Guild Wars 2

Well… Back in the marionette fight it only took a couple people that didn’t know the fight to end up in the wrong place at the wrong time and prevent a win. And it is nearly impossible to win Teq without a taxi to an organized instance.

Those big fights are designed so that all it takes is someone in the zone willing to explain everything to folks that didn’t know it, and for those folks to listen. They’re good fights, well designed (especially Marionette, which needs to make a reappearance someday, somehow).

That having been said, GW2 desperately needs a mechanic whereby zone leaders can get the attention of everyone in the zone. I think some people must sit in their combat log and never see /shout or something- or are staring at the pretty particles. Those are the folks that miss simple fight mechanics and create losses. It’ll be worse in the new content.

I’d like to see either the commander or some alternate mechanism expanded to better lead massive open-world PvE content.

And don’t say, “mumble/teamspeak”. That’s missing the point. In order to make it pug/casual friendly there needs to be a way for experienced commanders to communicate raidlike instructions. It’s not about how a group should communicate ideally, but what tools a leader should have to bring together a group that isn’t communicating.

…is terrible.

I impulse bought it yesterday since it’s on sale and I had some extra gems burning a hole in my account. (And I never directly buy gold- just doesn’t feel right.) I like having all those event nodes and the skill point in my home instance and I figured this would be a nice little addition- a little extra perk at the start of each game day.

Whoopsie. Caveat emptor. My mistake.

I’m stunned by how worthless it is. Not only does it provide only a tiny amount of cloth each day, it doesn’t even spawn close to the other nodes (at least in the cities I’ve tried it in so far). I’m pretty confident it takes roughly as long to run over to it and use it as it would to just kill a couple extra humanoids for cloth while running in the open world.

So, let this be a lesson to me to do my research first. As for you, hey, don’t make the same dumb mistake as me- it ain’t a bargain on sale. Walk away from that particular bit of home instance bling.

Xiahou Mao.9701:

Kross.6428:

The trade-off of using the Trading Post, is that annoying 15% trading fee placed upon the seller.

And that’s the single best hedge against inflation that the game currently has. If it weren’t for that removing 15% of the gold from every transaction, inflation would be much worse and most everything would be more expensive.

If you were to take that out of the game, what would you introduce to replace it to siphon gold out of the economy?

It also is incredibly important to minimize the amount of non-productive economic activity.

Flipping, arbitrage, and price manipulation are still possible in GW2, but that large fee helps to keep it much less prevalent than in other games.

Frankly I know this because in other games I was able to do it extremely effectively- in WoW I never had to work for gold after I figured out the economy. I always had more gold than I knew what to do with, barring some of the extreme cosmetic gold sinks (and even then I had a few).

I haven’t been able to do that in GW2. I have to make money by playing and doing contributory economic activities.

This is a good thing.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I have a few theories that I’m considering.

• Scarlet’s real goal was to weaken the dragon by cutting the ley line, and then turn both her armies and the rest of the world against it. You killing her aborted that plan, and her last words were referring to her being too late as she realized the dragon was waking up strong anyway. (“We’re too late, this was all for nothing.”)
  -or-
• Scarlet’s real goal was to wake up the dragon early, and thus in a weaker state, and then lead her armies and the rest of the world against it. Her last words were referring to her making it to her goal before she died- although she knew you would have to lead the armies instead of her. (“You’re too late to stop me from helping you, idiot.”)
  -or-
• Scarlet was mostly just driven mad by being the one rebel who saw how things really worked in a world of sheep, and everything else was an attempt at self-justification. Her last words were just a dying attempt to believe that she’d had a purpose in life. (“You’re too late, I win, I win, muhuhahahahaha I’m the joker only pretty and played by the other best voice actor in the world!”)

I’m not 100% on any of those, but ever since “Scarlet’s End” I’ve thought it would turn out somehow the world was worse off for us having killed Scarlet in cold blood instead of taking her prisoner. That was an intrinsically evil act, and in Tyria those kinds of acts, no matter how seemingly justified, always seem to have a cost.

Lyp Sao.1375:

Home Borderland. Visit from every place and return to every place. Crafting stations (plus bank), TP, merchant and saves WP costs.

I would totally do that- but on my server there’s often at least a short queue for EB and the home borderland. So…. I would feel really selfish if I was sitting there taking up a slot in the zone that someone who wanted to fight for the world was waiting for.

If our world never had queues there, I’d use that every time. It’s mega convenient.

That is great to hear! (And it came through fine for me in the livestream- I thought the music was part of what gave that presentation great polish.)

Now, since it’s you… Think you can get them to make that GW2 music box you taunted the world with in a certain youtube video a reality for the HoT collector’s edition?

Cuz lemme just tell you, lovecraftian dragon shaped music box playing one of your original HoT compositions…

Yeah, I’d buy the hell out of that.

lujate.5432:

So far, here are the reasons I’m hearing:
1. GW1 nostalgia
2. Amenities, most of what are already in-game
3. Social/RP

And don’t forget “sense of achievement”.

It’s something else to have that you didn’t have, and had to work for.

Personally I like Rata Sum. Of cities it’s got the easiest to navigate layout and the central waypoint has very frequent guild banners and such lying around.

Lot’s of RPers too, which I enjoy (even though I don’t myself).

I wish they’d put up the unlimited airship pass again. I regret not getting that.

We don’t know how they’re actually doing it, so don’t panic yet. For example to me one solution might include some meaningful NPC action against held locations.

If you frequently fended off minor incursions from NPC’s in the absence of a real attack, that would give you something to do and some rewards while waiting for the real attackers. There’s plenty of room for variety in those dynamic events- you might need to do some siege vs siege as a merc catapult team rolls up, collapse sapper tunnels, or track down and kill an infiltrator who otherwise has a chance to take out the lord.

The bonus there too is that it would be easy to use that as a mechanism to help balance population impact a little. Scale the difficulty or frequency of events based not on the number of defenders in the immediate area, but instead on the world’s population on that map. Bigger populations would be forced to spread out resources to defend. Smaller populations would have the opportunity to all focus on taking individual objectives with their full force.

Just thoughts- my point is I’m sure there are ways to make it work, and I’m not writing it off until I see the details.

Two words:

Baby.

Glint.

We don’t know yet of course, but I wouldn’t be surprised if new characters of this class are going to already have some kind of accelerated or different leveling to them. Perhaps at least a lengthier “private” leveling experience before entering the main world- similar to what WoW did with WotLK.

For anyone that isn’t aware, in that expansion Blizzard gave the new class a headstart by giving them a lengthy (and frankly awesome) personal story type experience, along with a number of perks. By the time you entered the main game world you were somewhere around 3/4 of the way to endgame content. (Not just levels, but several other grinds that you got alternatives to- WoW is way more grindy than GW2.)

The catch was you couldn’t just be a new player to skip over that stuff. You needed to have a class of a certain level first in order to create one of those characters, and you were limited in how many you could make.

Personally I found that the best introduction of a new class to an MMO I’ve yet experienced. I’m glad GW2 is definitively not a WoW clone, but that’s one area where I wouldn’t mind seeing a little imitation.

On a business side it makes sense too, because it would give an even bigger incentive to existing players to buy that extra slot right away.

Vayne.8563:

I’ve seen this comment again and again. I guess because other MMOs really annoyed me, I never had to come back to realize how good this game was.

And you know, sometimes this game annoys me too…but not nearly as much as other MMOs.

That’s pretty much dead on exactly how I feel too.

Probably 90% of the complaints I see, all I can think to myself is, “man, you must not know how good you’ve got it.” GW2 ain’t perfect- nobody’s made a perfect MMO yet. Doubtful it’s even possible, because everybody wants something a little different. But it strikes a pretty awesome balance in most areas.

Zomaarwat.3912:

Shooka.9712:

Logan coming back as a disney princess
ohhh the possibilities

Well, we did see them falling down into the jungle with the rest of the airships. Me Logan. You Jennah.

Hahahahahahaha!

People come to MMO’s with different motivations. For example, one venerable (in the MMO world anyway) theory called Bartle’s Player Types asserts that people to one extent or another are:

• Achievers
• Explorers
• Socializers
  and/or
• Killers

Other projects have expanded on that (the magnificent work by Nick Yee for example.) But ultimately the general premise is the same: it’s remarkable how invested people get with MMO’s, yet they do it for different reasons.

To some folks the motivations fall strongly into categories that lend themselves to big, visible, social achievement. (That covers two out of the big four above, as well as a substantial chunk of possible motivations from Yee.)

Guild halls represent the ultimate in that category in many ways. They’re a huge place, highly visible to the people you know, where you can gather and be aware of your achievement. They’re something to work towards and/or enjoy socially. They also cover a component of immersion in the game world, which isn’t in the four above, but is something Yee’s research noted as important to many players as well.

TL;DR:
They are a pretty broad type of content that can be really satisfying to people motivated in certain ways common in MMO’s. They’re both a big symbol of achievement and an immersive place to socialize.

Regrettably I don’t have a really photogenic Sylvari to show.

But I will say: I want my kitten baby dragon and I’m willing to go full-on minion to get it.

To a certain extent most PC’s already are antiheros. We haven’t joined a faction that is killed on sight by the general public, because that would be impractical, but in the course of the PS and LS a lot of PC’s do some rather nasty things.

Tyria is not a very nice place, and one of the themes of the game seems to be that the road to hell is paved with our intentions, good or otherwise. It’s sometimes a bit Bioshocky.

For example, anyone that played through season 1 was put in a position where it would have been reasonable to apprehend Scarlet and bring her to stand trial and (possibly more importantly) find out what her real motivations were. Instead we choose to execute her on the spot. Not a shred of heroism there.

Likewise most of the cultures we come from have some kind of serious and obvious moral ambiguity that we generally embrace. For example any Asura is automatically assumed to be a racist, egomaniacal jerk perfectly comfortable with a life that has a distinct “Hail Hyrda!” atmosphere. Charr are conditioned as soldiers from birth, Sparta-style, complete with systematic abuse in a creche environment. And Sylvari… Well, they seem innocent enough, don’t they? Sounds legit.

You get the idea. My point is, while no character matches the antiheroism of a deathknight or necromancer from WoW, there’s a lot of darkness there already- just a practical, culturally acceptable sort.

Edit: Oh, and let’s not forget that every single PC has killed countless thousands of sapient beings, and decimated entire ecosystems of animals. :P

Maybe each new class will be precipitated by a member of Destiny’s Edge going off and coming back as an angsty, vengeful anti-hero?

Nah.

Skritt!

Julian.3791:

I recently tried it to sell a pre, simply because I didn’t know it was against the rules (I thought only scamming was)…especially when you see a bunch of other people doing it.

Ended up someone was really abusive to me so in the end I figured it was better to just avoid it and put it on tp.

I think I might have actually seen this happen- not anything on LFG, but shouting in Rata Sum? That, or the exact same thing just happens a lot. Entirely possible.

Anyway, if that was you, I sympathize. I personally wouldn’t trust anyone I didn’t know well enough to buy a precursor outside of the TP, but the person who was yelling at you was way out of line.

I too come from WoW (and others, but that the longest and most recently), and I could write a book on all the adjustments I made!

For the most part, good ones.

First off welcome, congrats on spending the best $10 or $15 you’ve ever spent. There is no better value in gaming than GW2, period. It’s amazing how much you get out of this game without a subscription.

For me the biggest things you’ll find an adjustment vs WoW in terms of pure mechanics…

• There’s no trinity of tank-dps-healer. None.
• Combat is active. No such thing as tank-and-spank except in trivial content.

Everyone is their own healer, everyone rez’s everyone else, everyone is responsible for good pew pew and for staying alive. There is still some class and build synergy, and class roles are a little bit more defined in competitive play, but believe me, after WoW you’re going to find the whole concept really weird!

In PvE, get used to the idea that your job is to maximize your damage output while using active skills to stay alive. Obviously as you play through leveling content it’s mostly pure fun and doesn’t matter that much- you can get by trying out all kinds of things, and that’s part of the fun. But it’s still a good idea to get used to reading enemies to know when to use your dodge key, timing your defense abilities, and so forth.

I don’t have a strong opinion on this, but just to play devil’s advocate for the heck of it…

I think it’s pretty reasonable to assume that the developers have already done this math. So if they ended up deciding to knock it down by 47% instead of 14%… They probably did the math and think it’s about twice as effective as it should be, no?

Answered in this thread.

Bristingr.5034:

Silalus.8760:

• No increased level cap

They said beyond Level 80, so there is an increased level cap.

Beyond level 80 meaning the content provides a form of progression at the level cap. They were extremely explicit about the fact that level 80 is still max level, and existing ascended/legendary is still the highest gear tier. It was a major selling point, something to the effect of, “GW2 isn’t like WoW, because when we release an expansion we don’t instantly make all the stuff you’ve worked your butts off for worthless.”

Spiuk.8421:

Is it just me or the whole concept of this thread is pretty irrational? Anyway…

Here a list of other things HoT will not contain:

- DirectX 13 support.
- Free tickets to the next E3.
- Slavery simulation.
- Edible pillows.
- After-shave commercials.
- In-character Pastarian faith.

We’re talking about the things that got speculated about a lot and turned out not to be. We’re not making an exhaustive list of everything in the universe that isn’t in the expansion.

Bakeneko.5826:

Ayakaru.6583:

Depending on how difficult the quest will be. And wether or not it’s repeatable.
If it’s evry difficult and not repeatable, I don’t think the prices will drop very much, just a little

Does it really matter if quest are hard or easy? Get more experienced player into party and have a go at it. Month or two later, we will have those quests being sold like paths in dungeons. Either way, prices went pact airship over players maguma jungle pockets

I’d bet you that it will be neither hard nor easy.

What it will be is long.

If everyone is running around with legendaries a month after release, what’s next? Nah, they will still be a long hard road.

Bear in mind too that we should assume the expansion is not going to be a one-shot. It’s going to add content and systems, and probably coincide with a massive re-balance patch to vanilla systems too, since all of that impacts the new stuff.

Then after everyone has had time to enjoy the hell out of that for a while, you can bank on more LS seasons or other forms of progressive content release in the new expansion-driven world. There’s no reason to assume that there will never be a new dungeon or similar rolled out during those incremental releases.

Naus the Gobbo.5172:

I won’t be able to sleep until for months after this xpac is out.

Fixed.

It’s extremely unlikely you’ll use it everywhere, though you never know.

It looks like it’s going to be a key way to make content in the Jungle somewhat sequential. As in, to get to this next place you need to have these gliding abilities so you can make this gap, ride this thermal, etc.

I think that’s important to understand, from what little we’ve heard so far. Gliding looks like a mechanic that is about progression, not freedom. (At least, not right away.)

It will probably be fun, but ultimately it’s there to restrict where you can go immediately, not increase it. As you get better at it (both player skill and character mastery) you’ll be able to reach new places.

At least, that’s my working theory so far!

CureForLiving.5360:

Keene.5394:

I’m OK with this as long as it is an option and not a requirement.

With the new verticality that they promised you’d probably need it.

Yeah, I’d say it’s almost 100% guaranteed to be a requirement, as much as using the elemental forces is to get around the FotFW or Dry Top.

Ayakaru.6583:

No raids (no explicit raid-group-only instanced content)

This is actual ingame content, of which they revealed very little. It may very well be there, or not, just because they didn’t announce it. There could very well be bosses in the maguuma as big as tequatl and EJW

Very true- in fact I’m quite certain there will be and I’m freaking excited about it! :P

But those are really massive world events and world bosses. By raid I’m specifically talking about what people were speculating about- which was essentially dungeons with a much larger number of people required.

Nick.6972:

No new dungeons.
No new fractals.

Good point and I was thinking the same thing, but really that remains to be seen. They weren’t quite that specific on what type of content would be in the Jungle yet.

Gnat.9405:

This is a really inconsiderate thread guys

I’m trying to make it really clear that this is not a list of complaints.

Personally I’m not upset about any of this. It’s just that there’s been a lot of speculation and it’s just as valid to say what it looks like won’t be in this expansion versus what is.

Some of it was stuff people were actually really worried about, for the most part, and glad not to see!

Pinkamena Diane Pie.8054:

Hmm yeah, with silvari being shunned as enemies now, I was kindda thinking they would introduce dueling in PvE, but guess not.

Yep, that was a pretty common speculation- in fact more generally it was “factions”, like horde vs alliance in WoW. I’ll add that too.

digiowl.9620:

Kendra Nightwind.8734:

No player housing.

Get a personal guild, now with a hall.

Yeah I thought of that too, but I think it’s fair to say there’s still no expansion to individual housing. The fact that a guild can have a single player is sort of a loophole, yes, but given that already individual vanity guilds are limited in what they can attain by the guild mission mechanics, I think it’s still a reasonable thing to say.

Feral Nemonics.5097:

Wait .. i kind of missed the stream.

The new expansion won’t be like free? And we will must pay additional money for it ?

Correct. That’s been confirmed now.

Danikat.8537:

There will not be any new weapons introduced to the game as a whole.

But every profession will be able to use a new weapon from the existing selection. Like necros using greatswords and rangers using a staff. And of course they’ll get new weapon skills to go with them.

Yeah, between you and Justine (Dresden fan?) you have a good point. Edited to mention that for clarity.

lightson.2310:

No official form of GvG

There is that 5v5 thing but thats not GvG

Ah yes that’s a good point. Added.

Although who knows, that might end up as part of the overall guild expansion- declaring war on another guild, etc.

I would imagine they would have wanted to lead with that though!

CureForLiving.5360:

At this point we can’t talk about anything being definitely. Although I’d say we’re hovering 80-90% on what might not be included.

Well, we’re 100% on the level cap and gear stuff, because that was a selling point. But yes, definitely fair point on everything else. I changed the topic for ya.

Kendra Nightwind.8734:

No player housing.

Good point. Added.

Justine.6351:

there are new weapon types.

new weapon skills from new available weapons per class. The weapon itself is just a model/skin that holds 5 skills.

Not sure I understand. That’s new weapon skills, for the classes that can now use existing weapons, no? As opposed to new weapon types?

Mental Paradox.3845:

Mounts: well, we have flying now. Not sure that counts as a “mount”, but it sure augments the way you travel.

Fair point. To me it seemed pretty clear that the gliding/updraft/etc mechanic is going to be a method of progressing to access new content, rather than pure speed/cosmetic mounts like in other MMO’s, but it’s definitely a very interesting new movement mechanic.

Let me just make it clear, I personally think this expansion looks awesome and I’m ready to throw my money at Anet to get it.

So this isn’t intended to be a list of stuff “missing” complaints (in fact I think lots of folks are glad some things aren’t going to be part of the expansion)- just things that we’ve speculated about that we now know or think won’t be included.

(Almost) definitely:

• No new race
• No increased level cap
• No increased gear tier
• No mounts (movement via gliding yes, cosmetic/speed mounts no)
• No expansion to individual player housing (guild yes, personal no)
• No PvP elements within the PvE world (i.e. no dueling, no factions)
• Not a free expansion (i.e. it is not like the LS)

And also sounds like:

• No raids (no instanced dungeon content requiring more than 5 players)
• No new weapon types (per class yes, but overall to the game no)
• No changes to the base personal story
• No formal GvG elements (although somewhat in that direction)

Did I miss any of the other big points of speculation?

Naus the Gobbo.5172:

Gaile Gray.6029:

Thanks for the lists, Windu and Cure. There was a lot of information to take in, and it’s great you posted.

Gaile, next time you see Colin, can you please give him a giant hug from me?

I’m not a hugger… But a, “those extra high-maintenance players on the forums are really supportive so far,” would be great. ^.^

ZudetGambeous.9573:

sounds like just in the jungle. But either way it is not flight, it is just falling with style.

Well, not full flight- but they did say that as you progress you will learn to use updrafts. So it seems like it’s basically a mechanic more to gain access to progressive content rather than to increase overall movement freedom.

Based on what they said, the gliders look very specific to the new PvE areas, much as the experimental vertical abilities were limited to the FotFW and dry top maps.

There’s a precedent to this. In WoW when they first introduced flying mounts it was restricted to the expansion zone. It wasn’t until a few expansions later that they rebuilt the entire world to make them work everywhere.

Now it might of course be different from that- if they designed the rest of the world with gliding in mind from the beginning, they could roll it out everywhere. But that doesn’t seem likely.

None announced, but it will almost certainly not be free. Whether it’s gemstore or RMT only remains to be seen.

If they planned to make it free they would have announced that as a huge marketing point. It would have been the big finale to the event.

No company ever, ever passes up the chance to shout the word, “free”. :P

Agreed! Of course nothing will ever be perfect, but this looks great so far.

And frankly you can really see both how the Anet team listened to quite a bit of player feedback (don’t kill our current progression, etc) and used the results of tests (the flight mechanics are no doubt inspired by how much players seemed to enjoy the FotFW vertical map, followed by Dry Top, and some of the WvW stuff sounds quite a bit like a response to how the experiments in EotM worked).

Awesome engagement is awesome. For anyone that doesn’t think the Anet team is engaged… I’ve played other MMO’s very, very seriously (overly so, frankly), and this is a whole different level of communication.

Sagat.3285:

Silalus.8760:

Chlorure.9763:

No playable tengu? I’m disapointed….

This is probably something we should have mentioned.

So far it looks like there are no new races- just the new heavy armor class.

Secondary professions sir new races are just cosmetics mostly.

Oh I’m not complaining, just wanted to make sure it was clear.

Chlorure.9763:

No playable tengu? I’m disapointed….

This is probably something we should have mentioned.

So far it looks like there are no new races- just the new heavy armor class.

Crafted precursors via a combination of mastery and lengthy collections.

Purchased via master you will progress through the ability to glide and fly.