Guild Wars 2

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

Vol.7601:

I don’t quite get the concept of charging 200 gems for previous releases.

I don’t mind it in concept – after all, it’s a ‘convenience’ fee for accessing something you did not experience in the 2 week period, but who would pay 200 gems for a story instance that lasts no more than 10 minutes?

If I understand correctly, the 200 gems unlock not only the story instance, but also the achievements, the ability to gain rewards, and possibly changes to the open world such as (now I’m making up things) new dialogue in existing NPCs, new NPCs altogether, doors on buildings that wouldn’t open before, portals to new maps…

There’s every possibility that these chapters will be worth 200 gems (10-15 gold, only available to level 80s so it’s definitely very very affordable).

I believe you are correct, this is how I’m understanding it as well. It’s an extremely wise move on Arenanet’s behalf. Being able to get those achievements I missed, and to make this temporary content permanent, boy, that would be amazing, and for only 200 gems. That is one heck of a deal. I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t want to take this deal, it’s like digging through the $5 movie bin at wal-mart. I’m very excited about this and can’t wait to see when this becomes available.

I think this is a great idea, if they make the content of high quality, I am game, things are moving in the right direction, keep up the great work. For a game that is free to play, this is one of the smartest decisions they can make, I really hope this helps them get in the direction they want to be, I know I’d be more than willing to buy the content i’ve missed up to this point. And honestly, what is $2.50 to play through some content you will enjoy?

I just wanted to say Thank you to you guys. Saw some good things in those patch notes and it’s reassuring to see that you guys really are listening to what we have to say. The having 3 crafting professions seems like a pretty nifty idea, keep up the great work!

IndigoSundown.5419:

pdavis.8031:

@IndigoSundown

Ok I agree that some of it was pre LS. But it still remains that the Karka Queen is a new boss. Granted before LS, but still , added permenent content. The recipes and mats I was refering to, don’t include ascended. Crafting professions, not all, got bumped up to level 500, and opened up a range of new items to craft. As well as the toxic spore samples and watchwork sprockets for mats.

What remains though is what is defined as content. I see all the stuff added/changed pre, during, and post Living story as content. Some people do not. I believe that until “content” is clearly defined we won’t be able to move on with the discussion. As some people, like me, say that plently of stuff was added and is permenent, while others don’t see it as content.

I believe that ANet itself makes a distinction between content and features. The 2014/4/15 patch was called a “feature patch,” not a “content patch.”

The thread topic concerns whether adding content in LW S2 will be different/better from that of LW S1. The OP’s assumption seems to be that it won’t. In fact, his primary concern seems to be the temporary nature of the story presented in S1. It seems he’s presuming S2 story will be much the same. For the purpose of sticking to the thread topic, can we agree that content would be the story elements and their presentation for S2? If it helps, we can call it “story content.”

LW Season stories are a dramatically different approach to ongoing MMO content presentation. Most MMO’s present story — if they even have one — as one-offs (e.g., the GW2 personal story). You can do the story on another character, but each character does it just once. Such stories are usually in the game at launch, and ongoing stories just don’t happen.

Most MMO’s focus their ongoing development on repeatable content, not one-off story content. This is because the bills get paid if players are playing and paying on a regular basis. This is true for sub and store based games, although store-based games don’t always require the same players to keep playing in quite the same way as sub games — but that’s another topic. Thus, dungeons, raids, seasonal festivals and dailies keep interest alive via rewarded repetition, while the developer then presents new dungeons, raids etc. in an expansion – usually with more lore behind it, though few expansions offer additional personal stories like the GW2 PS or TOR character stories.

Keeping player interest via one-off stories is a risky approach. Some players don’t want story, instead they want that rewarded repetitive content followed by more of the same in new maps. Add in new professions, new races, etc. for them to repeat the older content in new ways and they’re happy. Even players who prefer a story-based approach may not like the quality of the LW story, or the fact that — unlike a TV drama — there’s no DVD to experience that story at their convenience.

The OP’s question, and it’s mine also, is what will ANet deliver in S2 for people who don’t care for story, or who want story on their terms.

Exactly. Appealing to all of these types of players is their challenge, and I understand what they face is a tough predicament, but I think all in all, most of the people I’ve seen would want more repetitive things to do in game. Doing fractals until you are able to do level 50 just gets boring, sometimes you’d like another thing to progress in, and when you have all level 80’s with 100% map on them. What, honestly is there left for you to do? After you’ve crafted the legendary? I guess you can play the trading post a bit to make money, but even that gets boring after a while. I don’t think most people are upset with this issue, it’s just them, re-iterating that a lot of players are hanging on by a very thin thread due to a lack of replayable content. After all, you can only get 100% map completion on the same character 1 time.

Nat.4029:

Snowmoon.1758:

Anet: So boss, can we start doing expansions and making permanent content?

NCSoft: And ruin the launch of Wildstar? NO

Anet: But boss…

NCSoft: DO YOU STILL WANT YOUR JOBS?? I SAID NO!!
Just give these fools some temp content, they’ll never notice.

Anet: But…

NCSoft: Shut up and do what i say. GW2’s launch is over, we’ve milked enough out of it. Wildstar is the Darling Child now. DON’T YOU DARE SCREW IT UP.

Anet: Yes sir…

NCSoft: And bring back Trahearne. I LOVE THAT GUY. Just makes me happy to screw the players with this NPC. MUAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAH!!!!!

+1000

This is realistically probably 100% accurate.

pdavis.8031:

Interesting. I like some of the ideas, but the hard mode idea…not so much. Not that it’s a bad idea, but a hard mode PvE just doesn’t make sense. It would just mean more grinding. Doing 100% map completion already feels much like grinding anyway. Especially on a second or third character. The first time wasn’t TOO bad, as you were seeing much of the world for the first time anyway. Hard mode in GW1 worked simply because it wasn’t an MMO. Hard mode in GW2 would mean you’d have to have a additional map shard for upscaled mobs, with better AI, etc. Such a thing wasn’t too difficult to implement in GW1 because all the maps outside of citys were already instances. However, hard mode dungeons and fractals (but hard mode fractals already exist, its the higher levels) would be good. It gets to easy stacking and burning. Throw in harder enemies, with improved AI, different mechanics, and lose all ability to stack…that would be awesome.

Yeah things that add replayability to the game usually add depth and difficulty as well. Those are the things I think will help improve the game the most.

I would like to throw out the idea for you guys to consider: For this season 2, it would be cool if each of the releases while giving us a temporary storyline, left us with some permanent result, some things could include:

~Dungeons

~Jump Puzzles

~More Skills (I loved the depth of skill complexity in GW1, could you bring that back?)

~A place to hang out (guild halls would be cool), but doesn’t have to be guild halls, the pvp arena has kind of turned into that place for some. I’d really like to utilize my home instance, but we don’t even have a bank there, let alone the trading post guy

~More items in the gem store that are like the Salvage O’ Matic, The permanent mining gear, and the Divinity’s Reach Pass, those have all been life savers and I don’t know anyone who has been unhappy with them, keep those kind of things rolling, I love seeing that kind of stuff on gem store, it makes the game a lot more fun in a way, and I’m not really getting too much of an edge on people.

~More Home Instance stuff (a bank would be very helpful in there)

~Maybe an elite area that is neither a dungeon, nor like fractal of the mists, something unique and new that no one has experienced before, but knocks your socks off every time you try it (but not quite like Dark Souls)

~Replayable content that can scale. (I know this is very general, but this is the gist I think of what everyone wants)

~Permanent Tonics, they can even be through the gem store, but those things were a blast in GW1, I especially loved the candy corn one.

~Hard Mode: This could be in regards to dungeons, or a portion of the map, you could offer different types of rewards, your progress would be tracked on a per event basis, here is what i’m thinking: Say you are in Plains of Ashford and there are 25 hearts (for simplicity purposes) You want to work on your Hard Mode completion for that map, so before that heart, you toggle on Hard Mode, you proceed to complete the heart, when you are done, you then get a reward, and progress towards your Hard Mode completion for that map, it could say Hard Mode completion 1/25 or something along those lines, skill points, vista’s, points of interest, would all work in the same fashion. Also if you made those hard mode aspects replayable that would be amazing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to do a heart that I’ve already completed, it would be nice to be able to get that reward again. Maybe even have it to where this is only available after 100% Map completion to give people that sort of “end game” feel.

I hate to admit this honestly, but when fractal of the mists came out at first, I really didn’t care for it. With having done a lot more in game at this point, it’s the only version of an end game that we have. I enjoy it, but I feel like there needs to be more than JUST that. We could do elite areas in GW1, why not bring those back? Running AC P1+P3 in under 30 minutes each day for only 3G, just doesn’t seem very appealing. Doing a dungeon in GW2 doesn’t give you the sense of achievement that completing Underworld did, or doing a run through The Deep. Fractals doesn’t give that feel either really though, to me, they aren’t as challenging as those were, I’m not sure what to suggest, but I think something that offers a great challenge, should also have a great reward, there are plenty of okay challenges with miniscule rewards, I think we are ready for something big.

RyuDragnier.9476:

Larynx.2453:

lordkrall.7241:

Teutos.8620:

1. July? REALLY? Not a mistake that they meant first of June?

I can not find any nice words describing how I feel about this. How do you want to keep people playing? Do you just want to kill the remaining small population of gw2?

You have already killed tpvp, are you now continuing with also kill the living world?

It is extremely unlikely that they would
1: Release it on a Sunday
2: Announce it less than a week before release.

It is funny how all those other games somehow manage to keep people playing for 6 months without adding anything, but as soon as GW2 have a gap of a month or two the game is doomed.

The population in GW2 is far from small. I still see massive amounts of people around (both in PvE and WvW).

Would you rather have them rush releases so that you can complain about how bad it is due to too little time spent on it?

That’s because “those other games” have actual content and progression. Gw2 is relies on snippets of temporary content to keep players interested. It can never stand on its own merit.

It’s also free to play once you buy the game. Do you pull this same argument with the online content of console games?

I think that even though, yes they have said they would like to add more permanent content to the game, not being informed of anything beyond just that tidbit of information is what leads to so much stirring on here. When the game first came out, Arenanet did one heck of job of keeping us up to speed through as many venues as possible, whatever happened to that? Now we seriously don’t even get all the information in the patch notes. I think people seriously just want to be informed, that is all.

Hylgeriak.8250:

Hey matey, small hint: I’ve been to GW1 yesterday to check for new birthday presents…and guess what: GW1 is still out there! So if you love it so much…feel free to go :-) Kamadan is still – to my own surprise – crowded like in old days! (though mostly just trading stuff to get their HoM filled for GW2 achievements)

It’s funny how you can be so ignorant, it’s not GW1 i’m after otherwise I’d be playing it.

Nage.1520:

Ever tried to farm for a Polar Bear mini in Guild wars 1?

I didn’t think so.

Actually I did polar bear farm, but in GW1 you also had the ability for things like solo farming which anet has clearly stated they are against in this game, but zerging/mobbing is somehow better. Raptor Farming, Vaettir’s, Chest running, sure they were boring and mundane, but there was something sweet and rewarding about them that this just doesn’t offer, maybe it’s because the items you got had more than the equivalent of a 1 copper value, like I said earlier, I think they are just super stingy with the in-game currency, especially comparing things to what you could do in GW1. I just feel like as the game goes on it becomes more and more difficult to make money as everything keeps getting super inflated.

not to fuel the fires here, but:

ZAP ~ 800G
1 Dungeon Chain Per Night netting 20g per night roughly
40 Days = 1 1/3 months
Amount of time spent on dungeon runs to JUST buy the precursor:
@ 3 hours a night (w/good groups, getting lucky etc): 120 hours
@ 4 hours a night: 160 hours
That is roughly 3-4 weeks at a full time minimum wage job: If you take just 1/4 of what you make in half that time you could buy the precursor $200 USD converted from gems, which is exactly what they want. There is no viable option otherwise, or move to a different game that isn’t 100% luck based.

Rho.1923:

The advantage of smaller, more frequent, DLCs is that it’ll smooth out Anet’s revenue stream. It doesn’t have to be as excessive as them making and selling a single dungeon for $5. For instance, Anet could make a sell a series of zones in the Woodland Cascades, Far Shiverpeaks, or Charr Homelands (the equivalent of a major zone like Ascalon or Kryta for GW2 ppl) with the appropriate dungeons included.

Good to see some other people finally realizing the ability to convert F2P currency to P2P currency isn’t such a great idea. There’s no fix for it unless Anet creates yet another currency, but wait. We have so many to choose from, karma? no maybe laurels? How about dungeon tokens?

GW2 lacks something that only someone from GW1 would be able to agree with: Awesome. I feel like the only awesome thing about this game is that you can WvW to your hearts content or play the trading post, why should I even bother with PvE if the rewards are so far out of my reach? Referencing GW1 again, if I wanted something in the game, something aesthetic, a new piece of armor, a dye color, a weapon it didn’t matter, I could farm for it. Unless you mindlessly grind champions or have a ridiculous amount of money to control the trading post, money is very hard to come by in GW2 and in my opinion always has been. You work your tail off doing dungeons each day to make a whopping 20g if you are lucky. (This can and often does equate to anywhere from 2-3 months of just dungeons, and that’s not including if you wanted to do something else in game after committing 3-4 hours to dungeons a day) for an item like a precursor. When did you guys become so stingy with something that’s not even real (in game currency)? Also, What happened to pvp? because what we have now is just … boring. Where’s alliance battles? Random Arenas? Underworld? It’s like everything in GW1 that worked and was amazing and that people loved you decided to not bring over, I can’t understand that. I think there was a calling that was truly missed with many of the features in GW1. Fractals is preached left and right, yet it will never compare to the challenge of an underworld run, or the deep. Where’s the prestige ? Doing a fractal 40 is cool, but so what? Who cares? It’s not like that feeling of accomplishment the first time you completed underworld, and then every time thereafter. Saying you completed a fractal 40 run is like saying you’ve ran a 5 mile marathon when you’ve been a marathon runner for 15 years, it’s not news to anyone, no one cares, and it’s not that rewarding after a while. On one last note:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mini_First_Mate_Horrik <—- what is the point in this? A mini pet that is account bound that you can only buy at a specific period of time, there’s no prestige in that, especially since you have to buy gems to get it, that’s the dumbest thing I have ever seen, please realize that to the real world this makes no sense and THIS is one of the reasons people don’t buy gems. I’d love the opportunity to buy those mini pets again, but you simply won’t provide me with one. I’ve seen the ones come on sale again that were part of the one week deal where you had a new mini pet each day of the week, but the other account bound minis haven’t been for sale ever again, especially the holiday ones.

I’ve asked before and I think my post has been overlooked so I would like to ask again. Are the forum changes done? It was mentioned changes were being made to the forums, yet I have no indication stating one way or another. If keeping us in the dark is the intention then it’s working well.

Dungeon Variety — The paths to dungeons are nice, but they still feel like they are fixed in place, if you choose path 2 of Citadel of Flame you will fight the same boss every time you choose path 2. Fractals has this feature already, I think it would be an awesome addition to regular dungeons. Choosing path 2 for CoF and realizing you could fight 1 of 4 bosses not only would require parties to be more versatile, but it would spice things up significantly, things wouldn’t be so, generic.

Teamplay/Profession Imbalance — This also can apply to dungeons. I don’t want anyone to believe I am saying the 5 man team is a bad thing, I think it is perfectly fine for this game, but there are some improvements on it that I would like to suggest. Currently it feels like the game is going down this path of change that is in the end for the better, but we are in the roughest part at the moment, when pertaining to overall game balance. Many if not all of the professions in the game are supposed to be able to fill any role. This is an issue at the moment because we have gotten away from that. Warriors do damage better than everyone else, if you want a zerker team you take 5 warriors, you don’t consider taking a necromancer or an engineer. If you want a team that has high survivability, you take 5 guardians in your team because they are most able to survive especially in a team effort, once again, you wouldn’t consider a necromancer or a ranger because they aren’t the best choice to take. Why settle for less than the best? I think the game has several options, but two stick out like a sore thumb: A.) The game can be balanced by means of each profession having benefits that others do not. B.) Falling into the holy trinity syndrome and finding a way to make it work with 8 professions, which seems like the direction we are currently headed and hope very desperately that we can reconsider this even being a viable option. What happened to the uniqueness? Why can’t thieves for example, work more effectively in a group, like if you have 3 or more thieves in party you get some inherent bonus to the parties condition damage or some sort of a stealth mechanism that allows for you to be in combat for a short period of time while remaining in stealth? There are many avenues that could be taken, and I feel that those are all being ignored for the generic route.

Home Instance — I don’t feel welcome or at home in my home instance. It’s just another place to me, it’s not personal or inviting. I cannot invite people to my home instance and throw some sort of party with friends. I don’t understand it’s purpose currently, other than to keep us on bait and hook until the next living story update where their may or may not be something that sounds useful for the home instance, this is very frustrating. This place is supposed to be fun, it’s supposed to be where you can always go to have fun and there isn’t anything to do there and it continually gets discredited and overlooked. Have you forgotten about it? Do you still realize it’s there?

Guild Halls — I would feel more welcome in the game if I could go to a place to hang out with my guild where it’s just us, we could sit and crack jokes, enjoy the scenery and throw little guild get-togethers in the guild hall. I think an answer on whether or not this feature is going to happen would be appreciated by many.

Support — This one is exclusive to these forums. I know you guys are very busy trying to get as much done as you can for these big patches, updates, and an expansion in the future. How difficult would it be for one person to keep us updated on what is going on with a few things? Dedicate one person to us if you need to, we like being informed. I will give you a very fair example: I work with customers every day, and all that any of them really care about is that you keep them informed, that’s all we are wanting here. If I happen to take a day longer to work on their equipment than I had originally said, as long as I let the customer know that this is happening and keep them up to date it is NEVER a problem. A lot of bitterness on these forums could be resolved if you could just let us know what’s going on and keep us informed.

I feel as if there is a very large gap between, what the game developers consider fun, and what their customers consider fun, I would like to try to point out some of the things that I consider fun in the game while offering suggestions for what I would consider improvements, in hopes it can help further the development of the game in a constructive manner.

I will start with playing with your friends. Playing with your friends in game is one of the most rewarding experiences and is one of the main reasons people will stay around a game for a long period of time. You enjoy these people and you enjoy experiencing the game world with these people, and the elephant in the room is that, I feel that there are many things that are being done in the game right now that make this experience much harder than it needs to be. These things include:

Mob Scaling — I feel that mobs in the open world should only scale up for events where there are just a ton of people doing them aka the zerg, I know this was a huge selling point for you guys on the initial release of the game, but the thing of it is, a year and a half later, I no longer find this feature appealing, it was a neat idea at first, but it’s not fun when a challenge continually gets in the way of your having fun, and secondly when the challenge is already something you’ve encountered, and it’s harder the second time around. When you face a problem in life and figure it out, chances are the next time around it will be easier, not harder, I would like to see mob scaling operating a bit more logically.

Dungeon Scaling — I think that this and mob scaling are backwards and maybe you guys mixed them up?? Dungeons don’t scale and I feel that they should. I feel the game would be more fun if the dungeons scaled to the level of the players in the party either by an average level or by somehow compensating for someone who is level 40 in Ascalonian Catacombs while the other 4 party members are level 80. I do not feel that this is balanced and it feels not so fun because of that

Collecting — I love collecting things both in real life and in my virtual lives and it feels like every corner that I turn you are waiting to make it more difficult for me to collect items that make my game experience better. If you are going to add more collections in the game please make them somewhat obtainable. My biggest frustration in this is minipets. I should firstly preface with: If I see something on the gem store that I am on the fence about I will buy it regardless of the fact because I know that you guys put a lot of effort into these items and want to reward you for the quality work, however the implementation of these items is not good quality in my opinion. With that being said, I strongly dislike the fact that I can not buy previous years minipets for holiday events when the minipets are account bound to begin with, I feel like someone was just having a bad day and wanted to make some people upset because the logic behind this is escaping me. It is account bound, if I want to buy 10 of them, why can’t I? I would essentially be paying you money and you are refusing, there aren’t many scenarios in life where I’ve seen this happen.

Node Mining — This feature of the game is quite fun. I love going out and farming nodes to either get some materials for my account or to make a little extra gold in game. Scavenging these in the open-world is a really cool thing and I don’t think people realize how fun this can truly be, on my first day in the game I wanted to farm all of the nodes that I saw, this is still a great feature a year and some months later.

Storyline Paths — I have played through the storyline and I felt very disappointed with the turn of events. You play through the game and no matter what you are doing, you are constantly being given a choice: This or that, apples or banana’s, candy corn or veggie pizza. It was very frustrating for me to finish the game the first time and realize that it didn’t matter if I fed the tengu warrior blocking the road a veggie pizza or an omnomberry pie, because the result was fixed and would turn out the same no matter what. This made me feel as if the choices I made, had no impact on the game, which in turn made me feel that the storyline didn’t matter because I was not a part of it any longer.

Guilds — I think guilds are very fun at the moment and they have come a long way since release. I also feel like there are many improvements that can be made and they have been voiced and heard and I’m hoping that those improvements at the very least, will be considered.

Did I miss something or did I correctly read the post a little over 2 weeks ago that said there would be forum changes where the arenanet team would be more interactive with the community via these forums? Is there something big going to happen soon or has that already happened? I’ve seen a few forums move to an archive slot, and the usual living story forum got created, but is there supposed to be more that we haven’t been let in on or is this it?

Vayne.8563:

To be fair, the Christmas content was six weeks, and during those six weeks we had both the end of the tower story arc AND wintersday, most of which remained the same as last year, which is pretty much in line with every MMO I’ve ever played and even Guild Wars 1.

That’s how it works. MMOs create holiday events. They then use them on holidays. There were some changes to the holiday event there year, but they weren’t significant. However, the Kessex stuff was all new, but people seem to forget that existed.

In the meantime most MMOs don’t get updates every 6 weeks in the first place.

It was called a vacation. After months of two week content releases, people got spoiled and used to it. But there were also people on these forums begging them to slow down.

I was one of the people who said the two week release pace was too fast. Many people were happy for the break in content.

I’m okay with them releasing this holiday stuff again, but please, PLEASE allow me to pay you guys for minis in previous years, this is one of my major frustrations. I will pay you money for older minis as would so many others, and since they are account-bound what is the point in discontinuing them?

I feel like the gem store can be summed up by: Account-bound.

I too have passed the 450mb mark. For us slowbies it would be very beneficial to know an approximate size of the patch if there is a dev kind enough to make mention of it

I believe this is related to latency, but it’s been happening more and more lately and it is quite literally only on GW2 that I have issues with “lag”. I can bring up anything else and play anything else, but if I go to send someone a message in game it acts like it doesn’t go through. I kid you not sometimes an entire hour will go by before I see something pop up on my screen saying I sent such and such this message. What would cause that sort of thing? This is a very occasional issue, my only guess is it’s happening at peak times when the servers are full of people.

I have several questions about the lore, being a GW1 veteran, I’m sure some others wouldn’t mind knowing these as well:

• Who are the elder dragons?
• Do we get to see them all?
• Will Drakkar rise from Drakkar Lake?
• Will Kralkatorrik awake from his slumber?
• Is Zhaitan an elder dragon?
• Who is managing the underworld now? Is it still Grenth?
• Is Menzies still stirring up trouble in the Fissure of Woe?
• Who is Abbadon’s unnamed predecessor?
• How old do Asura’s live to be?
• Whatever happened to the Zaishen?
• Will Xunlai Agents ever come back to the game? If not, what happened to them?
• Will there ever be Polymock in GW2? ?
• Were locked chests only a GW1 thing? Will they ever be back?
• Is there someone to follow in Nicholas the Traveler’s footsteps?
• What is really going on with the Hall of Monuments?
• The Mursaat are not in GW2, but if they must keep the Door of Komalie closed, where are they enjoying their tequila shots?
• Will there be more of the Luxon and Kurzick Houses?
• With Palawa Joko being undead in one of the GW1 Campaigns, will we ever see his lovely face again?
• Do we ever find out more about The Forgotten?
• Where is Oola’s Lab today?
• Is there more to the Shiverpeak Mountains?
• Will we venture to the Ring of Fire Islands and discover the Door of Komalie unprotected and opened?
• Will adventurers be able to use something similar to the scrying pool for GW2 in their HoM?
• Where does the Tomb of Primeval Kings currently reside?
• Is there still a Brotherhood of the Dragon?

I’m sure the question has been asked, but I feel it needs to be constantly reminded because the lack of it just seems like bad design, but will we ever get the chance to actually farm in this game? You know what really sucks, holding that carrot out in front of us and then telling us the only path we can take to get it. We can farm dungeons, once a day for some decent cash, we can farm enemies religiously until diminishing returns kick in, we can even play trading post for the ever slightest amount of profit that is barely worth noting.

I don’t see how farming would hurt this game at all and it just seems out of sheer ignorance that it isn’t in the game now. It would help so much of the playerbase feel like they could reach that carrot with a reasonable amount of effort. What are people thinking on this?

@Aerlen I agree that the spawn rates in the tower could definitely use some tweaking, it’s pretty tough to do this meta without a zerg or a large group. I also agree that it would be nice to have the ability to “explore” the tower a bit without being penalized around every corner.

Vick.6805:

I have a feeling the OP’s referring to the ghostly effect as much or more than the actual armor skins.

Yes, it’d be fun to have armors that have effects like this, or even more tonics that allow us to fight transformed.

You are correct, the effect is what would be nice. Legendary weapons have similar effects, on armor it would be nice as well, maybe when that legendary armor comes out this will be a possibility.

I’ll start out by saying that there are some huge improvements in this release and the storyline is starting to come together a bit which is very cool.

The tower climb seems grind as, but I guess we will never get away from a bit of grind. Although I do appreciate the diving achievements, that adds a nice new flavor to things.

I also respect the fact that you made the meta-achievement achievable by itself without dailies, but the option is there for people who want to do the daily achievement method, that is perfect. What does everyone else think?

Do we get an EZ tax form too?

I saw someone running around Divinity’s Reach the other day with the schweetest looking armor. It turns out it was one of these:

Potion of Ascalonian Mages

These things are sweet, I immediately went and crafted twenty of them and had some fun with that for a good hour. What are the chances of getting some armor in the game that looks as awesome as this? I would love to see ghost armor!

This post should not be ignored, all of these are great ideas!! It would be extremely beneficial in PvE moreso in WvW I’m assuming. My only addition would be, to allow players to join a commander through the LFG tool, instead of it being separate, implement it into the current system.

I’ve always felt exploration could be so much more in this game, you have shown off your beautiful scenery very well and I have always longed for something that allowed/gave me a reason to explore every nook and cranny of the game. Sure, I’ll explore a map just for the heck of it once in a while, but when I mean explore, I mean something other than just killing enemies and grabbing skill points.

I propose two new ideas, the first being vanquishing.

Vanquishing: In Guild Wars 1, we had this, and I actually loved it after a while, it was relaxing in a way. What it consisted of in GW1 was going back to an area you’ve already visited and killing all of the enemies in the zone AND it they were a much harder difficulty than normal while their aggro range was much larger as well. Imposing this feature I believe could really help add some depth to the game and give that challenge to those who want it.

Obviously people want a higher reward with a harder challenge, so for this my recommendation is something like 10-25 tier 6 materials for each completion of a vanquished map, make it very hard to complete, similar to a dungeon, but for the map.

Exploration Mode: I love to explore, this game has an endless amount of nooks and crannies that have yet to be discovered. This exploration mode could work a little like this:

~It would be like your regular exploration of the map without the following:
-No Enemies
-No Skill Points
-No Points of Interests
-No Vistas
-No Hearts
This exploration mode would consist of four parts:
-Node Hunting
-Puzzle Jumping (a puzzle or two unique to this map, YES I realize this would add a lot more jump puzzles, but at that point I don’t think they’d need many more)
-Diving (diving goggles could be incorporated into this)
-Unique Map-Based crafting challenges (sort of like GW1 equivalent of the canthan new year), these could act as the events in the zone

So you’d have to gather every node in the map, jump a puzzle or two, find the diving locations, and complete some of the crafting challenges, this would be free of enemies so you could explore the zone for as long as you wanted and not be bothered by those pests.

Leamas.5803:

I think we should be able to change the price of items we have listed on the TP, without having to relist them. That said, I don’t think it should be on a whim, that would just loan itself to terrible abuse. It would be nice if we could change prices of already listed items once every 24 hours, or even once a week (You commit to a price for the week, kind of like a store flyer), without the penalty of a listing fee, which is what we get hit with now if we cancel sales and re-listing them. Being able to change the price would also be far more convenient and less time consuming, leaving more time for actual game play.

This is a marketplace for god’s sake, we should be able to adjust prices to coincide with market trends or just plain put stuff on sale if we want to clear something out of our inventory, without having to unlist and relist…which, of course, cost 5% of the price every time, which can be substantial in the more volatile market areas.

I’m not saying this because I’ve lost money, which I’ve not, or am stuck with a lot of inventory, which I’m not. It just seems like it would be a great evolution to the trading post for anyone who buy and sells.

This seems quite the opposite of evolution. People make their money off of those buy and sell orders, delaying when you are hit with the 15% trading post tax just seems like it would only upset people that use trading post

To delay the listings by 24 hours, would only mean you’d delay the purchasing as well, if I want something off of the trading post, I buy it now because I want it, now. Not later, not in 24 hours, or 1 week, I could go get the item/craft it, but I’m lazy and if I have the money I want to buy it.

I think what you are suggesting is simply an advertising type of feature for the item, before you list it on the trading post, correct?

Good Morning, Firstly I’ll go over the things I’ve enjoyed so far followed by some suggestions for improvements:

Pros:

~The story is intriguing enough that I actually started to care a little about what happened, this is the first time in a long time I can say this about the living story, a huge step in the right direction, please continue improving this.

~You guys have added some variety this time, the escorting of a siege golem, that gives a bit of wvw aspect to the living story, giving everyone of all play styles not just pve a chance to partake in the update. (I’ll also add I rarely WvW).

~You have toned down the grind significantly, I appreciate that I am now able to get the living story achievements in a reasonable amount of time with a slightly more than desired effort, you guys are at a near perfect balance there.

~Daily skill point: I had not planned on completing the meta, until I saw this and I just went: YES! More things for the home instance is always a plus, keep doing that!!

Cons:

~The Toxic Weed Whacker achievement. I don’t want to do this event 25 times, that just seems a bit grindy as, it’s not completely gone. My suggestion is: I would rather do the event once in each of the maps than a solidified number that means absolutely nothing.

~The Halloween update is still here?? I’m not sure whether or not this is a con, but it definitely feels a bit more cluttered than usual with all that stuff sitting about still.

~PvE Downing. YUCK! This just isn’t much fun, being able to see everyone’s ranks is cool for the first couple of times, but do 25 events or so and then you’ll see what I mean. I really wish you guys wouldn’t have done this, I don’t know if the pvp crowd enjoys pve more because of it, but for the pve-er it just kind of sucks.

~I thought I’d add one other thing here that i failed to mention in the original response. Giving the option to complete the achievement through only dailies is cool, but making dailies a requirement for the meta is not. This goes against your play how you want philosophy which we do hear.

Thanks for reading.

Gendarren Fields has one in the bottom right hand corner of the map, that is the one I missed, hope that helps others.

I don’t have much to add except for on the topic of aggro. Aggro is pretty mild in this game and in dungeons especially it would be nice if it could be cranked up a bit. Also the ratio of aggro to how long the enemy stays on you is pretty insane. I may run past a grawl and have to be within a few feet to get his aggro, but then he will tail me for the next 45 seconds as I try to get away, I’ve never understood why they did it this way, I’d rather have it be the opposite to be honest. Larger aggro range, but less tailing you range.

I’m finding many people in the same boat I was in not too long ago. I hunted these achievement points religiously, until ANET upped the ante, which is fine, but I thought I would keep up and I couldn’t. I was spending 6 hours a night on SAB part 2 and I could not complete it all, I simply didn’t have the time. That’s when I realized, I needed to 1.) step out of the game for a while, 2.) do something in the game that I enjoyed. Seriously take a break from the game and do something else if it has you this frustrated, do not feel obligated to log in even to get the daily, because that’s all you are doing now. When I need a break from it I suggest flash games, as they are small and easy to get started on. Then when you come back it’s like you have a whole new perspective on GW2 and have a new list of goals and are ambitious to achieve them.

I would much rather suffer this error than have to do the captcha. If you wait 5 seconds in between sales you can sell each item, just count 5 seconds in between, not that big of a deal, or just wait for your buffer to recover, go do a dungeon, farm some dragonite ore, or finish that miniature collection.

Inverted.7439:

Instead of rabbits what if you had the animal of your PvP rank wondering around :O people would definitely want dragon & pheonix rank. (flying sharks for shark rank!?!?)

When they create the shark rank I want a shark tank in my home instance! PLEASE DO THIS! This would be epic.

That is quite the impressive feedback form, I’d at least try it a few times, though not the simplest to fill out, it would work for those who WANT to leave feedback.

Maybe I’m just hopeful in the direction it’s going, but with that added halloween node in our home instance I’m starting to see a trend developing that makes the game much more personal and enjoyable. I just wanted to take a moment to suggest a few items I feel would greatly benefit the home instance:

~More nodes: I made the comment to a friend the other day, it would be awesome if I could get my gathering daily done in my home instance, I hope that is still a possibility.

~Crafting stations: While people will hem and haw over this one, I think having the ability to get crafting stations in your home instance would be very worthwhile, make it cost gems per crafting station or something along those lines, but I for one wouldn’t complain if that were the case, those that really wanted it would get it and those who didn’t want to get the gems could still use the ones freely available in the major cities.

~Bank: This just kind of makes sense if this were in there. Being able to access it in your home world would make things much easier.

~Display case: I know this may be something FAR down the road, but something similar to the Hall of Monuments in GW1 would be pretty neat in your home instance. Something to display all of your mini pets/armor collection

~Rabbits: Some little creatures to slay possibly for that daily as I see so many people traveling to that place in Rata Sum where creatures spawn by the droves.

~Some scenery: You guys already know how to make the GW2 world look amazing, our home instances should be no different, having something pretty to look at for hours on end while you are doing nothing would be a nice addition.

~Decorations: Some options to decorate your home instance with different buildings, trees, bushes, flowers, walls, statues, something. If it were me, I’d be selling these decorations only through the trading post.

During the open-beta and the beginning of the release (if memory is serving me) you guys had an in-game poll system. I think it would be beneficial if we had access to filling out that poll in game again for things like Living Story and the personal story quests. We could give detailed information on pro’s/con’s of each aspect of the living story release/personal story. The 5 points to rate on were nice and having a small section below for brief comments wouldn’t be so bad either.

I’m still of the consensus that permanent content would be cool to have, however I could see how it would start to take up space, and as the OP has suggested if we were given an ample amount of time to complete the living story in a casual manner then I think that more people may enjoy it, I know that is my biggest frustration is the 2-week time frame to not only complete the achievements if you want to do them, but immerse yourself in the content, if it had a small story, or a dungeon, jump puzzles, you want to play those while they are here at a casual pace. More people would be able to enjoy the content if it wasn’t out of their reach.

This I could agree with, I think this content is/was passed off to the players as casual and it is clearly not that in some parts of it. I wouldn’t mind if it was casual and I think the frustration most people have is merely the time frame if that changed or if the content became more of a casual thing then I think many people would change their opinion on it overall. Even if I don’t like the living story, but I can still play through it each month I would be able to enjoy it, not being able to play through it because you don’t devote “said” amount of time seems very unlike the flow of events they have passed off previously. I’m not saying all of the living story has been like this either, just the past few months.

jsduke.6537:

I love the temporary content. I’m glad they remove stuff, and I hope they continue to do it.

Living story means that new things come, and old things go. Living = change. The removed content adds to the lore of the game. It is, quite literally, the history of the game. It’s something that no other game has the balls to do, and I think it’s awesome.

I get that you are disappointed that you missed some stuff, but that was your choice. You didn’t care enough to play it when it was in the game, but suddenly you care now? The game is free. Play whenever you want, as much as you want. But if you decide to skip content, that’s your choice.

Bookmark this page:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/releases/

Check it every couple of weeks or so. If you like what they’re doing in the game,

LOG IN AND DO IT!

I think you may miss the point that some of us are trying to make. I view it like this: I will treat GW2 as a service that I pay/have paid for while not having a monthly subscription I am allowed to have an opinion on such matters of where the game is going, and so is every other player of the game. You treat it like people are fools and imbeciles for trying to post their opinion on the forums in hope that the developers will look at it and see something they maybe hadn’t taken into consideration. It is not wrong to want to see the game go in a direction so that you may enjoy the game for years to come.

While GW2 is free to play I understand you can’t hold it to exactly the same standards, but I’ve said before if the content was something I enjoy I’ve usually spent some money on the gem store during that 2 week phase to let them know that it was something I liked, I am okay with this method, setup. They can continue releasing content that not everyone likes, but it would be wise of them to keep as many players as they can because that means more potential revenue, if people are leaving they miss out on that option. I don’t think most of the people here are demanding that they make a sudden change, they just want to see the game go in a direction that they’d enjoy and there are some pretty good suggestions on here about how to do so.

jsduke.6537:

TL;DR

Your post would be ten-times better if it were half as long.

Super Adventure Box: I don’t care. Don’t like it, didn’t do it, won’t miss it. But for you, they will bring it back. Enough people liked it and did it, so it will be returning. It’s recurring content. So relax; it’s coming back.

Living Story: LS DOES have a permanent impact on the world. Tequatl is different now. Twilight Arbor is different now. We discovered an Aetherblade base in the mountains outside Lion’s Arch and now it is a new permanent JP! All of those things are permanent content changes from Living Story. Exactly what ANet said they would do.

There ARE remnants of LS events in the world. My bank is full of them! Skins from Bazaar of the Four Winds, Accessories from the Southsun content, new Aetherblade gear skin sets in the Gem Store. You literally can’t walk through Tyria without kicking bits and pieces of the history of recent Living Story events.

I don’t do FoTM, so I can’t comment there, except that I’m pretty sure they DID add a new fractal as a result of the Election LS cycle. If not, it’s on the way. Those things take time, though.

Dungeons are fine. With the new lfg tool, I have no problem finding or making a party to do any dungeon at any time.

The living story content that has stayed is such a minute portion, why would it be so much more difficult to implement all of the previous Jump Puzzles back to the game and to implement all of the dungeons back to the game? I think I may not have been clear I’m aware of this minute amount of content that stayed, but it is so small in comparison to everything they’ve released and taken out that I just don’t understand why they would leave 1 portion of 1 updated in, but take everything else out. The bazaar of four winds was one of my favorite updates, that was a new location with some beautiful scenery, and we may never see it again.

Jaga.2084:

Play it now or never. The more players leave the game because of this, the sooner it gets real content; or it gets shut down.

Once enough people are upset and off on other games THEN they’ll change things. By that time people will be so fed up it will be years before they even consider giving it a chance again. Their approach is not only baffling, but unique in the fact that they were filling us in on all the details and then some at one time and I greatly appreciated that. The first few months of the game, we not only had updates, but we had an idea of their direction through Facebook, Reddit and some other means. I was grateful that they shared with us their intentions for the game, now it’s even tough to sift through the update notes, let alone get a non-public relations response. The communication on their side has done a complete 180.

I still chuckle every time I come to the forums and see that note about these forums being a temporary form of communication, because I wonder if we may have two different definitions.

This is the post I’ve been looking for! Hi nice to meet you OP. Time after time again I’ve met many players in the game that just think this storyline is the greatest and the living story enhances it so much I will be blunt, I don’t know what crack they have been smoking, but it must be some good stuff. Guild Wars 1 lore was so in depth and so detailed and like you have said you can go off on a tangent and enjoy the little side quests that just make the game so much better. M.O.X. had an awesome little storyline for example. My only thought is that maybe, they took the guy who named all of the bosses in Guild Wars 1 and made him the lead writer for the main storyline, no offense to him, but this is just dull and boring, I get better entertainment out of watching paint dry because the Guild Wars 2 main storyline is absolute trash. I don’t want something original or unique because there is no need for that, you guys do not need to recreate the wheel, you have a great head start with the storyline from Guild Wars 1, BUILD OFF OF IT!!! I play MMO’s because they have some of the greatest storyline of any game I have ever played, I quit playing the storyline of GW2 because it not only lacks depth and ingenuity, but it in no way builds off of the GW1 storyline, and you have so many opportunities to make this a great story, why wait? I would recommend hiring those writers back from GW1 because they knew how to make a story that involved the player and made them care. That’s how I feel about the GW2 story, I really don’t care what happens because it is all about one NPC who I haven’t been given no reason to care about since the first quest you do. If you guys need some creative ideas for storyline with exceptional twists and turns check out:

~The Walking Dead
~Breaking Bad
~Game of Thrones

Thanks.

ThiBash.5634:

A fix for the ascended ring drops could be to make the salvagable and give a (small) chance to turn into things needed for ascended crafting (like say, dragonite ore which you won’t get if you do a lot of fractals and no bosses).

Yes making them salvageable or even being able to mystic forge them, if we could get rid of them and get something in return at this point it would be nice. Anything would be better than nothing, even if it were one dragonite ore per ascended ring, they’d be worth more than they are now.

Finally onto miscellaneous items namely: Tonics & Minipets

~I will preface with, I have no problem spending some real life $$$ to get an in-game item if it is worth it, how do I determine that you might ask? I used to collect mini pets for the game, but realized that some of these minis are obtainable for less time than the living story content is, which seems pretty insane to me. I have mini pets that I would like to go back and get from previous months content, that we have not been told one way or another if you will ever be able to get them again, for a collector this is an issue, and frankly I just gave up on that because I want to have the ability to collect all of the mini pets, even though I may not do it, I would still buy the new ones that came out if I had a “chance” at completing the set.

~Tonics are a huge fail in this game in my mind. In GW1 you guys had it figured out perfectly!!! I want the ability to get an everlasting tonic of something, I don’t want to turn into a moa 1 time for 5 minutes. And if the tonic is everlasting I would like for the ability to use it as often as I can. I have so many worthless tonics because they are only 5 minutes, and I may get booted out of the game or lose internet connection or switch cities to check on something and I am done looking cool after that, please make tonics something desirable because right now I don’t know that many people care and they just seem like filler content until I can have one I can use permanently.

Thanks for listening, feel free to discuss.

Moving on to Fractal of the Mists.

Truth be told it’s a nice gesture, but needs some serious work, you have thrown us the bone, but not all of us can chew it. Fractals is a frustrating mess with some clear bugs in it still that need worked out. A few suggestions for Fractals:

~We’ve had the content for close to a year now and have had the same few fractals, some variety would be greatly appreciated
~It would be nice to be able to choose 2 out of the 3 fractals (via party-wide vote) and have the 3rd fractal you do be random instead of just having them all be random, then there would be more consistency and people would have to spend so long “rolling” for a fractal. Your third fractal would be random and could not be rolled, but you could choose the first two, balancing these out so they are equally challenging would be nice as well, the overly long/challenging ones: Underground Facility, Uncategorized (at higher levels) and Volcanic could be toned down a bit while the overly easy ones: Swampland, Urban Battlegrounds, and Aquatic Ruins could be made more difficult.
~Expanding the variety of rewards you can get from the fractal chests would help immensely, people doing high level fractals have done it plenty of times and to be honest it gets very boring and uneventful to continue getting the same ascended ring every other time that you cannot use anymore, I’m not saying these have to be ascended items, I would gladly take a guaranteed rare from the chest or heck even something unique like an everlasting tonic that you can only get from the fractal chest, a minipet, something, add some spice to the mix, we love that.

Moving to dungeons, dungeons have a few issues:
~People only do a couple of them
~There is one path done for those select dungeons
~The other dungeons are ignored for the most part
~Dungeon armor is far too easy to obtain

On a side note I think the storyline for all of the dungeons are very good, especially the explorable paths

It would seem people focus entirely on Honor of the Waves or Citadel of Flame both which have paths that can be done in a short period of time and for that reason alone, people do them. There could be others, but these are the two I have witnessed. My question has always been, why don’t people do these other paths? They take too long, or they are too entailed is the response I usually get. I think dungeons could use a serious balancing. Not in the sense of AC, but rather making them all equally doable in about the same period of time for about the same amount of effort.

The only other thing I have about dungeons is that the armor is extremely easy to obtain. I can easily deck out a character with dungeon armor in 3 days, easily, I don’t even have to play but a few hours per day doing dungeons. While I enjoy this, and I enjoy being able to have dungeon armor on my characters, I think it’s time that tiers be introduced.

Tier 1 dungeon armor could be what it is now, rare/exotic armor. A basic armor set that can get you going if you are without armor, easily obtained in a few days time so you are able to get back to the conquest you are doing on that character. This takes approximately 10 days of doing two paths of the dungeon once per day.

Tier 2 dungeon armor could be an alternate version of the tier 1 armor, with some advanced stats that aren’t quite the stats of ascended armor, but are in between. This armor could take two to three weeks to obtain at a reasonable amount of playtime, approximately 20 days of doing two paths of the dungeon once per day.

Tier 3 dungeon armor could be of ascended rarity with the same attributes as tier. This armor would takes you three to four weeks + at a reasonable amount of playtime, approximately 30+ days of doing two paths of the dungeon once per day. If we could get some ascended weapons this way as well it would be very cool, though I don’t know your future plans for that route. Being able to obtain items in different ways is nice, because it allows us the choice of how we’d like to go about it. Saying we have this armor in the game, but this is the only way to get it is frustrating. Legendary weapons being the exception in that we always like having something to work towards that is long term and cannot be achieved easily.

Let me start by saying that this game has had a few great improvements throughout the past year,

~The wallet (genius idea)
~The ability to buy more vault space
~Magic Find now being account bound
~Cool new skins which aren’t obtainable in just 3 days (ascended weapons)
~LFG Tool, though extremely delayed
~Many others that have slipped my mind currently, but I am grateful for

The downside is I’ve had this feeling since the living story content was first mentioned that we’ve been treated as temporary and so it would seem most people are coming to play the game only temporarily or not at all (myself doing the latter). What are the chances you guys will change this to make the content available at the same time each year? That would be awesome, I don’t want to feel as if I’ve missed out on content because I cannot complete it fast enough which is exactly what has happened in the past months.

I feel like longer/more entailed content such as Super Adventure Box should be a semi-temporary event or just make it permanent and instead of releasing full blown expansions for the entire game you could release mini expansions each year for this content that was still doable, expanding on content rather than depth.

I’ll be honest in saying that the fact that you added a ton of depth to Super Adventure Box this time and then factored in the two-week time period to complete the achievements before new bi-monthly content was released, this feat really makes me not want to play Guild Wars 2 ever again.

I thought that “Living Story” once mentioned that this was content that would leave a permanent impact on the world. This is everything but the truth. Some things I would like to see:

~Living content can be temporary as long as it is replayable in the future (yearly @ said time of year would be preferred)
~Permanent traces of each bit of content, Things like the jumping puzzles in each release should stay in the game permanently, people who enjoy the jumping puzzles don’t want to see them go away, and please stop making them part of the meta-achievement, many people do not want to have go through them as they are extremely difficult, I have compassion for these people regardless of my love for jumping puzzles. Dungeons from these living stories should also stay in the game, because that molten alliance one was just fun as heck!
~I’m still thinking Super Adventure Box should be more permanent somehow. Worlds 3 and 4 are planned I know, but I think enough people enjoy it that you could go beyond that, but you have to allow us time to enjoy the content you make, and I think that will be resolved once we get off this living story turn and burn scenario.

Up for discussion:

->Weapon Skills
->Dungeon similar to FoW/UW
->Guild Halls
->Elite Skills
->Dual Professions

Weapon Skills

I would like to see more skill variety I think it would give the combat system in the game so much more depth and a bit of personalization.

Instead of having your weapons determine your skills, you could have an option of weapon skills.

I know I’m generalizing, but take any weapon, you have 5 skills currently for that weapon. Each skill could have some variant like a power based one, a defense based one, and then a healing one. This would add some customization to the skill bar and not feel like you are locked in to using a certain skill and for skills you don’t like, you can find a better match.

Each skill could be customizable, skill 1 could be power, defense, or healing. Skill 2 could be power, defense, or healing, and so on.

FoW/UW-like dungeon/farm

The fact of the matter is, I do not entirely hate farming and I don’t think other players do either, judging from the minion events/champion farming. I like having the option to go out and mindlessly lose myself killing a virtual creature, that is nice every now and again, while I don’t want to do it 24 hours a day, it is nice to be able to fall back on that. Vaettir farming was popular in Guild Wars 1, as were Fissure of Woe and Underworld farms. What will it take to get something like that in the game? I’ve met few people who greatly disliked either of the above, and I think it would really bring some things to the table for the player.

Guild Halls

I don’t know if we have an ETA on this, but I’m very excited to see what arenanet does with these, just curious if anyone knew of a timeframe?

Elite skills

It is no secret that some of the elite skills are just bad. Some variety in that field would be nice, maybe give each profession an additional 5 elite skills to choose from.

Dual Professions

In GW1, one of the highlights was you could have two professions on one character. You had your primary profession and then you had a secondary which you could “unlock” and then use on that character. You could have any of the other professions as your secondary, with the exception of your primary, so that you couldn’t have the same profession twice. That added a great mixup to the grand scheme and I feel that it would be beneficial in GW2.

I’m curious to know everyone’s thoughts. Happy hunting!