Guild Wars 2

draxynnic – that is true, and it only happened roughly a century ago – well after Usoku’s reforms – so Cantha never was actually closed to trade, just non-humans (I seem to recall the entire crew of that ship was human, mostly Krytan I think).

Yeah, I got that suspicion from Taimi’s journaling. How exactly they plan to do it, whether they’ve done it before (or even make the trip on a regular basis), and how it’ll go, is not so clear. They obviously don’t need to land much, and some of them have apparently never set foot on the ground, so my guess is they might just send down “culturally acceptable” representatives to deal with the Canthans.

As far as I recall, Cantha isn’t under an actual embargo – I think it was the activities of Zhaitan that prevented anyone from attempting the voyage by sea (I don’t think “Bubbles” actually came into the picture there, though I could be mistaken). So it’s not unthinkable that they would welcome traders who managed to find their way to Cantha by air…

One thing I’m curious about is whether they’ve ever attempted the trip before, though. I don’t recall any extremely strong hints that they have; their architecture and decor do have a resemblance, though, which might mean something. On the other hand, I note that they are also tied in with Glint, a Tyrian dragon – although I forget whether that was always the case – and Zhaitan’s forces also included quite a few undead dragons which could have made even an airborne journey perilous, at least until the Pact moved in. It’s not exactly clear how successful they’ve been at mopping up that part.

Tengu has been top of my wish-list since the GW: Factions preview event. Which was over eight years ago so yes, I’ve been waiting a while. (They were interesting mobs in Prophecies too but back then I didn’t expect ArenaNet to do anything much with them.)

I don’t honestly expect them to show up without some kind of solution to the armor problem. I know armor is going to look worse than the problems with charr otherwise – although I would take them regardless and just avoid those skins – but it wouldn’t make for good press for sure. Still, people continue to ask for better-functioning armor for charr, and it should be technically possible to fix – so I’m not giving up yet…

Largos are also interesting. I know people have concerns about their “mystique”, and they might be right, but so far I wouldn’t mind seeing more of them.

Stormdancer.4972:

Gryphons! … okay, second to that, the Tengu.

As a new ranger pet, that would be nice, actually. They’re not going to be playable though.

Working in the same company for 10+ years in the games industry seems to be a rare thing, so that doesn’t really surprise me. If it even is true (I personally don’t remember any statements to that effect but I don’t read everything).

Whether season 2 will be like an expansion I don’t know, I can only speculate. I recall Colin Johanson suggesting in an interview that they were considering the idea of presenting that sort of content through the living story – whether they pulled the trigger on that idea, who knows, but it seems possible. Now that the living story is formally arranged relative to the personal story, will share many of the same mechanics, and we have a new dragon to deal with, most of the pieces are in place.

I do expect that if they introduce some of the other “expansiony” things like professions, races – they will come through the gem store. Those seem too big an investment to hand out for free. Core gameplay changes have to be released to everyone though.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

Except that you have to be able to mine it – that’s why the Quarry exists, obviously it’s not as simple as going out with a pickaxe and hacking away at any random bit of the Jade Sea. Just like anything else it’s a specialised skill, which is what enables them to make money from it. It’s no different to farming, technically anyone can get hold of some land and some cows, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to be able to turn a profit from it.

Imagining for the sake of argument that there isn’t much of a quality difference – why wouldn’t it be that simple? Open-pit mining does require substantially more resources, yes, but if the product were the same as what’s on the surface, why bother going to those lengths? Cracking bits off the surface will produce the same goods, and you don’t need to spend huge amounts of labor getting to it.

That’s how our Chalcolithic/Bronze Age ancestors used to get their metal ore – from deposits on or close to the surface. The serious underground mining operations didn’t start until that ran out – otherwise the use of metal would never have happened as early as it did.

If the Jade Sea was sufficiently dangerous, that would make some difference – though I doubt the Luxons would have the manpower to police a border of such immense size. It also doesn’t justify open-cast mining from a single site versus moving around – unless you’re turning that site into a fortress, anyway, since there are defensibility issues to worry about. (JQ being attacked so regularly would make it unlikely that that was a significant factor, though – if I were the Luxons and the specific site didn’t matter that much, I’d set up somewhere further from the border.)

So, we’re basically back at the quality thing for a sufficiently strong explanation – which has some interesting complications. It has to be much better, and it has to be obvious what the difference is (otherwise it’s cheaper to get average jade and pretend it’s good). Perhaps the magical properties of this jade are so much stronger that it can be used for things that more pedestrian material can’t.

Ensuring quality is perhaps the biggest problem to be solved with player-generated content. There are lots of people playing the game, but most of them are not Michelangelo.

I am OK with this; they’re offering a service they weren’t offering before. Instead of missing out entirely, forever, you can play an episode you missed for the price of around a couple of those lousy BL chest keys.
It also helps me in an additional way; if I’m too busy to play much for a couple weeks, I can just log in once (which takes maybe 5 minutes to update, which I can do while eating breakfast or something) and “lock in” that chapter for free. I can’t really complain about this.

JQ jade must be an awful lot better to justify the effort of going there for it… if the rest of the jade sea was remotely comparable the inflationary effects of having that much of it would be amazing and there’d be little point trading it (except out of Cantha perhaps, but the price would be almost entirely transport costs unless the Empire intentionally restricted quantities). In much the same way water isn’t particularly valuable in the real world.

If they could get the warband/krewe/whatever into the living story at some point that’d be great. Races that don’t get that can just have arbitrary companions I guess.

Having Skrittsburgh (I still can’t get over how silly that name is) do something during the LS would be great – I don’t know how I’d feel about skritt being the focus of an entire LS season though. That’s a lot of time, and I’m not that big a fan.

This idea kind of sounds like EVE… it’s interesting but I don’t know if it’s the tone ArenaNet is aiming for with GW2. I wonder whether I’d like it… or whether I wouldn’t… I guess it depends on a lot of things.

Happens in real life all the time

Not that that makes it any better, just… you know.

I don’t have a norn ranger to test with, but on my guardian, popping Bear Form (or any others when I’ve tried them in past) removes and locks all utility skill slots. The part I’m not getting is how you’re going to have any signets stay in effect if it does that.

“Is this behavior/tool allowed?”: relatively easy question to answer
“What are you doing with next LS?”: probably not easy question to answer meaningfully without violating NDA

I’m guessing that has something to do with it. If answers are not readily forthcoming, it’s because they don’t have them.

Mostly I’m OK with what’s there. There are just a couple places there doesn’t seem to be enough variety: medium charr armor that doesn’t clip and medium armor that isn’t trenchcoats.

The two are probably related.

Elite forms strip utility skills, so Ranger signets will do nothing. I’m not sure about traits, they may or may not work but they also tend to have marginal-at-best effects.

I figure the “racial skill” status is the only reason they’ve been passed up for rebalancing since release – there were some minor bug fixes and skill tip changes but that’s all that I can remember. It does seem strange to even have racial skills if you’re not supposed to use them though.

Scrambles.2604:

Of course, the TS server that is owned and moderated by the players would still be the best for WvW (because you can keep spies off the server), but it would be nice to have the option of an open TS that players didn’t have to pay for that also didn’t require you to be verified by another player that may not be available all the time.

Stormbluff Isle seems to do this sort of thing – there is a TS3 server with channels for general PvE play (though megaserver changes a few things) and some channels for WvW, which someone has to verify you actually play on the server to join.

If the community had some sort of standard practices, I imagine most of the issues that in-game chat is typically introduced to fix would disappear. e.g. if there was an official-unofficial voice chat server for dungeon groups that you just generally know you should log onto for this sort of thing.
Setting that up is easier said than done, that’s the problem.

Does being downscaled to 16 really hurt that much anyway? Never stopped people running champion trains in lowbie areas.

To be honest, if GW2 needs to do anything with voice (of which I’m not convinced…), I think partnering with one of those third-party vendors would be the better move. Then you could work on integration and rearranging players/channels, without re-inventing the wheel on getting VOIP servers to run efficiently, which would be a fool’s errand.

The next problem is that the specifications for how exactly players/channels will be managed, who runs the servers and how/when you get the players joining, dealing with account integration and all the rest of that stuff… well, that could get pretty messy. (And going all in-house wouldn’t simplify it much.)

I think the biggest problem is that the kind of system most people are going to imagine requires ArenaNet to either host or pay for the servers. The extra resource demands that would impose (bandwidth particularly) would probably have you staring subscription fees in the face pretty soon.

Not sure that was any big secret

The GW2 dev team has actually expanded since release, if I recall. Funding isn’t an issue – it’s probably just that most of what they’ve invested in has been non-obvious stuff or isn’t done yet.

If NCSoft had actually scaled back funding on GW2, it’s hard to imagine ArenaNet wouldn’t have to lay off staff (or transfer them to a new game, if they had one).

Just like the concept to which the title refers, it’s not really intrinsically harmful – it depends how it’s used and you probably shouldn’t rely on it exclusively.

In the case of temporary content, it depends if your dev team is big enough.

MMOs rarely seem to turn up at E3, indeed. Mostly “AAA” games from big-business publishers that can’t be bothered getting too personally involved with fans anyway. And probably mobile games as well, since they’re the new media darlings.

ANet’s events tend to be Gamescom and the various incarnations of PAX – few months until the next one I think.

Thanks Tamias, I felt much the same way. I’ve seen a lot of “you should fire xyz person / team” posts, and wondered if those posters had considered what they would be thinking if someone came to their workplace and said that about them, to their boss, in front of their face. I do believe the nature of the Internet is responsible for some of that – I very much doubt the same people would be as brazen in real life where things don’t seem so detached.

Personally, I suspect the problems with storytelling in LS Season 1 fell to production issues – mostly having to cut corners to meet deadlines and resource constraints. If the writers had something more detailed in mind, but constantly had to scale back the places they were going to do that plot exposition, it’s pretty easy to imagine that any story with too much nuance is not going to come out how they wanted it to.
You can fix that with better planning, and the last few episodes of the LS seemed to improve the hit/miss ratio – so I think it’s something that can be fixed without requiring a new writing staff. They’ve had a year and a bit to learn what tends to happen in this format, and might be better at making it work now.

Of course, they also might not… I just prefer not to be a kitten when I don’t understand what people have to deal with. They do have to get better though. Regardless of the reasons, Scarlet came across like a cartoon villain, and nobody wants a repeat of that.

The OP may have been able to pick a better title, but that’s hardly a crime against humanity…?

Aerinndis.2730:

Video in https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/guild-wars-2-launches-in-china/ is sooooo beautiful! Nice blend of GW2 and live action. Makes me really anticipate the Festival of the Four Winds!

Yeah, it is fairly well-made actually – it can basically stand on its own as a music video.

The goggles were on the ship, but not way up the top. I saw videos of some people getting (very close to) there with help from mesmers, but it wasn’t something I had the patience for – especially since it doesn’t net you anything but bragging rights.

Diving from above the clouds is pretty awesome though. 99% fatal in real life, but hey.

Since ArenaNet staff do actually read the forums (despite insistences to the contrary), I’m pretty sure they already know what the weaknesses of the major changes in the feature release were. They might not know what they’ll do about them yet, since they are really complicated to solve – which would explain a lack of comments in their PR releases/interviews to that effect (that and it’s only been a week) – but I really don’t think the sky is falling yet.

I do think they probably unloaded on themselves a great deal more refund requests from the gem store than they really wanted to. That one’s going to have to be a priority. Either that or just weather it and assume it’s a one-time problem, I guess that’s an option. The talk of people wanting to mix-and-match (and dye) outfit pieces seemed fairly compelling though.

There’s no really perfect solution to this – yeah it’s an awful lot of stuff to do to get access to a weapon skin (although I would argue GW2 legendaries are far worse, maybe even ascendeds), but selling it on the BLTC is spitting in the face of the GW1 players, and there’s no way to make it not be.

So this is the way things will probably have to be. You can pick up the 14 HoM points or make do without it – up to you.

At this point I think it would be nice if dyes were bound to pieces of armor – so if you swap armor sets you can use different colors for each without having to reselect them each time. The bank wardrobe tab made me realize it’d also be nice to be able to pick dyes a little more sanely on the previewer – currently I basically have to look up the dye to preview on the BLTC if I want to check that out at the same time, to figure out how an armor piece I haven’t got would look when dyed in various ways. It’s a little awkward. If I could select dyes from a palette in the previewer instead of the “preview” option on a dye item, I think we’d be in business.

Wardrobe as a whole is great for better visibility of the things I can get though. It was much harder to find that info before.

Now I just have to figure out what to do with my two leftover transmutation stones. Hmm.

I don’t know why it’s so important for armor skins to have a story behind them. The crafted skins in game at release didn’t.

For the weird stuff like Zodiac, OK… but Rampart/Strider’s, does it really matter?

GW3 is not going to happen for many years yet. Once GW2 is closer to 10, maybe, but it’s too expensive to go build a new game when what you’ve already got still has plenty of time and space to grow.

I was checking through the medium armor sets in the new wardrobe, and found a couple I didn’t know about – a “Sneakthief” set and a “Strider’s” set. The latter appears to be a gem shop item, but I can’t find any mention of Sneakthief on the wiki, or this forum, and even Google doesn’t turn up any results as far as I can tell. Does anyone know about that armor set and where you get it from? It looks like it might be crafted from what I see on the trading post, but I’m not really sure how.

Side note, both those two armor sets seem to work really well for charr characters – a very rare thing for medium armor.

Yeah, the bobbleheads are definitely reminiscent of the GW1 stunts. It’s kind of funny that it actually works… although not as funny as it is that it also works on dolyaks.

Interestingly, it’s a Tuesday, and it’s exactly two weeks’ before the feature pack and after the last LS release. I know they said they were taking a break but odds are good something’s still happening.

I’m not really sure that it’d be SAB though. That’s the kind of thing you might as well announce, because it’s not a practical joke anymore…

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Evon’s name will gone down in history as the greatest charr LA ever saw.

I would probably have to give that title to Sykox actually…

Looks to me like he has always been there.

I agree, but I’m not really optimistic about this ever getting fixed.

I have just two things that I think really matter to me for story quality… that aren’t there already. The supporting cast (Rox, Taimi, et al) are already there and you should continue to make use of them.

1. There are a lot of things to cover in GW2 – probably need to keep going at a decent clip. The game might have a lifetime of maybe 10 years if it’s doing great, and there are a lot of stories to tell in that time. Mordremoth showing up was important, but I don’t think it justified 15 months’ story just on that.

2. Using what’s already in the lore where possible. Sometimes you need to make up new stuff to tell the story you want to, but Scarlet went absolutely wild with it – a new faction every couple months, the watchknights that seemed to come from nowhere, the ley-lines which seemed to come from nowhere, that drill the size of the Puget Sound that she managed to keep hidden somehow while it was under construction…? Not saying villains shouldn’t be able to surprise you, but it feels less cheap when you can explain what they did without resorting to “it’s magic!”.

Yeah, the most logical explanation is it’s a name-drop for a future NPC. The name might be a WP pet reference, sure – it wouldn’t make a lot of sense for the whole mini to be, considering… it’s not a crane (which is what I’m guessing the original was)

To me this is really more of a case study in why stats shouldn’t be fixed for things as expensive as ascended armor is. The game changes from time to time, and if it changes and your gear doesn’t, you have to spend more months re-acquiring gear, with no guarantee that it won’t be obsolete before you’ve even finished collecting it. Either the price has to come down, or stats have to be swappable – otherwise it’s just not worth it, as many people may be about to find out the hard way.

I definitely don’t think any one-time exceptions should be made specifically for berserker gear though. Metas generally do change, because they usually end up getting nerfed sooner or later – if you refund people who bought gear for that they’ll probably use it to switch to the next meta until that’s nerfed, and the cycle will repeat ad infinitum. Really all it does is encourage people to overuse the meta even more than they already do, since they know they’ll get bailed out once it stops working.

Yeah, the boat is a little strange anyway. There aren’t too many places to go in that cave, unless you take it underwater, and that… is a problem.

Maybe someone thought there might be fish, and dragged it up that rock wall.

It’s not going to be gone forever – there are already people rebuilding things. I don’t think it’ll happen quickly though.

Ah, I was wondering how to get there.

Between the two lion statues in Old Lion’s Arch where Firstwatch Sergio used to be, there is a tunnel leading up to an underground lake. A path from this rejoins the path leading up to the Diverse Ledges waypoint. There doesn’t seem to be anything going on there, but the path appears to be new.

I find it very difficult to fault people for cheesing a workaround to get items that are basically a scam. There is no way BL keys are fairly priced.

I believe the content it skips is just the group event stuff, though I’m not sure as I’ve never managed to get all the way through the group events yet. It didn’t seem to leave anything horribly unexplained.

I’ve tried three times on SBI, failed all three times.
At this point I’m kind of hoping for a “skip” option – this is just feeling like a waste of time now.

Same reason as you’d want more than just one race in general, I would think.

Apparently patience is not one of the seven virtues of bushido, but it is a virtue nonetheless
I have a suspicion there will be some warning or at least a lead-up if new playable races are to be introduced. Could happen this year, but also could not. I’d rather just wait and see than get my hopes up on every little thing.

This is far from the only game I’ve heard people saying isn’t properly random… but somehow, they never manage to provide any real statistical evidence to back up those claims – just anecdotes, which have a tendency to cherry-pick themselves.