Guild Wars 2

I m going to reiterate my point on page 4:

IMO almost everything in the last year that is in any way related to ascended gear has been counter productive. Ascended gear while solving the need for vertical progression of a vocal minority has created numerous problems for everyone else. Not only that but if the time spent on making this gear was spent on actual content and improvements the game would be far better off.

In any case if you really want to “fix” ascended gear you first need to find the problems it creates for the game. Here is my list in order of severity:

1. It is not a definitive end of vertical progression. Pouring all your time and gold only to then see better gear 3 months down the line. You d say that wont happen but it already did: with ascended gear. ANET refuses to give us a definitive answer on this. Why should i waste all my money on it if this is not the end of vertical progression? Even with a given word such as a new manifesto many of us would be slow to trust ANET again on this again.
2. Even if you can get past point 1 ascended gear locks you in a specific stat build. It destroys any and all variety one could have in terms of build and stat combinations. With ascended you will only be playing one build or a small set of very similar builds using the same weapons and armor.
3. Not only that but it is completely alt unfriendly. Making it account bound would only make it tedious to switch between characters.
4. It takes a lot of money and time as well as time gating to acquire. The whole purpose of its existence is based on this. The grinders wanted something to “work for” and they got it but the rest of us never asked for this idea of an endgame hamster stat wheel.
5. There is only one feasible way of acquiring it: putting ridiculous amounts of money into your crafting professions, crafting useless exotics, grinding specific areas of the game.
6. It makes content easier and necessitates the need for harder content across the whole game. So far this hasnt exploded out of proportion with only small things like the cage fights, certain dungeons and one boss event but the power creep is undeniably there.
7. It promotes unneeded elitism across all areas of the game.

Other problems associated with it and gear in general:
Transmutation stones, armor look collections, etc. I m glad ANET is fully acknowledging this but i would say it should be of lower priority than the issues above. Adding the option to acquire and store different looks trough a unified account closet similar to that in sPvP however would be awesome and could be made into a very good horizontal progression system.

So what are the best solutions now that we know what the problems are? Well the suggestions have been around for over a year but first ANET would have to make point 1 crystal clear. If ascended is to be replaced at some point in the future or the gear level cap is raised the whole point of this discussion is moot. Vertical progression always takes precedence over horizontal and this issue must be resolved first.

Besides that here are the solutions that would work:
1: make it on par with exotics with changeable stats and possibly even looks – eliminates all of the above problems except point 4 which is optimal. It is now a hard to acquire gear that gives you a lot of horizontal progression. For vertical progression for the hamsters i again say: take a good look at GW1. Systems like agony that affect only a certain elite area of the game should be the only vertical progression in the game period.

2: make it easier to acquire trough many different avenues of play, maybe also reducing crafting requirements etc. but have it still be top stat with changeable attributes – eliminates most of the problems but also point 4 which as said is the base of its existence. Points 6 and 7 are also still a problem in this solution albeit small ones.

3: completely redesign the gear system akin to the one in sPvP and GW1 where armor and weapons do not carry any additional stats. This would make making and managing builds a lot easier as well as enable simple changing of looks and stats.

PS: Izzy cant balance.

cheezwhiz.9517:

…
- Nonsensical crafting progression. I stopped at 489 Weaponsmithing because I have to discover 5-8 more exotic weapons I will have no use for. Why not have a method that lets me improve the gear I have rather than crafting items I won’t use?

Just want to sound off this particular issue as it is another thing ANET said you would never have to do as a crafter. Making throw away items just so there can be another gold/mat sink in the game is not fun.
I have not bothered crafting past 475, 450 or even 425 in some crafts as the whole thing just feels like a giant waste of time and money. You could at least lower the crafting for ascended weapon components like hilts/blades to 475.
Also still keeping refining of items like soft wood logs at 4 per plank is ridiculous at this point.

Ok ANET here is your problem in a nutshell:
You made and marketed a game with no real grind for max stat gear to please a subset of players.
You then added the grind to please a different subset of players.
And now you want to please the first players again by making it less of a grind?

Before you lies the impossible task of trying to please everyone.

You had the throne as the no grind MMO all you had to do was get us REAL content. Instead the last year could be summed up as: GW2 2013 – Scarlet and the grind for ascended gear.

So what is the big problem with ascended? Well in case you didnt read any of the numerous posts in the last 13 months:
-it devalues peoples efforts that have previously had BIS gear
-it creates more inequality in WvW
-it destroys balance
-it promotes elitism
-it necessitates the need for harder content
-it necessitates the use of transmutation stones
-it makes the game revolve around it and makes it seem the focal point of everything you do in the game

So what doesnt do the above?
Well there s a certain almost 8 year old game that has the answer:
horizontal – variety/skin progression and/or vertical progression that only affects certain areas in PVE (ie: lightbringer, GW2 agony)

But wait… i thought you already knew this?
http://web.archive.org/web/20130201042944/http://www.arena.net/blog/is-it-fun-colin-johanson-on-how-arenanet-measures-success

Draco.2806:

Company puts out an ad for the product.
Ad makes it sound like the best thing ever.
The company doesn’t deliver.
Customers feel betrayed and lied to.

More like:
Company puts out an ad for the product.
Ad makes it sound like the best thing ever.
The company delivers a mediocre release.
Instead of fixing the problem the company decides to take the easy way out with a tried and tested method: grind.
Original customers feel betrayed and lied to.

Drag… scratch that. It was Scarlet.

While taunting the player tripping and falling down the longest set of stairs in the game.

1. Ascended gear gone or made stat-same as exotics.
2. Scarlet dead and gone forever.
3. More GW1 and less korean grinder in GW2

Chris Whiteside.6102:

So with all of this in mind it would be cool to carry on discussing around this area in much the same form as Nike has. Specifically brainstorming on top of the foundation of known systems and functionality. I do also want to point out that someone mentioned (sorry i forget who) the ability to potentially build forts etc and then gain new events, goals and rewards from them by protecting and nurturing your land. Wouldn’t that be awesome!?

Chris

I d love to see big long campaigns against dragons or other powerful foes. Slowly building up NPC forces, fortifications, while being assaulted by minions then marching out to the next new area. Dealing with new threats slowly advancing toward a goal – a massive fight against a powerful enemy. The enemies could invade back. In fact the whole thing could start like that.
Southsun cove was kind of like this. The entire Orr area was supposed to be like this. Unfortunately the execution in both of them was very lacking. What was supposed to be end game PVE large scale fights turned into farming a chain of events with ease of access to almost all parts due to the personal story or a one time event full of lag.

Before any of that could happen ANET would have to solve the whole overflow/friends/server shards/performance/mob scaling problems that has been present in the game since the start. GW1s sytem of instances yet on a far larger scale would be a good solution. Letting the player play where they want and when they want is one thing you have not done enough for.
Incentivising players with rewards for the less visited areas could also help. Similar to the now almost forgotten mechanic of mob-time alive xp you could have better loot in areas that are virtually deserted. The same would also have to apply to the campaigns themselves. Loot in GW2 is downright horrible.

Here are my issues with the living world/story:

1. It has nothing to do with GW2:
Dragons are not present at all in the story. In fact they have been replaced by a horribly written villain with an effect on the world far greater than the forces of nature we have battled before.
The occasional distraction or event like halloween, wintersday and SAB are fine and good every once in a while but the living story feels disconnected, completely ignoring lore, history and the rules of the universe.
You have done your personal story, you have killed Zhaitan, destroyed hordes of dragon minions and now you have to deal with… Scarlet. A psychotic somehow in possession of an army, airships and incredible technology allying forces together that make no sense in the lore.
In fact you could say all of this content is just filler like in some long running anime series where the lead writer can not get out the story fast enough and the other guys had to come up with something to keep the thing running.

2. It doesnt deliver enough:
Compare the soon-to-be 1,5 years of GW2 to a GW1 campaign made in the same time. 30 something new areas, a new campaign, 2 new professions, hundreds of skills, a full new story, new characters, new gametypes… Yes the two simply can not compare in numbers.
I know there is a lot more work involved in making GW2s assets, maps, mechanics… but even so there is no wonder why people want a full fledged expansion.

3. It has a low replayability value:
Once you ve gone trough a part of this living story, there is no point in doing it again, that is if you even get to do it in the first place.
If you look at the game from a new players perspective what you get is barely anything more than what people got at release.
There is nothing wrong with changing and evolving the world and having a story but if that takes precedent before gameplay which you then have to fill out with grind and time sinks the whole thing just turns out cheap.

4. It forces players to play a certain way:
GW2 was to be all about playing the way you wanted to. Unfortunately when ANET decided to make achievements matter and with the introduction of ascended gear they presented the players with two options: play our way and be rewarded or play your way and get nothing.
Parts of the world are changed drastically while the rest of it stays the same, frozen in time. The open world apart from this directed play areas is virtually deserted even on the most populated servers.
Meanwhile the areas of interest are filled with players turning into zerg fests ruining the game (due to bad engine code and optimizations) for most people that are not running top of the line CPUs.

5. It is not going anywhere:
When GW2 launched the direction was simple: get to Orr and slay the dragon. With the living story we are hopping all over the world, making it seem small and infantile.
GW2 lacks proper villains in its living story and what real “villains” it does have it has been ignoring them in favour of Scarlet.
The games immersion has taken a nosedive and there are virtually no new experiences, just rehashed old content and a few dungeons that stay open for a month then disappear.
There is no direction, not just for the story, but for the game itself. It is stagnant and boring and many people i know are just waiting for the next big thing if they havent already left.

Here are my short thoughts on each update so far:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/lwd/Best-and-Worst-of-GW2-Releases-Year-1/2988117
For the new ones:
This years Halloween brought rather little new things but as a small seasonal thing it is ok.
The tower of nightmares however is an interesting idea but considering the lore i dont really like it. Also merging two foes has been done before and now it just feels gimmicky. Not to mention the whole thing smells of Scarlet.

I think many of these issues are very clear to the playerbase and have been vocalized many times. ANET really needs to start listening. I m sure they are creative enough to come up with solutions on their own and they will have to if they want to keep this game afloat.

The worst part is they havent even fixed the T3 mediums problem with the torso always being dark and virtually undyeable.

MrDmajor.7084:

I’m sorry. I’m a bit bothered at the fact that a developer would respond to this thread and completely ignore what people are talking about.

“I can’t see anything because of particle effects, and I’ve been complaining about this from beta” -Players

“Hey guys, we’re going to streamline the UI. You’re gonna love. K’bye” -Dev

What is that about? Am I out of line for being a little upset by this? Are we going to get all technical and do the whole “but the OP said”? What about the discussion and the major problem?

That is pretty much how ANET has been avoiding(dealing) with many key issues for over a year now. They simply do not want to talk or converse about them openly with us.

If you want a free alternative:
http://www.blender.org/
I ve been using it to port/modify… models for Oblivion and Fallout games and while it probably doesnt have all the options and tools like the commercial stuff i think it is a good place to start.

1. Ascended gear and grind for stats.
It is an issue ANET has not properly dealt with since its first reveal back in november. It has been the discussion of countless topics and is the single most darkest mark on ANETs record.
It and the effects it has had on the development of the game have to be dealt with once and for all.

2. Directly related to that are group gameplay mechanics, build variety, stat variety and build management.
In GW1 changing a build was faster than changing your pants IRL, even in PVE. There were roles you had to fulfil and even though 90% of the possible builds were not valid there were options. GW2 has had much of that taken away.

3. The living world, the story and general idea and direction of the game in terms of content that usually comes with expansions.
ANET needs a clear direction for the game. A roadmap where players can see what content can they expect either soon or even years down the line. The quality of updates needs to be addressed and real expansion worthy content needs to be introduced. Comparing GW2 to GW1 a year down the line makes it absolutely clear what and where the shortcomings of GW2 are.

IMO these should be the first three that need a discussion and subsequent fixes ASAP.

AFAIK this is the same guy that did a few similar videos in GW1.
Extracting models and textures from the dat files shouldnt be too hard. Not sure about bone info (rigging, etc) – he probably had to rig the models to a skeleton himself and then animate them.

As said – lots of work in a 3d modelling and animation program finalized in a movie editing program.

5. new areas, weapons, skills… you know the things that make a real expansion
4. no RNG for gems, less RNG in general and better balanced rewards, less fluff, more quality in terms of gear aesthetics
3. client and server optimization, long overdue bug fixes
2. a real living world and a story that matters and evolves the world and doesnt ignore the dragons – it seems we may be finally getting some of this, no more Scarlet
1. a return to what made GW1 great: no grind for stats, good and engaging PvP modes, rewards in PvP that are useful in PvE and vice versa, no server shards but instead a district system so you can play with your friends and not deal with the horrible overflow system…

In general: fix existing stuff first, then worry about more content and features.

Because:
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/greater-internet-kittenwad-theory

I understand why you made other players appear as motes but why not make it optional? Maybe by talking to one of the NPCs in the lobby?

I just love seeing other people fall :p

Qin.7325:

If ascended gear (and infusions) could be obtained from
- dungeon tokens
- wvw badges
- laurels (besides accessories)
- fractal relics (besides accessories)
- guild commendations
- karma
in addition to separate crafting

how great that would be…

Ascended gear would loose its point then.

The only reason ascended gear exists in the game is to please the elitist hardcore crowd of farmers. The whole point of it is to make people grind for it. Colin confirmed that in Matt visuals interview.

In any case because GW2 is based on promises to the GW1 playerbase ascended gear will always be an issue.

Have you experimented/considered auto adjustable settings for the client? Say if FPS drops below certain levels it turns off selected features or scales them down and if it goes back above it turns them on/higher again (like downsampling).

If possible it would be nice to have them for each setting (that can be adjusted on the fly and dont cause too much of a spike) separately with a global desired FPS option at 30/45/60.

In particular this would be useful for shadows and reflections as they are the most demanding on the CPU.

It should help most people due to the variance in client performance due to forcing people into zerging certain events and it should be a relatively quick thing to implement.

Apart from that if you could maybe extrapolate on the things you are doing for client performance it would let people know that you are actually working on something significant. SOE has done some good reassuring with this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaHgTR4yyuU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgOsrJaibjM

Finally IMHO you need a bigger leash on content creators. Most people who wanted a redesigned Tequatl fight didnt really ask for 100 people to run to single spot and fire off some 1000 skills in a matter of seconds. Not to mention all the other forced zergfest updates in the last few months.

Galen Grey.4709:

Thing is you cannot take a hard stance if you claim to listen to feedback.
They could come out and say we will never have a new tier but what happens if down the line a lot of people finish gearing up their alts and demand a new tier ? Do you ignore their voice just because you promised never to have a new tier and thus you’d be lieing about listening to the community or do you follow it through despite promising not to?

That is exactly what you do. You need to take a hard stance on design decisions that are the pillars of your game and you can not under any circumstances back out on them. They did that back in november and look where we are because ANET wanted to please everyone. They chose a path almost every other MMO had chosen. The easy way out with mechanics like grind, dailies and content made only to keep people playing. The EXACT thing that they promised us to stay away from.

Yes you need to ignore a lot of people. But unfortunately ANET chose to ignore their core playerbase. Not only have they ignored the people that supported them for over half a decade and made GW2 possible in the first place but they also lied to us. Take a wild guess why we are not happy with a product that is not as advertised.

Personally i think i m done wasting my time by giving feedback to a wall. ANET has over the course of a year proven that they just do not get the idea of a game that was presented to us over the course of 5 years with numerous blog posts and interviews. They ve repeatedly ignored feedback or even bothered to ask for it, disregarded performance and drove the “living” world into a joke.

Lorelei.7809:

It is certainly more alt-friendly than GW (excepting the dye system, which… is still arguably better than in GW as you permanently unlock the dye). Achievements and titles are wonderfully (excepting map completion) account bound.

Not even by a long shot is that true. GW1 was far more alt friendly (if not outright alt encouraging) than GW2 is, was or ever will be.

My 13 characters in GW1 never needed a statistical upgrade in the 7 years that i played it. GW2 broke that in 2 months. Playing those characters gave me skills that i could use on another characters heroes. I could not only have all my alts geared properly but have multiple sets as well. Armor also didnt influence builds as much or at all unlike in GW2 so most of the time you could simply swap a piece and be able to run a completely different build.

Going back to GW2:
Most other problems for alts like FotM levels and such have already been mentioned and some things have indeed been improved in the last year but with ascended gear not only is the game more alt unfriendly with every update, it is multi build unfriendly as well.

With that said i d still recommend people to try alts. ANET has succeeded in making professions play very differently and the leveling experience is adequate and diverse enough to run several characters to 80 (even without crafting) while doing different things/events etc. Past 80 however ANET dropped the ball with ascended gear and till that changes gearing alts will always be a chore, rather than fun.

Year one is a giant disappointment for me. The living world is not alive at all and no update to date has improved that state. ANET has completely abandoned the world of GW2 to pursue content that has nothing to do with the actual story. While some of this content was a nice and well done distraction without an expansion (if this is all we are getting with the living story) there wont be much left of the actual GW2 in a few years.

NOTHING so far story wise has had anything to do with the elder dragons. They are not even a threat. The world isnt moving anywhere. Things just come and go. Apart from a few locations the same events are still going on all over the world. Nothing has really changed. I dont feel like a hero. More like someone at work, doing chores.

Almost all updates suffer from good idea/terrible execution.
Instead of best/worst here are my thoughts on all of them:

Shadow of the Mad King
Pretty good update with mostly fun activities very much akin to GW1s yearly events.

The Lost Shores
Worst update to date with ANETs complete and utter disregard for the game, its limitations and the breaking of many promises to the player base. At this point GW2 died and Grind Wars 2 was born.

Wintersday
A fun distraction similar to Halloween.

Flame and Frost: Prelude
Boring story but at least it wasnt completely out there and felt like the world was actually starting to slowly change. New grind – dailies now obligatory. A new currency.

Flame and Frost: The Gathering Storm
More meh story wise but at least it was coherent. Guild missions – yet another bad addition to the game. Yet another currency.

Flame and Frost: The Razing
Story picked up at this point and raised my expectations. ANET got rid of the horrid conversation mode and while characters werent the best at least they made sense and were interesting.

Super Adventure Box
A load of fun, probably more fun than the actual game even now one year down the line.

Flame and Frost: Retribution
A fun new dungeon continuing the story.

The Secret of Southsun
Decent interesting story continuation making use of the horrible karka island.

Last Stand at Southsun
Performance problems and zergs again. Yep, lag crabs havent changed one bit.

Dragon Bash
Boring, bland and utterly pointless. Introducing a new menace to the world when there are bigger fish err dragons to fry.

Sky Pirates of Tyria
Fun dungeon and JP. Made me wonder where ANET was going with story at that time but now that we know it just makes me cringe.

Bazaar of the Four Winds
Probably the best content update to date. New place to explore, some lore and fun minigames.

Cutthroat Politics
Boring, bland and utterly pointless again.

Queen’s Jubilee
Lets put all our players into a small place and make them run around in zergs which neither their PCs or our servers can handle. Pathetic. Challenges were interesting but again – poorly executed. Introducing Harley Mary Quinn Sue. Disastrous.

Clockwork Chaos
More of the above except in the open world. Scarlet more important and more powerful than dragons with an army behind her that could save the entire world.

Super Adventure Box: Back to School
Fun distraction again thankfully fixed in proper time and for once properly communicated. Ascended weapons however a complete disaster again forcing people into certain things instead of “play how you want to play”.

Tequatl Rising
Proving ANET learned nothing in almost a year all the problems with the first Southsun update came back.

Twilight Assault
Another decent dungeon – a bit too hard IMO. But not much else. More Scarlet barf.

Comparing that to GW1 just makes me sad. The team at ANET probably doubled or quadrupled in size since then yet managed to bring in less interesting, fun, engaging and rewarding content in the same time frame.

I am sick of fluff, bad storytelling and grind. Things better change next year or this game is done for.

Everybody and nobody.

The first is what they are aiming for.
The second is what they ll get eventually.

Here it is in all its original glory:
http://web.archive.org/web/20130201042944/http://www.arena.net/blog/is-it-fun-colin-johanson-on-how-arenanet-measures-success

It is ironic to the point where it is just sad.

At release the game was as advertised. It wasnt perfect, it wasnt polished or fully finished but it had a lot of potential.

Over the course of a year ANET has systematically destroyed a huge part of this vision. The game is now just another WoW clone with a few quirks.
We have grind for stats, dailies that you have to do, horrible story that doesnt matter, terribly designed raids with zerg game play and a dead “living” world. All of this accompanied by lies such as why and how ascended gear was introduced.

I d love to hear from Colin on this article but we wont. If anything tops all of the faults, issues and other problems of the game it is ANETs utter failure of communication.

I would rather have a full expansion with a proper story than this filler content we ve been fed with for the past year.

Sure a few updates were interesting and looked like they could have actually progressed the story but then came Scarlet and turned GW2 into a joke.

Mike Z and many others at ANET could easily have a career in politics, they r that good at dodging questions!

The one thing i got from this presentation:

ANET has no direction for GW2. They r just making filler content to keep people playing while everything else stays on the table.

Treeline.3865:

SonicTHI.3217:

In case you missed it: single thread performance.
New laptops usually run i3 or i5 CPUs compared to mid range gaming rigs with AMD cpus.

Here s a “GW2” CPU chart: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

Yes there is the occasional “i didnt clean my PC for 3 years” or similar situation but in general GW2s render engine the main source of the problem. There are no miracle performance boosts till they dethread/optimize/rework it.

I was not debating whether or not the game is thread heavy. It is. As for your point about the intel and amd processors I’m not quite sure which point you are trying to get across.

There are plenty of “miracle performance boosts” if your computer isn’t setup right. As the best example which I have already used, no one really considered CPU cores being parked when running the game, until a guy came along at the forum. I’ve never seen so many happy people in one thread before. You can yell all you want that you get horrible performance because of poor optimization/poor game engine all you want, but a lot of people also come here saying they have no problem. If they can run the game, why can’t you? Because the game has a special exception that if they see your particular setup, it has to do twice the work? I have still seen nothing that indicates why half of GW2 players should get poor performance while others run the game fine.

My point was that intel CPUs perform better when a single thread is concerned and that most laptops nowadays run intel CPUs. I dont know how that escaped you.

Fine… for some people 20 FPS on lowest settings is fine. For some people 30 FPS is not fine. For some people 30 FPS on max settings is not fine. For some only 60 FPS at max setting is “fine”.
People who benefit from your “expert” solutions are usually those who consider 25 FPS in normal PVE “fine”. People with high end rigs expect to never go below 30 in any situation under max settings.

And i dont even know what you are going on about in the second part. Running the game and running it at a satisfactory frame rate 2 completely different things. Why would the game on my setup have to do twice the work? You make no sense and i have no idea what point you are even trying to get across.

Half the players have bad performance? EVERYONE has poor performance in GW2. It is a fact and there are no miracle solutions for it. No stock CPU can get trough all the instructions in all situations in the game. That is a fact. Compare it to properly optimized engines and you ll easily see how bad its engine actually is.

As Draco said you are a self proclaimed “expert” who thinks people are at fault when you dont even know what the real problem is.

Treeline.3865:

Draco.2806:

Your ego is showing.

Either way your “advice” was absolutely bogus. I was just trying to find a polite way to tell you that everyone knows it’s bogus.

You’re basically insulting everyone here by saying poor performance is attributable to rookie mistakes, when everyone knows full-well that the GPU side of things (and by extension, graphics settings) have zero effect on performance overall. Everyone knows the issue is game logic (CPU-dependant) and you’re telling your tales about how you helped your friend by disabling power savings for their AMD card. It’s nonsense.

Again, we have reports from people running pre-2xx generation nVidia cards that can easily “max” the graphics without issue.

There’s always “experts” like you in these threads. Everyone’s heard it: “It runs fine for me, so you must be doing something wrong, and I’m a genius computerist for building my rig right.”

Well it’s garbage, and it’s annoying.

Alright, I’m sorry for trying to indicate that I could actually know a little on the subject, since I helped, not just my own, but somewhere around 7 or 8 other computers up. And yes, some of them were rookie things, like using the power saving power-plan for a laptop. But heck, even I didn’t know that core parking could be a problem on a computer until GW2. The advice is not bogus. Maybe it is to you because you knew about all those things, but a lot of people go from “My computer isn’t running the game well” -> “I’ve heard something about a game engine, let’s jump that bandwagon”. I’m not trying to insult anyone, but I’m also not assuming that being a GuildWars 2 player with a low framerate means knowing anything as to why that is. But since you seem confident enough to try and debunk me completely, why do you guess that a generic relatively new laptop can run the game while new gaming rig computer can’t? Is that game optimization for you, or could there be something else at play?

In case you missed it: single thread performance.
New laptops usually run i3 or i5 CPUs compared to mid range gaming rigs with AMD cpus.

Here s a “GW2” CPU chart: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

Yes there is the occasional “i didnt clean my PC for 3 years” or similar situation but in general GW2s render engine the main source of the problem. There are no miracle performance boosts till they dethread/optimize/rework it.
If they can not do that they definitely should not make any more zerg events or similar content. Not only are our CPUs not utilized properly but the network (or servers) on ANETs side has problems as well.

As for the rest i very much agree with everything Draco said.

Plenty of lies here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20130201042944/http://www.arena.net/blog/is-it-fun-colin-johanson-on-how-arenanet-measures-success

Vayne.8563:

I think you should do some serious research, staring with competition.

As I said elsewhere, when Guild Wars 1 released, how many multiplayer fantasy games existed that didn’t charge a monthly fee? How about now?

You can’t compare what a company did 8 years ago in this industry with the situation today. You can’t compare a company with a staff of 50 to a company with a staff of 300.

It’s a different type. The genre has changed. The player base has changed. Games that try to do that, will perish into obscurity, because unlike 8 years ago, there are dozens of free to play MMOs…and that’s the problem.

Anet tried to use a similar strategy at launch and found it wasn’t working. That’s why they introduced ascended gear in the first place in my opinion. To stop the flood of people who simply stopped logging in because they had nothing to do.

Hell there were no sites like Dulfy 8 years ago either, where you basically could get a walk through for everything the day before it was out. So you need more content today than back then, because people finish it faster.

I was in this business for a long time, buying games for a computer store in NYC. I started in computers in 1983. There are very very few fields that change as fast as this one does.

Convention wisdom doesn’t necessarily continue to apply, because circumstances change so rapidly.

Yes, competition is strong and that s exactly why you need to stand out. And you dont stand out by making WoW. Just look at all the MMOs in the last 9 years that tried to do that.

You argue that making more games like WoW is a good thing when the opposite is clearly the proven case.

You argue that competition is stronger for niche titles when again the opposite is clearly the proven case.

What direct competition does EVE have?
How many MMOs have tried to fill the same niche in the last 9 years?
How many have succeeded?

What direct competition does WoW have?
How many MMOs have tried to compete with it in the last 9 years?
How many have succeeded?

Now look at GW2. It was supposed to be a niche. Look at it now. What does it fill? Before it had no competition in its own niche. Now its competing against every other MMO.

Vayne.8563:

I’m contesting your premise that they’re better off focusing on a niche market instead of trying to appeal to everyone…in other words, you’re entire premise.

Okay, let’s for argument sake say Anet changes and focuses on a niche. What if another game comes along that suits that niche as well or better. They’re completely screwed. The idea of player retention is to retain players…as many as possible. Not five guys who might still be playing in five years.

No big business and MMOs have become big business, can function that way. It’s not realistic.

I think you need to do some serious research.

GW2 disproves your point entirely. If GW1 wasnt a successful niche GW2 would never have been made. You do not retain players by watering down your game to please everyone. In fact you get the opposite result.

Ask any successful person in the entertainment industry what you get if you try to please everyone. You loose our identity/brand and you are no longer recognizable.

Instead you start with a niche and build on it as GW2 did till nov 15th. But then they abandoned the core principles and now here we are a year later. GW2 is now just another MMO with progression, dailies, grind… why would people want to play GW2 instead of the next best thing coming out soon?

Wings and many other fluff backpacks and similar items should never have been put in the game in the first place IMO. It makes the game look cheap and ruins the art and immersion.

A year ago this was the game for us:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/index.php?title=Is_it_fun

Now its just another MMO catering to WoW players with “progression”, “shinies” and grind because these people are too narrow minded and wont accept any MMO without these things.

Not that the devs ll ever speak of this.

Considering the above here is how an improved Tequatl fight would look like:

-Arcanist lab houses another power station and its event cannot be active during Tequatls. The quagan event provides extra NPCs for the north station. Completing the gorge quest reduces the number of mobs assaulting the SE station.

-Event starts, hordes of undead start spawning across the entire coast length and start walking inland. These mobs will continuously assault 10 points: 6 turrets and 4 power stations. Bloaters will head directly for the stations and try to blow up on them. Mob rank is adjusted according to the total of players in the entire area but never goes past veteran. With this system the event could be scaled all the way down to 20 players and still be just as challenging.

After 2 minutes Tequatl makes his entrance and starts spawning his fingers and small waves. Tequatl has a individual damage threshold on each of his 3 points that resets every few seconds – damaging all 3 points at the same time does the most damage. The undead increase in numbers and start running. Fingers spawn poison around them. Hylek turrets deal increased damage to Tequatl, bone walls and fingers and clense their poison. Batteries begin charging the laser. If a battery is destroyed the charging is slowed. If all 4 batteries are destroyed the laser will not fire and the event fails. Laser does 20% damage to Tequatl and fires every 2 minutes with all 4 stations charging it. It is the primary source of damage and stuns Tequatl.
After the stun ends Tequatl roars, spawns a wall and a champion for each of the stations. If the wall is not destroyed before the laser fires again it instead destroys the wall with no damage to the dragon.

If Tequatl is not defeated in 13 minutes he spawns the big wave, then destroys the laser. At this point a massive army of undead overruns the area and a new event spawns to recapture it.

First for all the fame seekers and “hardcore” players: this has nothing to do with difficulty. I like difficult content and enjoy being rewarded for my skill. What i dont like is artificially difficult content. Content where i m battling the system instead of the game. Overflows, lag, framerate, too many effects on a single target, damage sponges… horrible game design and combat mechanics. Many of these points have already been brought up by people like WoodenPotatoes but they need to be brought up again and again till ANET actually takes note because all of this has already happened before and unless something is done will keep coming up.

So as much as this might offend some people at ANET i need to ask this and call some people out on this:
What manner of clueless game designer designed this fight? What QA team let this horror past the door and what superior let this whole thing happen in the first place?
I know i will not get a response to this but i hope at least one dev reads this and raises hell in the company because this stuff simply will not do!

So lets look at what you did wrong. Lets start with the most obvious things:
-Forcing a hundred players into one spot to DPS a single point. The main complaint with the dragon fights was this one exact thing! Your game engine is horrible, your servers can not handle the load and your game mechanics (conditions, etc.) dont allow for this but you still managed to yet again completely ignore those facts and make the same mistake again! You could have spread out the players all over the big area if not half the map but no. A single 300 radius area will do.

-The fact that you need that many people to begin with. Less populated servers wont ever do this. The more dedicated people on those servers just guest on the bigger servers making the whole experience hell for anyone but the lucky few.

-Hinging the whole success of the fight on 6 people. The moment you allow a player to have control over such an important mechanic is the moment griefing is let trough the door. In an open world encounter no less! Not only that but any player who doesnt know what exactly he needs to do will get yelled at as he is decremental to everyone else.

-The “rewards”. Provided you manage to kill Tequatl or should i say deal with overflows and finally manage to enter the real server after several hours you get… greens!

-Achievements that are counter intuitive to what you are doing. Same thing as in the aetherblade dungeon. You learned nothing ANET. Get sucked into the vortex, stand behind the dragon, use the turret even though you dont know what it does and how important it is!

And finally the problems that you would have to work around or fix already before making any more new content:
-Viability of different builds and specs. I dont think i need to say much more on this. It has been a year and with ascended gating you have forced people into a single build and in most cases berserker gear.

-The dreaded overflow system and minimum player numbers.
Even before the game launched i was against this. Overflow is as bad a system just like the original HA system in GW1. It needs to go. It prevent players from playing with players they know and destroys communities. WvW should be the only thing based on worlds and even then an alliance system would be much better.

For several months now (with the exception of SAB – thank you Josh) we have had nothing but pathetically designed zerg battles fighting respawning enemies to get money. Yes, just like in any other MMO! The thing as you said you did not want to do! Now we have raid like content with all the flaws and more but without real rewards. This needs fixing now.

Funny… that s not what they said a year ago:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/index.php?title=Is_it_fun

I would love to know what happened at ANET a few months before launch. It is definitely not the same company i knew.

I find it pathetic that ANET doesnt do surveys like these in the game.

The real deal breaker is the game engine which wont ever work properly on a next gen console.

Yet another very constructive and well written post that will be completely ignored by ANET.

I enjoy GW2 a lot. It completely changed the way MMOs work. I dont need to grind for the best gear in the game. It has tons of fun, meaningful and bug free content and updates. It rewards the player no matter what he prefers to do in the game or how he does it. The new trinity of support/control/damage is so much better than the old supporting build variety further enhanced by the fact that you can acquire the best gear in many different ways in a short amount of time. Action combat is so much fun even when there are 50 people around me.

GW2 is very alt friendly and doesnt lock you out of getting rewards or time gate things for the sake of prolonging bad gameplay.

The game is completely bug free and fully utilizes my CPU. WvW battles are just like something out of a LOTR movie and sPVP is fun and rewarding. Esports is in full swing with many pro teams making a living of it and hundreds of thousands of players enjoying a single perfect game mode.

Oh sorry, you meant the real GW2 a year after release? It doesnt even reach to the balls of GW1 in the same time frame.
Coherent game design based on a solid foundation with proper testing and listening to feedback while not compromising said things. No. This game is far and further from what it should have been with every month that passes by.

This is pathetic. Bad game design 101.

Only increasing a mobs HP 50x doesnt make the fight more fun. It makes it tedious and not worth the time. The second phase attacks do nothing to make the fight more fun or interesting.

I think some of ANETs content designers need to be taken back to school. Either that or their QA teams are not doing their job or being given enough time to do their job properly.

We complain because we care. The moment complaining stops this game is done.

Carlin Sanders.3587:

Have gw1 fans forgotten the name of the fancy versions of armor you got on prophecies? does ‘ascended’ armor ring a bell?

exotic was designed to do a job – make top tier something that required effort so that people can actually appreciate what they have. it failed. so they had to bring in ascended to do that job. (would you salvage an ascended weapon? in comparison, would you salvage an exotic? and why?)

edit: and have we forgotten the point of why skill point scrolls exist? are we going to cry and whine when they introduce new skills into the game that seem better than the current meta? of course we will.

I wish people would stop spreading disinformation about GW1 already. 15k GW1 armor had the SAME stats as 1,5k and the SAME as obsidian or any other max armor.
Legendary had the SAME stats as exotic. Ascended was not needed in any way and goes against everything explained in numerous blog posts and interviews over the course of several years.
And no i wouldnt salvage my exotic weapon if it was max stat. Exotics required enough effort for most people. Especially if you wanted to have a fully geared character or god forbid alts.

Ascended was not brought in to do “a job”. It was brought in to please a subset of players that were complaining or leaving in droves – the same people that wanted GW2 to be more like WoW.

Unfortunately these same players can not be pleased. Ever. Once they have their chars geared out in ascended they will either demand new shinies again or leave.

ANET is doing the same 2 stupid things most companies in the last decade tried to do: trying to cater to everyone and trying to do what WoW does best.

The interaction we had with Josh produced positive results in record time. We want more of this and less of that worthless PR talk.

Irrodesia.3907:

…..

So…. What ARE you going to do now?

They will do what they did so far: stay silent.
It took them one year to even give us the real explanation why ascended gear was introduced to the game. Not to even mention all the issues and problems that were introduced with it or have existed in the game since launch that haven ever been addressed or even acknowledged.

One year down the line GW2 is without a doubt yet another MMO that buckled to the MMO locusts in their search for the next WoW.
Fitting clip posted by some back in november:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiZNSzWIaLo

GW1 never saw higher tiers than what was originally in the game. So no, “GW1 devs” would not design end game gear like this.

I do agree on cosmetics and stat/skin selection though.

Tiger.7506:

For the people out there, it’s “play however you want”, not “get whatever you want.”
Gw2 is not L T W ( Log in TO win ).

GW2 was meant to be “play however you want and get max stat gear however you want: karma, tokens, crafting, wvw, loot” not “grind x and y to get max stat gear”.
Next time read the articles before replying.

Might as well add this:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/index.php?title=Is_it_fun

Not that it matters as ANET does not care at all for us who stuck with them for over 7 years or bought the game with these and many other articles in mind.

The game is all about farmers, grind and progression now.