S] 112 points 3 months ago
Hi All,
Here is the reply to the second question:
E2:Ascended gears are making a lot of people worry about an ever-increasing gear treadmill. Many players did not want the exotic/legendary system to change, and they don’t like ascended gears. Was this expected? Can this be something fixed in a painless way? Can it happen?
Yes the response was definitively expected. We did not intent for the information to come out this way. Going back to my previous answer the issue is that we believe in the vertical progression system we had pre launch and that the introduction of an element into the system post launch was going to cause concern but something we believe in. That is why there is no plan for new Rarity Tiers of loot but there are plans to enhance or gain items within the existing rarity design whose properties continue on a shallow power curve.This said we certainly don’t want to create a system where itemization blocks progression in the game globally and we also need to be careful of this in areas such as FotM if the primary reward isn’t available elsewhere in the game. So in short its an exciting problem but one that has been poorly communicated and handled.
And for this i take responsibility and apologies. However the future of this philosophy and the design challenges it throws up are going to lead to a pioneering world and one that we are very excited about.
So anyway i kind of went of topic here so in short. We don’t intend to have an item rarity gear treadmill, we intend for the progression for gaining these rewards to have lots of different avenues for different types of player and where possible lower no fun grind within the whole of the game.
I hope this answers that question. I will be right back.
Chris

edit : link if you want to re read the whole AMA http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/13tuac/im_the_studio_design_director_on_guild_wars_2_ama/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_in_fact_contract:

As defined by the United States Supreme Court,¹ it is “an agreement ‘implied in fact’” as “founded upon a meeting of minds, which, although not embodied in an express contract, is inferred, as a fact, from conduct of the parties showing, in the light of the surrounding circumstances, their tacit understanding.”

^ this is the problem with the manifesto, when the devs say exotics = legendaries = BIS
and refer to legendaries as an optional cosmetic grind. then change it

legendaries are not an optional cosmetic grind, if you want to be competitive or play the game they originally sold and not hamster wheel 2. they have explicitly stated they will be BIS forever, when a new tier comes out you get a free upgrade, and have a statistical advantage for the first few weeks it takes people to get their new weapons

to those who seem to be misinformed about ascended gear, its is the final rarity, not the final tier, it was stated there would be additional tiers within rarities in the future.

trust died in nov. Seriously who gives almost no notice on major game and design changes before pushing them out, changes they know are flawed? everytime the devs do something like declare player concerns a “xfiles level conspiracy” then turn around a week or so later with a “found the problem its fixed this time for reals” they lose a little of the credibility they have left in some players eyes

whenever they talk about progression i wonder how they’ll mutilate the game next, first it was dyes, then ascended now guilds soon spvp, wont be much left at this rate

jewelcrafting is now obsolete outside of gifts, the best items it can craft are sub par and use the same materials you’ll be putting towards your BIS gear so if you bother you are actually extending the amount of time it’ll take you to get it…

the direction they are going has turned this into a single player game for me.

when i spawned one at first i thought it was sitting on a bed of lightning discharges, which looked cool from that angle, then it moved and i never summoned it again

VOLKON.1290:

C’mon people… are you really stressing over numbers this marginal? You can practically change a gem and have a bigger impact.

lol you get a bigger change by swapping gems because you are putting an equivalent amount into other stats, you don’t get more stats. you could equally argue there’s a bigger change by swapping traits or classes <_<

and while your example is specifically chosen to show a small difference, here is a larger one

opal orichalium amulet of the explorer vs golden lotus

exotic item with exotic jem
79 power
79 precision
7% MF

ascended item with fine infusion
85 power
85 precision
30% MF

difference in %
+7.5% power
+7.5% precision
+328.5% MF
since your base MF is 0 thats a pretty big increase eh

TLDR numbers can show whatever you like depending on how you do the calculation and what variables you include

devs say its a 5-10% increase, which is approximately right, trying to spin it as marginal due to base stats is ridiculous given anyone can take off their gear and see the difference in performance compared to base stats alone gear makes for them. if you want to include base stats in your calculation you need to count the difference for every slot and for every possible build.

Salt.4621:

Tolmos.8395:

No here as well. I don’t want all the gear everyone has worked for up to this point to instantly be rendered obsolete and for us to have to go through all that all over again.

I’m confused by this answer. You say no more levels and no more gear. So what now exactly?

titles , different looking armour with different stat combinations (not better) more activities like keg brawl, more pvp maps etc etc lots of more content they can add without ever adding +1 to stats or lvl. see how GW1 had about 3 games worth of end game due to not increasing the lvl

but it doesn’t matter what anyone wants they’re going to do it anyway

Mackdose.6504:

I’m taking a “wait and see” approach.

My guess is that ascended will be the final tier for a while, infusion rarities will be the vertical side of progression, the level cap increase will bring nothing but cosmetic rewards above 80, with stat scaling coming from the increase to base stats by level rather than gear.

…What a wonderful expansion that would be…

as amusing as that would be to see, level increases usually function as gear resets so players aren’t too fragmented in terms of being unable to play together due to gear gating.

thus we can presumably expect to work for our fine > masterwork > rare > exotic > ascended lvl 90 gear or whatever the new cap is unless you put in the work for a free upgrade to your legendary

Can you craft the best tier using something similar to the mystic forge in WoW? No? Then don’t expect to see it here. Is there only a minute difference between the top tier of gear and the second top? No? Then don’t expect to see it here.

in wow you could create bis through crafting, no idea if this still works in the current expansion but in previous expansions there were sell-able recipes that dropped in dungeons/ raids etc, and in some cases you just got to craft them when you maxed your profession. then when they introduced a new tier they introduced new recipies.

also this game is not wow, why would i play a game that copies wow poorly when i could just play the original? which is also adding more horizontal progression, like pet battles etc

Anet has made it extremely obvious what their design goals are

i don’t think they have given the amount of different assumptions people seem to be operating under, if it were extremely obvious everyone would be on the same page and wouldn’t be speculating about what they are going to do.

Mackdose.6504:

I’m not blindly defending anything here, just trying to move the conversation to bigger issues than increased stats such as:

1. Ascended gear being bad for alts due to calendar gating.
2. Ascended Infusions requiring the same mats as legendaries, extending the grind.
3. Ascended gear not being available by crafting.
4. Ascended gear still not available in enough venues.

At the end of the day, the increased stats don’t matter to anyone but horizontal progression purists when the gear is easily accessible and available. It’s not accessible enough yet, and that is a problem.

The issue with making ascended gear accessible quickly is that the time gap to the gear cap is back to being too short. This was obviously an issue (not just my opinion), else why would ArenaNet rush to move on it? I remember the exact statement being “Players were hitting the Exotic wall faster than we anticipated.” So clearly, they want there to be some time between level cap and gear cap.

time to gear cap being short was one of the selling points of the game, and your making assumptions, that could just as easily mean people got their exotics farmed story mode/ etc for tokens before nerfs and got the asthetic they wanted transmuted and had no further needs in term of gearing. ie hitting the wall in terms of needing to get exotic gear

they panicked and released half baked mess they hadn’t thought through, in their own words they knew it was flawed and pushed it out anyway but its all right cause they had the “best intentions”. I upgraded my armour to exotics ~2 weeks before they announced a new tier. its such fun to be told all the gold you just spent on bis gear that would last the lifetime of the game is obsolete.

Mackdose.6504:

There are more productive discussions to be had on ascended gear than whether or not they need increased stats, which is why I’m trying to persuade people who can’t get over that fact to move on.

and all of those are solved and unnecessary by removing it or nerfing the stats to be equivalent to exotics, so its just a rarer tier with no statistical advantages kind of like legendaries are supposed to be, but those are now actual BIS because they get a free upgrade forever, by having it just be rarer but equivalent to exotics it doesn’t matter how accessible it is as its optional content

It’s a tried and true reward structure that is appealing to a large amount of the player base, not just content locusts.

got solid numbers to back this up or just personal opinion? cause i can equally say
It’s a tried and true reward structure that is unappealing to a large amount of the player base, not just casuals.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

For now DR is hitting parked characters who you don’t do anything else with but that specific thing. To avoid being hit by this, whether it is intentional functionality or a bug, do some other stuff on that character.
I wish we didn’t have to have the system, but when exploits arise players abuse them, so we have to have something. We’ll continue to evaluate its functionality and fine tune it.

i don’t think this is working as you describe, i have several characters “parked” at farms and am getting multiple gathers from the same node repoping instantly, such as 6 strawberry off the same plant, meanwhile characters that i move around the world usually only get blue items or nothing at all from vets/champs and green from chests. this is with 121% MF on my main

In some cases exploits aren’t clearly exploits and are the result of implementation errors on your end ie snowflake jewellery thus if if players unknowingly exploit remove their gains and if they repeatedly exploit after being informed what they did is an exploit ban them.

Star Ace.5207:

Some people are saying “no, because the game isn’t good enough for a sub”.

Monthly fees don’t make any games “better”, pure and simple. If the sub model/game works for you, you’ll pay, but it doesn’t mean that it will be really “better” than other buy to play, or even free to play games. Subcriptions (IMHO, so please take no offense) just mean that somebody is overcharging you, not that you will be receiving any special, “premium” gaming experience over anybody else.

you seem to be misinterpreting this, its not a matter of subs making the game better its a matter of it being worth it, ie is the game worth paying X a month for whether that’s a sub or the same amount in cash store purchases. currently its not prior to nov it could have been had they fixed bugs and continued on the projected path. instead they took the easy way out by turning the game into a crappy Skinner box instead of developing quality content the fact that the devs have come out and admitted they pushed out content they knew was flawed shows you where they are heading.

current development actively discourages spending more money with them because its so incoherent, soon jewel-crafting will be obsolete, it will be the same with all other professions bar cooking, the best they can craft is intermediate gear that uses the same mats as the BIS ascended gear, its ridiculous, look at the ascended roll out pieces are only obtainable from one new type of gameplay every three months what’s next? Use Dragon Tokens to get ascended weapons/armour from the forge in may?

Jrunyon.3012:

This thread was laid to rest a long time ago. Please don’t necro useless threads.

but if you dont necro and start a new thread your told “there are plenty of other threads about this topic post in one of those rather than creating another one”

also all threads are equally useless, their only purpose is discussion

of those ive done off the top of my head in no particular order

spekk’s lab
goemm’s lab (without cheating using shortcuts)
obsidian sanctum
clock tower

basically anything that is timed/ has environmental effects that add another dimension to it

I don’t really find them hard to see, but i dont really see the point either as you’ll just run around the corpses spamming f anyway.

I’ve never had the chests drop anything better than a masterwork item, once a blue and once a white iirc, which has been amusing given most of the time ive had them drop off normal mobs I’ve pulled while fighting veterans. the veterans then drop nothing, just for fun i started chain killing veterans only to see how often id get drops, so far it seems to be 1/5 chance for loot which is then a blue item (will build a decent sample size if i have time).
champions are also dropping blues if they drop anything, it really makes the extra effort of killing them worth it when you receive superior quality loot including rares from normal mobs.

no, when you transmute you take the stats of one item and the appearance of another, so what you would be doing is taking the kudzu skin and applying it to whatever bow has the stats you want, the new bow will not be legendary it will be exotic but with the appearance of kudzu

copy GW end game completely or port it to the new engine.
had three and a bit whole games worth of endgame content to play, with quest synergies etc.

John Smith.4610:

Actually about 15% of the population finds making money very fun, irrelevant of the uses of that money. Ever gotten unnecessarily rich in a single player RPG like Skyrim?

so you have surveys for each of those 15% backing up that its fun right, you didn’t totally assume that because they spend most of their time flipping items for profit they find it fun did you.

its not at all possible people will follow the path of least resistance to obtain the maximum rewards while not enjoying it just because it is the most efficient use of their time.

also if your going to make a comparison to another rpg it shouldn’t be something like skyrim where you can steal/craft anything you need and pickpocket all your money back after paying someone while having no major gold sinks

imo i think it would be amusing if for a high amount of gold maybe 1k, they introduced an item that gave a golden aura and as you walked gold coins dropped off your character leaving a little trail

1. work with everyone to develop a consistent vision for the game and its direction
2. ensure everyone is on the same page and understands the vision
3. let the players know what it is and explain it in a blog post etc
4. shoot down anything that violates the vision/ direction ie adding VP to a HP game
5. change content rollouts from every month to every 3 months, use extra time for polish + QA quality over quantity, consider benefits of a PTR
6. remove minipets etc from lockboxes and just have them in the store for X gems
7. add UI toggle for instruments so people can choose to hear choir bells etc
8. add a toggle for dyes so players can see character or account bound completion and use either on every character
9. add a recipe similar to triforge amulet upgrade for every exotic in the game
10. slap whomever introduced ascended because they just doubled our end game item database for no good reason
11. add WvW to SPVP so everyone can mix builds etc and are on a level playing feild
12. remove things like fractals completion and WvW kills from monthly
13. add WvW kills to monthly PvP
14. add title tracks simmilar to wows pugging one where playing with new players is rewarded, extend these over time offering titles / minipets
15. implement scrum for all teams if not already in place
16. remove Agony as resistance gating is a poor difficulty scaler, come up with new abilities etc to compensate
17. consider porting GW to the new engine
18. stop using progression as an excuse for bad design and realise “we did it with the best intentions” is not a valid excuse for terrible implementation.
19. ban people who consistently exploited to progress in fractals
20. get in my time machine and go do it right first time