Guild Wars 2

I can see them swooping in(if Tengu can swoop that is) and saving the day. It’d be a great way to introduce a new playable race on a positive note, rather than just a ‘oh it them’ kinda option.

Teofa Tsavo.9863:

Do people not read the Dev Interview? Services are being relocated. Personal Story will be accessed by “time travel” portal. It will be an explorable but they stated “not safe”.

How are you reading “not much will change” into all of that.

They wont change because of Wintersday? Rofl.

They crafted a game featuring LA as a multicultural commerce center with a ton of infrastructure relating to that fact, the trade routes, the Havens, the very function of the Lion Guard as commerce and trade route protectors… a ton of work.. and they are happily tossing all of that out along with any NPC references to LA becoming moot as well.

I doubt that “what about wintersday” was a factor at all.

Yup I did read it. Esp this part “All essential services that are unique to Lion’s Arch will be redirected to Vigil Keep for the time being, including Asura gates to other cities”

For the time being means temporary, at least the way I read it.

That’s not to say LA won’t be changed at all, but it certainly reads like at some point it will become a hub again. Oh I’m sure we’ll get some sort of wreck as a memorial to attack, as well as stuff being rebuilt into different looking structures.

But I really can’t see LA being turned into looking something like Orr with all the effort put in to make the annual celebrations work there. Just think of the art, scripting, AI, programming changes needed to do something like change where and how the mad king event works for example, let alone dragonbash, wintersday, april fools etc etc etc

The main issues with events like marion, Teq and the wurm is the level of coordination that’s required to succeed is higher than usually exists in a everyone mashed together overflow.

I suspect this event will need far less coordination than the above and so a simple zerg mentality along with a reduced player cap will be enough.

I guess it’s possible, but that’s a huge amount of assets you’ve had to discard. Esp when apparently it took several months to make em all.

With no LA, where will the mad king and wintersday Dolyaks go?

There’s an awful lot of time and money spent in developing seasonal stuff just to have to redo it somewhere else. After all a while ago one of the reasons given why the early LS content was so light was because they wanted to invest the time and resources into seasonal content that would be easily able to be bought back.

With no LA, a whole load of that work goes away and would presumably need to be redone, taking a similar amount of time as the first lot did.

Yup. We meet every week

Vayne.8563:

Why is it that people feel they have to sit around. Go do a few events, gather some stuff, kill a few things….you know that is playing the game, even if it’s not doing the dungeon you want to do, or sitting in WvW.

Tell you what. Go around, do a few events, some stuff, kill a few things and play the game and i’ll PM you 5 mins before the puppet/wurm starts so you can come join me..

The best solution would be to get rid of servers altogether for PvE and move to a district based system like GW1 did.

From what I’ve seen of Teso they make heavy use of instancing but it looks like it’s open world

The issue isn’t people guesting to servers etc it’s the downright daft and counter productive server and guesting system Anet have implemented alas..

It also seems to share the same timer as Teq. So basically a server needs to pick what world event it wants to try and rather than waiting an hour between major world bosses we have to wait for 2 hours and pick one……

I take it back if I’m wrong but the only 2 times it’s spawned so far it’s been at the same time as teq…

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Welcome to horizontal progression! At least it isn’t vertical!

A 10% nerf is vertical regression, not vertical progression

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

One problem would be, if someone from a guild changes servers, but others in the guild don’t. How could the guild bank move then? Guilds are tied to the server rather than to people for this very reason. Otherwise the data would have to be repeated for each individual in the guild. Same reason Guild banks can’t be restored, when an account is restored. Too many people can have access to the data the bank is associated with. If there were a difference between personal guild banks, and regular guild banks, it could work…but, there isn’t. Maybe in the future.

Or have your bank accessible from any server, just like your inventory or storage bank. I remember asking Marin Kerstien about why guild buffs and guild storage wasn’t shared across servers just before launch.

His answer (paraphrased) was that they didn’t want people smuggling siege plans, or anything that could affect WvW from server to server.

I can see the reasoning but there’s so many ways to smuggle stuff over the statement leaks like a sieve.

More often than not I find the whole server architecture and guild system ridiculously poor in logic, functionality and the effect on the community.

It’s such a shame.

Manuhell.2759:

Blame the design of the encounter, not the players.
Those guesters can’t do it on their servers, so they have no choice but to guest.

And that’s all due of the high scaling – it is useless to even try doing the event if there isn’t an army of players already there. And people will go where they know they can find said players. Your server, for example.

This. Basically, the whole server architecture is flawed. It splits communities, friends and creates havoc with world events.

Super active servers are great, but if you are in a under populated one then it seems you are out of luck unless you pay. If you were to remove guesting then all that would happen is these smaller servers would empty until the larger pop ones were totally full leaving even less people in the smaller ones.

I bet we’ll have identical issues in the Wurm event as we did with Teq in terms of overflows, guesting and the like.

if you know someone with the game, copy their GW2.dat file onto a suitably large USB stick and then copy it into your Gw2 directory. It’ll do a few checks and then be fine.

Belenwyn.8674:

I think the goal should be that berserker is still viable but not the best choice for all encounters regarding to speed. There should be a large variety of encounters covering the whole bandwidth from zerker-friendly over condition-friendly to bunker-friendly.

For me it would be important that a path does not favor a certain build in each single encounter. If one boss is zerker-friendly the next one should be bunker-friendly for instance.

Which forces people to carry totally different sets of gear, and is especially kitten those who have ascended items as a core part of their builds..

I know what will happen if they do that. People will only do the berserker paths and forget the others.

The optimal way of instigating the change would be to allow dynamic stat change on Ascended gear, then make the changes.

My worry is it’ll be nerf first then a ’don’t worry your ascended gear will still be valid followed up by a ‘At some time in the future you’ll be able to change the stats on your ascended gear’

Tbh it was a daft idea to have your build so dependent on gear stats in the first place but there we go..

One thing I never really got about the ‘people got exotic items too fast’ reason for ascended items is that they reduced the amount of time and dungeon tokens needed to get them just after launch.

If exotics were taking too much time to get, why reduce the time to get them in the first place? Why not either just leave it alone?

Just a short bump to say winners have been selected(it was harder than we thought) and prizes sent out

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/community/events/Random-Acts-Of-Kindness-100g-of-prizes/first#post3462747

Congratulations to all those who were nominated and a big thanks to those who took the time to nominate them. It’s these sort of selfless acts that really makes the game and the community such a great place to be.

Thanks again

Shan

Hi there. We’ve decided on the winners and the mails should be on their way to the recipients.

I have to say it was harder than we expected to decide between them because all entries had something wonderful about them. In the end, we had to choose and so the recipients of DVDF’s random acts of kindness prizes are:

1st Ethic.1569
2nd Starillusion.7128
3rd Magilerax.8015

Because it was tricky and we really couldn’t decide we decided to create joint 4th prizes of 6.25g each to go to Shorok.9706 and Kallandra.2610

We loved reading up on all the fantastic acts of generosity and community spirit and I’m sure we’ll be running similar ones later on this year.

Thanks to all those who nominated people and a special thanks to everyone who gives their time and resources to make this game and it’s community a nicer and better place to play

Shan.

Depends what you mean by dead. A game can be full to bursting point and still make a commercial loss, or it can be nearly empty and still make the developer money.

At a guess GW2 is still commercially viable since it’s still running, so no it’s not dead.

If things were getting bad, we would see an announcement for the closure of GW1 servers as I doubt that brings in much money compared to the costs of running the servers and networks. It also has the least chance of increasing revenue as opposed to GW2’s potential.

Keep em. It’s pretty probable they’ll be used for pre-cursor crafting..

Hedger.9261:

Shanaeri Rynale.6897:

They should separate your WvW server of choice from your PvE servers. Keep the same WvW restrictions for your WvW choice and remove them for PvE

you mean exactly how guesting works?

anyone looking to PvE can easily guest to wherever they think is better to PvE when ever they want to. The only people who have an issue with server transfers are those who want to ride the coat tails or other servers.

Nope. Guesting has a number of significant drawbacks:
- Can’t play with friends across different regions.
- If you find a guild you enjoy on another server you can’t make use of their buffs, guild banks nor can you contribute by gaining influence
- You can only guest to two servers per 24h
- You can’t join the proper guested server’s region from overflow (network error)

And yes, WvW server choice should have been separate from PvE from the start.

A quick bump to say DVDF will be running Public Guild Missions from Sunday 5th Jan onwards .

There isn’t such a thing I’m afraid. Better is such a subjective terms it’s impossible to judge. For some better is loads of people with maximum members, for others that’s the worst kind of guild hell.

Influence, guild buffs, unlocked guild missions show past and current activity levels but by no means defines the quality of the guild.

The best guild is one where you feel at home

Thanks everyone, some great nominations.

We’ll peruse the above and announce the winners in the next few days

They should separate your WvW server of choice from your PvE servers. Keep the same WvW restrictions for your WvW choice and remove them for PvE

Not anything directly. It’s a question that has been dodged and avoided a few times.

The best we had was something like “During the development of a game priorities and ideas change and we did what we thought would work best”

There’s a number of systems inherent to the game that while designed to promote casual community, actually work against it. For example:
- No grouping required, just join in. While great for short term events tend to lead to ‘one night stand’ grouping. Do an event for 10 mins and part ways.
- Chat system. You can’t chat and fight. Without chat, there’s no socialisation, and with no socialisation there’s no community.
- Server system. Dilutes the pool of like minded players who you can play with, splits friends across a time gated paywall and generally screws everything up.
- Personal story. No need to group so just do it solo
- Dungeons. Small party size, skip and stack mentality means little time or opportunity to communicate.

So basically, stuff like no kill/node stealing and no need to wait for X class is great. It’s an anti-social game in terms of much of its mechanics

It’d be nice to fix the ones there are already, so people who get left behind ressing others/showing people where to go etc don’t get locked out.

Logged in, kinda hoping to get 5 lots of ‘visit laurel vendor’ for the dailies as an xmas present from Anet. Darn Grenchies have stuck Anet HQ and given us a normal set for today.

Bah humbug

I guess it depends on what you want from a dungeon/instance/whatever. Speed runs, just for the reward I wouldn’t argue with the meta.

If you wanted to explore builds, combo’s, deeper combat mechanics or just do a run for the fun of it then anything goes.

As you and I said, just blindly running the meta because it’s meta doesn’t really help anyone., Understanding why, what, when and how helps (to me anyway) makes gameplay and combat a deeper, more enjoyable experience.

OFC you need to make sure you have a like minded group of people whatever you choose. If you don’t that’s when the trouble starts

They are the exact reasons I use staves. There are a few places where the extra boost to support make equipping it worth while. I don’t worry about changing gear/traits just for the few occasions or minutes when I’ll be using it. The effectiveness for what I want it for is good enough without messing with armor/traits.

The effects of support is pretty invisible in PvE but it is noticeable to those it’s helping .

There also tends to be a lot of ‘snobbery’ over weapons outside of the skip and stack meta but it’s one of the marks of a good player IMHO that knows how to use the right tool for the right situation.

Thing is, because of the (I don’t often call stuff this) kittened way guilds are fixed to servers, moving servers isn’t much of an answer.

If you wanted to move a guild to another server, basically you lose everything. Influence, guild bank, guild mission unlocks… everything.

If you separated your WvW server choice, from the server you PvE’d on it’d solve loads of issues including this one.

Say on logon you choose a WvWs server to be loyal to. You’d then have exactly the same limitations as now(cost gems to change loyalty, 7 day cooldown etc etc).

Then just allow free server transfers wherever and whenever you like, without impacting WvW.

Economy issues could be solved by only allowing harvesting on your loyal server.

Even better, all the mechanisms for doing this are already in place. Only the loyalty server part(could probably be done mostly in the database) would need to be coded.

By doing this you’d allow cross region play, allow empty servers to be merged and generally get people together more.

Gizmo.9178:

I nominate Shanaeri Rynale.6897 because he/she is going to give me 100g right now

Nice try :p Alas I’m exempt from the contest

Weekend bump to raise awareness

lordkrall.7241:

Shanaeri Rynale.6897:

Also, on the topic of language discrimination I’d like to know why the game only has the US flag to represent the English language and not half US/Half union flag like in beta

Because there are more countries than just the US and UK that have English as their main language?

Being mischievous. I think you’ll find way more countries that have English as their native language have part of the union flag as their flag than ones that have stars and stripes :p

Also, on the topic of language discrimination I’d like to know why the game only has the US flag to represent the English language and not half US/Half union flag like in beta

Personally, I think moving towards a pure HP model is going to be more difficult than some people imagine. Not without significant rework in the combat, skills and content systems.

For sure adding things like wardrobes, new skins and revamping rewards can help but ultimately people like to feel their character has evolved and moved on. Not just been able to wear prettier and shinier stuff.

This is where the weakness of GW2 becomes ever more apparent(certainly in PvE) where DPS is king and support and control are very much also rans.

Adding new skills, and methods of capture is indeed a great idea. However these skill are going to need to be useful if they are to move beyond the gotta get em all phase.

If they are DPS skills, people will expect them to be more powerful, if they are support/control skills people are going to expect them to be worth taking over the DPS meta.

All of which, unless content Is going to be trivialised even more will mean that content and encounters will need to be re-worked to ensure these new skills (especially support and control ones) are actually useful.

Basically, unless PvE is re-worked new skills are a temporary fix. An accelerant in the cycle of buff, nerf and power creep.

The other issue is that of build diversity and failure scenario’s. Thanks to a restricted skill set and focus on DPS there are only a few build for each class that are actually worth taking.

This issue is further compounded by the fact that stats are now linked to gear. If the current meta’s are changed to make others more worthwhile then all of those who ground for thousands of hours for ascended items are going to be furious and upset.

In order for build diversity to become available then really stats should be separated from gear(or at least have stats swappable) as really I don’t see an alternative.

There also needs to be a sense of jeopardy. Outside of a very few encounters it is impossible to fail content in a meaningful way. Fail a temple event, so what? either wait or hop to a server that has it open. Personal stories and dungeons are impossible to fail, only run out of time or money.

You can’t drive horizontal progression in a very largely fail free game., as nothing matters, nothing is at stake.

As to how to fix these issues. Then I would suggest:
Short term
+ Introduce more social stuff. Wardrobes, guild halls, more stuff that allows the community to do stuff together(and if we are being really radical take a long hard look at your back end server structure. It really does hold so many things back) – *Community drives longevity and fun, not content grind. *
+ Allow dynamic stat swapping on ascended items too. It would give a horizontal progression meaning to why they are there, and facilitate more build diversity.
+ Go back and play GW1. Look how that did content and horizontal progression. particularly skill capping, the UW and FoW areas. Basically look what worked there and do that

Long term:
+ Rework content to make support and control aspects needed
+ Introduce real consequences for failure in dungeons and instances.
+ Allow a degree of profession blurring. where you can use weapons and skills from other professions(Heck maybe ascension still works in the crystal desert and the reward for ascending is being able to utilise more weapons)

Basically. I feel the pve meta is stale, adding more of the same skills and content wont fix it. It feels to me as though GW2 needs to become GW2 2.0 to really evolve and move on. Every and anything is else is just treading water.

A whole chapter of GW1 was scrapped because it highlighted issues that were unsolvable in a GW1 context. It was a courageous decision and from it GW2 was born.

I feel now is the time to be courageous again if GW2 is to move beyond the trivial and temporary.

Due to Xmas we’re not having a meet this week. But we’ll be back on the 27th at the same time

Hi

In keeping with the time of year it’s time to spread some good news to all men and all that With that in mind my guild, DVDF think it’s time to celebrate and remember those people who have done some amazing and noteworthy things for others in GW2.

We have 4 prizes to give away, first prize of 50g, second of 25 and two of 12.5g each.

All you need to do is nominate someone else and tell us (in this thread) what acts of kindness they performed that are particularly noteworthy and should be rewarded.

Since the events forum is a little out of the way, I thought it might be nice to give it a little more exposure

Please see https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/community/events/Random-Acts-Of-Kindness-100g-of-prizes/first#post3367271
for more info

VOLKON.1290:

VOLKON.1290:

Could always bring back the Eidolon in some fashion…

Let me embellish now that the grey matter has digested this a bit.

Every thirty hours, on all servers simultaneously (to prevent hopping) and in overflows a Meta event chain kicks off somewhere, possibly even in a new, small zone that is relatively dead otherwise. The chain takes your through a few events and, at the culmination, there before you stands… er… floats the Eidolon. In a battle of Tequatlesque fashion, the server comes together to take down the beastie. You loot from it (if you win) an “Eye of the Eidolon”, which you can use to turn in for a piece of ascended gear of the stats of your liking.

I chose thirty hours because that will rotate through the timezones for the server and not leave people out due to work or region, but that can be modified of course, say fifty-four hours for example if it seems too frequent.

Meta event, mega-beast, coordinated server efforts, alternative means to get a piece o’ gear.

It’s a nice idea. However the overflows would kill any semblance of community and coordination. If you thought the mess that organising Teq was, this would be worse..

Great idea, but hampered by the limited way in which the game works :/

I think stat swapping on ascended items would be welcomed by pretty much everyone. The main point for debate is how best to implement it.

I’m not sure making an ascended insignia for each type of stat I wanted to swap to on each set of armor would be the way to go. Once you’ve got the insignia the bulk of the work is over. The same if it was RNG based, I’d hate having to rely on RNG to get the stats I want.

People need a horizontal reason why to go for ascended stuff, and quality of life stuff such as easy stat swapping would seem to be an easy, quick win for everyone with very few downsides

For PvE there are I think two main barriers
1. Support and control being way less important or effective than DPS
2. Having stats tied to armor and gear

They also said that ascended gear was always supposed to be in the game but we didn’t have time to include it at launch. You may or may not believe that, but they did say it.

I know. They also said ascended items were put in when they saw how quickly people earned exotics. So which is it? You can’t put something in before launch but run out of time, and decide it put it in as a reaction to something after launch?

Anyway. I digress

what it is and isn’t is irrelevant to how people feel. It’s clear from this issue coming up again and again and again that people feel aggrieved and upset. When dealing with people perceptions are waay more important than facts. Feelings are much more important than definitions and expectation management has more effect than technical information.

The world and customers operate by expectations and their perception of value.

The above statement above while factual(in a facetious way) does nothing to address feelings, expectations and perceptions. So therefore would do nothing to resolve the situation and because of the tone would probably make it worse.

As I also mentioned above. Explain why parts of the manifesto couldn’t be met, then express regret and acknowledge the disappointment the change caused.

It’s customer management 101 stuff.. really..

Vayne.8563:

Shanaeri Rynale.6897:

Regardless of all the to’s and fro’s about the manifesto, it’s pretty clear there’s still a large amount of ill feeling around it. Some people still feel disappointed and let down about it, still feel like they were bait and switched and still hanker after the game they thought the manifesto was describing.

it’s become the focal point for what many perceive to be the failings of the game, even if that’s not always the case.

Because it’s people’s feelings and expectations that have been expressed it’s rare facts or simple ‘it was an expression of wishes and it was bound to change’ statements will ever be enough.

I feel that those feelings ought to be dealt with by Arenanet , directly, compassionately and with understanding otherwise I fear the manifesto will continue to be a rock around the games neck for years to come and in my view will continue to suck players and potential customers away.

The manifesto and what it represents to some is an open wound in the community and perhaps it’s time to start healing it

How would you like Anet to deal with this?

They offered refunds to people who didn’t like the change and gave refunds for people, even after they played the game for six months. That is when the ascended gear was introduced a year ago. A whole year.

People are still talking about this. Those who didn’t like it could have gotten a full refund, even after playing the game for months.

Those who didn’t mind it, or wanted to see were able to keep playing. Anet has already said what will happen going forward and in fact, even back then said there will be a new tier of gear added, namely ascended gear. Obviously they don’t want to promise that will never happen again, because they didn’t necessarily expect it to happen the first time. You can’t make promises you can’t guarantee you can keep.

So four years now after the original manifesto video was released and a year plus after ascended items were released, what should Anet say?

Say sorry. Offering refunds, stating that stuff changed isn’t the same as actually showing remorse and regret over something. To some it read like it a stroppy ‘well you don’t like it! take your money back we don’t care’.

It reeks of hubris.

To admit something would allow people to move on, accept what’s done is done and would imho restore a lot of trust and faith that people lost.

For example. in reply to a question about the manifesto at Eurogamer 2013
“Still hold core values but had to make some adjustments during development. Sometimes we have to stray away from what we have said in the past. "

There’s no sign of regret, or dealing with how players felt about it. Now look at what they could have said

“We really wanted to deliver on our manifesto promises, and for a long time it looked like we really could. Then we hit a number of snag’s we just couldn’t find away around and we had to change it. I know people were disappointed, a lot of us were too but y’know sometimes it just doesn’t work out and we’re sorry for it.”

Regardless of all the to’s and fro’s about the manifesto, it’s pretty clear there’s still a large amount of ill feeling around it. Some people still feel disappointed and let down about it, still feel like they were bait and switched and still hanker after the game they thought the manifesto was describing.

it’s become the focal point for what many perceive to be the failings of the game, even if that’s not always the case.

Because it’s people’s feelings and expectations that have been expressed it’s rare facts or simple ‘it was an expression of wishes and it was bound to change’ statements will ever be enough.

I feel that those feelings ought to be dealt with by Arenanet , directly, compassionately and with understanding otherwise I fear the manifesto will continue to be a rock around the games neck for years to come and in my view will continue to suck players and potential customers away.

The manifesto and what it represents to some is an open wound in the community and perhaps it’s time to start healing it

I do like the idea of being able to upgrade armour to a higher tier by doing a variety of in game activities . However, these activities can’t be too quick or too easy otherwise we’re back to the ‘we got exotic too quick’ scenarios.

Anet do some to under-estimate the ability of the players to get stuff done. Witness how they thought it’d take us weeks to solve new teq. So striking the balance between grind and ease is going to be tricky.

Hmm how about being able to throw 3 pieces of ascended armor into the mystic forge and get a random chance of a piece of the new legendary armor

<hides>

Having gotten a couple of pieces of Ascended I would feel a little peeved if instant Ascended armor was put in, in lets say in 3 months time.

There does need to be other ways of getting them for sure, but if the whole idea was as an intermediate in time between exotic and legendary then quite simply they can’t be easy to get. Otherwise what’s the point of putting them in, in the first place

As I mentioned a while back, my solution would be a token system where you got a token that got you an ascended piece each time you completed all dungeon paths of every dungeon.

That’s a pretty epic quest, cant be done in twenty minutes and might encourage people to step outside of the usual money paths.

Instead of boosting stats, then make each ascended piece have dynamic stats. That’s a big incentive for people to go for them right there.

Hm horizontal discussion sounds a little like pillow talk

As a suggestion of a nice way to get ascended armor. Issue a token for each complete set of dungeons done. I.e the reward for dungeon master is a token, subsequent completing of all paths in all dungeons are rewarded with a token.

1 token=1 ascended weapon/armor piece.

What sort of vertical progression would I be happy with? None once a maximum level has been reached.

Vertical inherently means obsolescence,

One thing I have noticed that has not been bought up in all the talk of rewards is that of fun.

Whatever happened to fun,challenge and doing stuff together with your friends and guildies being it’s own reward?