Guild Wars 2

Well written OP. The game is anything but what it was supposed to be:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/index.php?title=Is_it_fun

rfdarko.4639:

To further illustrate the point : http://youtu.be/J9-aUFHIt7c

It’s not difficulty, it’s not even lag, it’s terrible detection. If Josh can watch this and claim everything is fine with the hit detection and the player was at fault in each case, then I really don’t know what to say.

Wow, just wow. That is worse than tribulation mode. At least there you know what killed you.
Bug testing with my coins is not something i want to do.

With all the latest content and bugs in it ANET needs to seriously rethink the 2 week release schedule or expand their QA team.

As this thread is getting the most response:
I wanted to do a quick run to preview the world 2 in infantile to get my bearings for the real deal. First i had to redo the whole world 1 to get it working. Then i got into it and it was fine for a while. I died a couple of times (curiosity and stupid knockbacks) but what did me in was the torch. Insert 400 coins to continue. What happened to giving the player the tools he needs?

You can not finish the SAB in infantile if you dont grind out 400 boubles! That is simply unacceptable.

Apart from that i can atest to the excruciating length of zone 2. Even in infantile mode it took a long time to get to the end. Most people do not have 3-4 hours or the will to sit trough this in one go. Not to mention the continue coins. You need to either split up the zone into 2 or shorten it.

Yea i had to go trough w1 AGAIN with infantile before i could do it in w2.

Also in w2 i would need 400 boubles to progress past the ice waterfall… WTF? Is everything with ANET about grind these days?

I havent done world 2 yet and just wanted to quickly check it out with infantile mode but it seems to be inaccessible for world 2.

The manifesto was just the tip of the iceberg. There were over 200 blog posts detailing almost every aspect of the games philosophy and design with just as many interviews given to various websites.

Unfortunately ANET took down their blog so i cant serve you the armor specific quotes but here s the one i did save:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/index.php?title=Is_it_fun
It does far more than just address gear. Time gating, dailies, content… it is all in there and almost all wrong a year down the line.

Here s a quote specifically on items:

The rarest items in the game are not more powerful than other items, so you don’t need them to be the best. The rarest items have unique looks to help your character feel that sense of accomplishment, but it’s not required to play the game. We don’t need to make mandatory gear treadmills, we make all of it optional, so those who find it fun to chase this prestigious gear can do so, but those who don’t are just as powerful and get to have fun too.

And then there s this:
http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/21/guild-wars-2-interview-monetization/

Before even answering this question, I want to point out that in Guild Wars 2, being competitive isn’t all about having the best gear. It’s not like you’re going to go into world-versus-world and get smoked because someone else has a godly weapon that you can’t hope to acquire. We’ve always been against that kind of thing.

Here’s what we believe: If someone wants to play for a thousand hours to get an item that is so rare that other players can’t realistically acquire it, that rare item should be differentiated by its visual appearance and rarity alone, not by being more powerful than everything else in the game. Otherwise, your MMO becomes all about grinding to get the best gear. We don’t make grindy games — we leave the grind to other MMOs.

Going back to armor specific quotes. IIRC there was one that went something like this: max stat gear should be acquirable trough many different means in the game: karma, crafting, wvw and loot.

Ascended gear breaks all those design choices so the truth is:
ANET lied.

While we r discussing quotes:
A personal favourite rebuttal from fanboys is them quoting ANET: Ascended gear is meant to bridge the gap between exotic and legendary items.

Yet no such gap ever existed. Exotic gear cost anywhere from 1g to 500g and stat wise there were no differences.

This whole system was pulled out of nowhere to please a subset of hardcore progressionist players. Most of those players left the game already chasing their next carrot while the rest of us now have to suffer with bad game design and decisions.

Another quote that people keep misusing is:
There will not be another tier of gear… this year.
And as pointed out above they can always up the infusion tiers.

GW2 doesnt need minor improvements. It needs a complete rendering engine overhaul. As you see above it doesnt make use of an 8 core or 4&HT CPU. It doesnt even make use of 4 cores and the biggest flaw is the rendering thread which only runs on one core. The graphics cards are under utilized because that thread is not providing enough data to them. The instructions in that thread need to be split in order for this game to properly utilize modern CPUs and run properly. Also: a console version of the game is impossible before this happens.

But it is not just client performance. ANET has continuously ignored even server side performance. Skill lag in zerg events is ridiculous. Hell the whole zerging gameplay is horrible in its own right.
ANET needs to design better gameplay by spreading players out more.

Erasculio.2914:

True. There was a blog post before release talking about how ArenaNet defined success, considering that GW2 does not have a number of subscribers in which to base it; the conclusion of the blog was that success could be measured on how fun the game was.

I actually saved that blog post and copied the text to the wiki:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/index.php?title=Is_it_fun

As for Nexon. Not only do they own a lot of NCsoft, the monetization manager of ANET is a former Nexon employee. Just so you people know where all the RNG comes from.

When ANET says we listened to the players they really mean: We looked up the graphs stating x amount of people did y in z time. So lets try and please those players.

Its like this is not even a game company any more. Their original game has been completely trashed by such horrible design decisions over the course of the last year.

Where the core values at game launch were:
Fun, build variety, storytelling, action combat

They are now:
Progression, time gating, farming, zerg fests

Of course we dont need ascended weapons. Content is easy as it is.

So why are they adding them to the game?

Acerola.6407:

@ SonicTHI.3217
Why can’t we let this story finally die? Everyone knows that Anet said and says bullkitten. Everyone SHOULD HAVE known before, because it’s just PR and marketing.

This wasnt just some PR talk. There were 200 blog posts touching on every aspect of the game. But not just that, the game was true to those words till november. Yes it had flaws but those could have been fixed and they can still be fixed.

cillercammy.8064:

I think all these angry posts sound quite ridiculous. Here are my thoughts!

-First: Anet stated last November that Ascended gear was supposed to be in game at launch, but didn’t make it do to budget and time constraints.

-Second: There is NO higher tier content being added with ascended weapons. Meaning you don’t even need them for any part of the game other than just having them with their MINIMAL stat increase. If you don’t want one, don’t craft one. It will not matter.

-Third: This is not a GearTreadmill nor is it a ItemSpiral. Those occur when new tiers are added every 2-4 months. It has now been over a year and we don’t even have a full tier added ( just rings, back pieces, trinkets and the soon to be weapons).

The thought of rage quitting a game over a new tier weapon with a tiny stat increase just sounds absurd. Do people expect Anet to still just hand out weapon skins 5 years down the road? I love new skins, but skin wars 2 won’t survive. People will not care in 5 years when they have over 600 new weapon skins in their bank. I think they have found a great balance to please both types of players. New tier for those who wont better stats but minimal enough so that no one needs them to appeal to those who don’t want them.

in the end I feel really bad for everyone who has or will rage quit. When all is said and done, I think Anet is doing a great job here. The game is growing, changing and in my opinion getting better with age. I feel bad for everyone who will miss out and such a great MMO down the road.

They sure sound ridiculous to people who werent here before the game launched, to people that are uninformed or refuse to acknowledge the facts.

1. ANET lied. If they didnt lie about that they lied that the game would be feature complete at launch. Oh wait, what about this?:

“Here’s what we believe: If someone wants to play for a thousand hours to get an item that is so rare that other players can’t realistically acquire it, that rare item should be differentiated by its visual appearance and rarity alone, not by being more powerful than everything else in the game. Otherwise, your MMO becomes all about grinding to get the best gear. We don’t make grindy games — we leave the grind to other MMOs.”

-Mike Obrien, President of Arenanet

2. Go read that article on ascended gear again. ANET said there is no higher tier being added this year. As to your “You dont need one”: Why do you or other people need it? There is no harder content in the game for it so why do people want it? They have no good reason for it but we have many kitten good reasons against it.

3. Yet new items are being added with significant time gating and now even large monetary requirements. Not to mention once you start this ride it can not end. After the tier is complete people will whine again. Guess what happens then?

People havent been quitting because of some gear but because ANET lied to them. See this blog post and compare it to how the game is one year later:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/index.php?title=Is_it_fun

ANET is definitely not doing a great job.

zerk.9701:

Samsung 840 only brand I recomend, build with, and use.

I ll second that with my older 830.

Desthin Sinkropht.4123:

There is a lot of hate being thrown around concerning the introduction of ascended gear and time gated crafting, so I feel the need to post here and clear something up for the general community.

Whatever demographic of gamer you may be in, you aren’t the only demographic being catered to.

As a supposed member of the industry please tell me it it is ok to lie to your players. Is it ok to put down your vision in over 200 blog posts on exactly what the game should be about then do the opposite? Is it ok to collect money from about half a million people then change the design of the game just to broaden the audience while not fixing your game or addressing countless issues?

Anyone in the entertainment industry knows trying to cater to everyone will result in a complete loss of your or your products identity. Yes you can try and cater to higher common denominators but you can not cater to opposites.

ANET lost any and all credibility and the game a lot of its identity with the introduction of ascended gear. There is a really good reason why many people are upset.

Here is a part of one of those blog posts that i managed to save before they took down their blog last year. It touches on many points (not just ascended gear) and after one year i can only shake my head in disbelief at it. See the full version here: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/index.php?title=Is_it_fun&oldid=667665

Is it Fun? Colin Johanson on How ArenaNet Measures Success

By Colin Johanson June 19th, 2012

Now let me pose a second question: If the success of a subscription-based MMO is measured by the number of people paying a monthly fee, how does that impact game design decisions?

The answer can be found in the mechanics and choices made in subscription-based MMOs, which keep customers actively playing by chasing something in the game through processes that take as long as possible. In other words, designers of traditional MMOs create content systems that take more time to keep people playing longer. If this is your business motivation and model so you keep getting paid, it makes sense and is an incredibly smart thing to do, and you need to support it.

When your game systems are designed to achieve the prime motivation of a subscription-based MMO, you run the risk of sacrificing quality to get as much content in as possible to fill that time. You get leveling systems that take insane amounts of grind to gain a level, loot drop systems that require doing a dungeon with a tiny chance the item you want can drop at the end, raid systems that need huge numbers of people online simultaneously to organize and play, thousands of wash/repeat item-collection or kill-mob quests or dailies with flavor text support, the best stat gear requiring crazy amounts of time to earn, etc.

But what if your business model isn’t based on a subscription? What if your content-design motivations aren’t driven by the need to create mechanics that keep people playing as long as possible? When looking at content design for Guild Wars 2, we’ve tried to ask the question: What if the development of the game was based on…wait for it…fun?

If we chose fun as our main metric for tracking success, can we flip the core paradigm and make design decisions based on what we’d like to play as game players? Can we focus our time on making meaningful and impactful content, rather than filler content meant to draw out the experience? Can we make something so much fun you might want to play it multiple times because it’s fun, rather than making you do it because the game says you have to? It’s how we played games while growing up. I can’t tell you how many times I played Quest for Glory; the game didn’t give me 25 daily quests I needed to log in and do—I played it multiple times because it was fun!

This metric of success impacted a lot of our early content-related design decisions for Guild Wars 2. Some examples include:

Fun impacts loot collection. The rarest items in the game are not more powerful than other items, so you don’t need them to be the best. The rarest items have unique looks to help your character feel that sense of accomplishment, but it’s not required to play the game. We don’t need to make mandatory gear treadmills, we make all of it optional, so those who find it fun to chase this prestigious gear can do so, but those who don’t are just as powerful and get to have fun too.

And no they will not respond. The only response we got back in november was some PR spin talk while not addressing any of the real issues. ANET are very good at that.

How to fix ascended gear in one simple step:
Remove it from the game.

With 6GB i have so far never ran out of memory. GW2 has no big memory leakage. Did you disable the page file? Some software just cant do without it.

In any case i agree a 64bit client would be nice. It is 2013 and only complete PC illiterates still use 32bit OS.

unknowable.8470:

Interesting use of the word fine, if I am not able to max out the graphics card of cpu and get lower than 60fps this is not exactly fine on a system like this.

ah well, if it is how it is it is how it is. I really do hope arenanet do some engine optimization at some point though because that is not really great on the grand performance scale of things.

Imagine how bad it is for the rest of us with slower PCs.
Besides heavy workarounds they havent even acknowledged the problem much less promise any real optimizations/engine improvements so dont hold your breath.

No.
I was trying to match titles to my characters ie: guardian – combat healer but decided against it after the title display change.
Since then i find titles to be useless clutter and do not want to impose this on other players.

Erasculio.2914:

Keep in mind that the feedback thing is what they told us. But ArenaNet knows how many players do each kind of content. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have learned that no one is doing the events, excluding those that are farmed.

If they really base most of their decisions on such metrics they are doing a horrible job as game developers. Considering the state the game is in i m not really surprised. Or maybe NC really tightened the grip on them.

What i can say for sure is that i am disappointed by them. They took a vision of a great game and then 2 months after launch turned it into just another ordinary, average MMO. If they at least were working on an expansion i might be fine with it but apparently that isnt so. Another year of filler content, time gating and similar pathetic typical MMO techniques simply wont do.

A quickie but goodie for all us altaholics.
Scrolling instead of clicking the arrows on the char selection screen or an option to display more portraits would be a nice small improvement for the UI.

The best written summary on this whole thing.
+1s well deserved.

Not even by a long shot.

Remember, remember the 15th of november.

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/posting

There are probably many other such instances but here s two that have been bugging me on my mesmer for a long time:

http://imgur.com/a/GpjvP#vmJgwVv

Its been almost a year and stuff like this can be quickfixed by an amateur like me in less than an hour. I m sure a pro can do better.

So could this please get fixed already?

It worked for me earlier today. Focus on Chomper, get all the food and kill him (you should get the achiev at this point) then finish the norn.

Spendingallmytime.7249:

Hopefully the rest of that message is, “And battle him to the death.”

Trahearne is so imba it would make the Liadri fight look like a childs game compared to that.

Sil.4560:

I don’t think it’s about alts at all. I think it’s about Anet intentionally dragging out playtime as much as possible for players. All of this time gated content and soulbound crap are just an excuse to have us only accomplish a little bit day after day for each and every character we might choose to play. They’re desperate to keep us playing and this is their method.

Spot on. Makes you wonder how a company got to that from this:

But what if your business model isn’t based on a subscription? What if your content-design motivations aren’t driven by the need to create mechanics that keep people playing as long as possible? When looking at content design for Guild Wars 2, we’ve tried to ask the question: What if the development of the game was based on…wait for it…fun?

If we chose fun as our main metric for tracking success, can we flip the core paradigm and make design decisions based on what we’d like to play as game players? Can we focus our time on making meaningful and impactful content, rather than filler content meant to draw out the experience? Can we make something so much fun you might want to play it multiple times because it’s fun, rather than making you do it because the game says you have to? It’s how we played games while growing up. I can’t tell you how many times I played Quest for Glory; the game didn’t give me 25 daily quests I needed to log in and do—I played it multiple times because it was fun!

So if your key metric for success of your game is fun, how do you make content that fits that goal, and how do you know if you’re succeeding?

It’s easy to tell if a subscription-based game is hitting its metric of success, you simply look at the number of subscriptions; fun is much harder to define. To accomplish this, we’ve had to fundamentally redefine our development process of content in Guild Wars 2 around this concept of fun, and it starts with asking a very simple question that surprisingly isn’t asked that often in game development: “Are you having fun?”

- Colin Johanson, Is it Fun?

This blog is no longer available on ANETs site unfortunately but i have that article saved and it hurts every single time i read it.

Erasculio.2914:

There’s one thing that worries, me, though. We know ArenaNet can track players, and that they can measure – and see, even – how many players gather in a given map or in a given activity. This means they know how many people do dynamic events, how many people farm, how many people do Fractals, and so on.

What if we, as in those asking for better Dynamic Events, are the minority?

What if the great majority of GW2 players only wants to farm content like the bottom of the Crown Pavilion? What if the great majority doesn’t care about interesting dynamic events, about a rich storyline, or about relatable characters, but would rather farm for more gold and more shinies?

Guild Wars 2 was meant to be a revolution, as far as MMORPGs were concerned. The game wasn’t all that – it was a nice evolution in some aspects, true. But what if the GW2 players, in their majority, aren’t those who bought the game because they wanted something unique, rather those who bought the game because it was the next big MMORPG to be released, without caring about dynamic content at all?

We don’t know what most players do inside the game. ArenaNet does. And if they have learned that what the great majority of people do is farm mindless content over and over… Would it really be reasonable of us to ask them to bother with very elaborate content like new dynamic events chains that would have significant impact on an entire zone? When it would be much easier and much simpler for ArenaNet to just make the farming grounds that their players enjoy so much?

I honestly do not know. It’s possible that all the concerns above are an absurd, that it’s only a minority farming, and that Guild Wars 2 is filled with players who crave interesting and dynamic MMORPG content. But what if the GW2 community is really dominated by farmers and grinders, who don’t anything more than places to farm and shinies to grind for?

Even if we are the minority content like this simply wont hold the game afloat. Farming and shinies only please people for so long till they realize there is a wheel around them and they have in reality not moved an inch. Other MMOs are coming and this stale state GW2 is in wont get it anywhere. Even the biggest farmers and people demanding eternal progression will get sick of it. It is why all recent runothemill MMOs have been failures. 90% of my guild has left the game to play other games while they wait for their next WoW killer. Not only that, ANET by trying to please everyone has pretty much succeeded doing the opposite. Only the blind and the real hardcore GW fans remain.

I dont believe its a manner of minority. It is easier to please certain people but they too would love content that mattered, content that would actually progress the story of the world. And no the living story didnt do that. I hoped the karka were minions of the sea dragon. I hoped the dredge invading would signal a big campaign for Primordus. I hoped that a real dragon would crash the dragonfest and finally get us back into the actual story of GW2. A glimmer of hope came with the Zephyrites but even so in the end it is a giant hole of nothing since Zhaitan (pathetically) died.

Instead we are celebrating, running errands, flying kites and doing other non-heroic tasks. I dont mind doing that every once in a while but a year is almost over and GW2 content wise has less to show for it than its predecessor.

Not to even mention the plethora of other problems with the game that seem like they will never be fixed.

Rammie.2843:

If only they were voiced by Tricia Helfer…

Just a few weeks back i watched Tron: Uprising – great series.
Guess who they got to voice the narrator?

She s pretty much the defacto robot chick voice in the industry.

I really hate the required grind for entrance tickets. With all the bugs and issues not to mention gambits requiring even more tickets this is even more frustrating.

I enjoy skill based fights and figuring out how to beat an enemy but to grind for the “privilege” to do that in lag infested boring zerg battles that then also affect my performance above… no thanks.

I agree on all points with the OP.

What i d like to add is that not only is the content in this update boring, grindy, and uninteresting but also bug ridden and horribly designed.

In 1 year the actual story about GW2… (about the dragons about to destroy us all) has progressed not even one step. It is like the premise of GW2 never even existed.

We ve been showered with filler content, pathetic fluff items that dont really fit into the world, pointless gear progression, numerous time gates and currencies.

Meanwhile real problems that have pestered this game since the beta persist and are largely ignored by ANET. Performance, uninteresting champion and world boss fights, boring PVP, zerging in WvW…

And finally with the roadmap promising even more of daily gated progression i m not sure i ll be sticking around for much longer. Especially since real content or an expansion is apparently not even in the works.

ANET has failed to make the world feel alive, instead sending its playerbase chasing after a new carrot every 2 weeks while doing their daily chores.

ANET manages to completely ignore the performance limitations of their horrible engine yet again.
Not to mention the stupid camera in the fighting cages.

Iason Evan.3806:

From reading all of this, I see some great points. Most of the points I see though are things that lead me to believe that some of the people making them shouldn’t really be playing GW2 because it probably isn’t their cup of tea. At some point, you just have to cut your losses and find something else to play that suits you more.

Funny. We kept telling people that wanted WoW in GW2 the same thing before ANET pulled a 180.
ANET is making the stupid mistake almost all MMOs in the last decade made: try and cater to WoW players. In fact you could say they are making an even bigger mistake as with GW1 they had a very large player base and have sacrificed their original design. In most cases when you do that you ll end up with nothing once the next big thing rolls around the corner.

GPUs that strong dont enhance the GW2 experience. CPUs do.

It is and isnt ANETs fault.

It isnt their fault that Intel CPUs excel in single thread performance far better and are generally a generation or two ahead of AMDs:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-cpu-review-overclock,3106-5.html
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

However it is their fault for not optimizing the engine to better utilize multiple cores or that they very much disregarded performance as a factor while making this game.

Even with a 4770 or 4670 (offering the same performance for GW2) WvW will still tank your frames.
Only with a very limited budget can you consider buying an AMD CPU and even then speaking strictly for GW2 you d probably be better off with a dual core i3.

Kain Francois.4328:

Credit to That_Shaman, from the .DAT:

Game optimization

109841_0003 Character Quality:
109841_0004 Character Limit:
109841_0005 Limit detail of particle effects.
109841_0006 Effect LOD

Happy?

I d be more happy if devs actually responded to this and told us themselves what exactly is in the works. No idea why it wasnt addressed in the roadmap.

Still i m not gonna hold my breath over this but it appears at least something is being worked on. Even if its just workarounds more options are always good.

Adminir.8140:

From a player’s standpoint, what would be the best option in terms of trying to reduce overall lag in terms of PC component upgrades? With a less than optimized game, would the best upgrade solution be a newer GPU or CPU? A majority of people posting seem to think that this game relies heavily on the CPU, though there are some that believe the GPU has more say within the performance department. Is there anyway to test such theories?

These arent theories. Nvidia themselves stated the game is heavily CPU bound and you can see it for yourself if you monitor your CPU/GPU usage – not with task manager that is.
People who say buy a new GPU as a general advice for this game are clueless.
Unless you have a really bad graphics card and a very good CPU the game will benefit a lot more from a CPU upgrade.

GW2 would run best with a hypothetical tricore CPU clocked at 5 or 6 GHz. The best real option is an i5 xxxxk OCed beyond 4GHz. i7s are a waste for this game.

Espionage.3685:

Has this actually been proven? A similar case exists with Crysis 2 and its DX11 Tessellation (there’s a river of invisible tessellation), but this was also backed by pictures showing it in wireframe.

Not sure about reflections but take a look at this:

http://www.umbrasoftware.com/en/clients/case-studies/guild-wars-2-case-study/

Xenon.4537:

This thread just makes me sad… I never dip below 30 fps in anywhere, and I have max settings. I’ve been in the middle of Stonemist with 3 zergs of 50+ each clashing and I still get 30+ fps. I’ve got a i7 3770 and GTX 670, so if you’re on a comparable level and having fps issues, its probably not the game…

As for people who aren’t able to afford such hardware, I know that sucks, but games just require more power every few years, and so you gotta keep up or settle for lag. We can’t keep living in the past though.

Complete and utter ignorance akittens best.

kelman.9451:

With this game it seems CPU clock speed is the thing more than how many cores you have. Big WvW fights though, probably will bog down anyones machine. Turn of Post Processing, and things that will help some.

Post processing does absolutely nothing when you are limited by CPU power.
The biggest factors that help improve performance in this case are shadows and reflections.

Pure Heart.1456:

For all the FPS hungry people out there, I would suggest going out and mowing a few lawns on weekends, save up your money and buy a decent graphics card—Nvidia GTX580 or higher.

TurtleofPower.5641:

The game runs fine on any cheap gaming rig. Now if you’re talking a computer with no quality gaming parts… this is an age old problem. You have to be careful what you buy because there are plenty of lame companies that will sell you a junk parts computer because they just don’t care.

Your best bet is to go to hardware websites and check in the forums what kind of parts someone would build a cheap gaming rig with right now.

ITT: people who know nothing about GW2 performance issues and/or dont bother reading the thread.

I m sad there was nothing said on performance improvements in the road map nor have we even gotten a response in over 2 months of a moderator promising us one.

Exotic: available relatively easily trough ALL means in the game with plenty of stat variety, you know just like we were promised to be able to obtain max stat gear

Ascended: what a load of kittens

Striker.9413:

The old list was clean, elegant, and easy to scan.

The additional categories were unnecessary. They only made the list 10 items longer and requires additional clicking to navigate to the category you want. Some categories only have a single sub-category anyways.

The individual achievement “list” is now a zigzag of icons. This makes it more difficult to scan and compare differences. The long progress bar also showed more detailed progression.

Finally, the icons only show the titles of the achievements, not what you need to do. You have hover over the icon. The old one showed the task to complete without an additional action.

Overall, the interface requires far more actions from the user to get the same amount of information.

Just wanted to post the same thing. Excess scrolling and clicking sucks.
Also while they r at it they might as well add an option to auto remove completed achievements from the watch list.

Mackdose.6504:

SonicTHI.3217:

Mackdose.6504:

SonicTHI.3217:

Increasing the level cap in GW2 would be stupid and pointless, especially since they introduced ascended gear. Even without touching gear and only letting skills go past 80 it would break the balance and they d have to spend even more time on it.

They ll probably do it as ever since release they have been trying to cater to the WoW base more and more. Better gear to grind, soon raids, then 10 new levels, next mounts and maybe flying ones as well to top it off.
Way to show their core base that has supported them for so long the finger (again).

I forgot WoW invented vertical progression and challenging group content. Also, WoW doesn’t update every 2 weeks.

I’d take mounts over instant way point travel any day… at least there’d be people passing through zones.

WoW invented vertical progression and challenging group content… and you managed to deduce that from my post… somehow. Wow, you must be a magician!

And if you like mounts that much why did you start playing GW2 anyway? But dont worry i m sure ANET will listen to you.

No magic here, just wondering how you equate gear grinding and raiding to be “copying WoW” when GW2 has been chasing its own niche for months now, and hasn’t been biting ideas from WoW at all. But it’s cool, go ahead and back pedal.

Thanks for ignoring the “makes the world less empty” reasoning for taking mounts over way points. I guess you like having all that lovely landscape and downscaling mechanic go to waste after the leveling curve.

(mounts are also horizontal progression)

I m the one back pedalling? You cant even get your point straight.
Guess i ll have to explain it like i would to a child:
All i said was that GW2 has been more and more catering to WoW players who enjoy those things i listed and whom are the majority in fantasy MMOs. FYI that definitely does not mean “WoW invented vertical progression and challenging group content” and it does not mean “equating gear grinding and raiding to be copying WoW”. So stop pulling rabbits out of your _ _ _ and start debating rationally.

As to your actual points in the last post:
GW2 has not been chasing its niche for the most part. It gave up most of its niche long ago to get more players into the game and to keep those who came with false ideas on what the game would be about playing and paying. Yes GW2 has many small niche elements in it but as a whole its further from GW1 than it is from your average themepark MMORPG.

As for mounts:
How is a world more populated when people are just passing by on their mount to reach a destination like a dungeon entrance? They dont interact with me. People who WP to an event i m doing do. It is a different system it has pros and cons. GW2 went with it and you are here whining you want it changed.
And mounts most often actually are vertical progression in terms of speed before they are in appearance.

On the actual topic of vertical progression:
GW2 itself is proof you do not need perpetual gear or level progression as it is built upon GW1 that had neither and is the reason GW2 can even exist. Now before someone points out that GW1 had lightbringer ranks or similar things: those never devalued your armor or level and were only applicable in certain areas.
Besides pleasing the people who prefer chasing the proverbial carrot perpetual vertical progression is utterly pointless as in reality it gets you nowhere. The wheel turns. The hamster stay in the same relative spot. At least till he quits or gets flung out.

Mackdose.6504:

SonicTHI.3217:

Increasing the level cap in GW2 would be stupid and pointless, especially since they introduced ascended gear. Even without touching gear and only letting skills go past 80 it would break the balance and they d have to spend even more time on it.

They ll probably do it as ever since release they have been trying to cater to the WoW base more and more. Better gear to grind, soon raids, then 10 new levels, next mounts and maybe flying ones as well to top it off.
Way to show their core base that has supported them for so long the finger (again).

I forgot WoW invented vertical progression and challenging group content. Also, WoW doesn’t update every 2 weeks.

I’d take mounts over instant way point travel any day… at least there’d be people passing through zones.

WoW invented vertical progression and challenging group content… and you managed to deduce that from my post… somehow. Wow, you must be a magician!

And if you like mounts that much why did you start playing GW2 anyway? But dont worry i m sure ANET will listen to you.

Increasing the level cap in GW2 would be stupid and pointless, especially since they introduced ascended gear. Even without touching gear and only letting skills go past 80 it would break the balance and they d have to spend even more time on it.

They ll probably do it as ever since release they have been trying to cater to the WoW base more and more. Better gear to grind, soon raids, then 10 new levels, next mounts and maybe flying ones as well to top it off.
Way to show their core base that has supported them for so long the finger (again).

Yumiko Ishida.3769:

I’m running an e450 1.68 ghz dual core laptop with an ATI Radeon HD 6320 (even has its own pool of 2 gig ram). The game works poorly no matter what I do, but it doesn’t overheat my machine either… yet its been worse at loading things and my character since Halloween event. I can run all high on the GPU end of things, but the CPU bottlenecks so badly (and loads even slower) its not worth it. If Anet makes the game more 50/50 on terms of reliance of GPU and CPU, I think dual cores can run this very well.

I even run PSO 2 and GW 1 better than this on this machine! GW 1 topped 60 fps in spots!

I remember ANET saying GW 2 runs off of a modified GW 1 engine and if so, we shouldn’t have these problems.

That is some really bad reasoning you got there since GW2 has models with 10-100 times the polygon count of GW1, not to mention other graphical additions. There are reasonable expectations and improvements and then there is this.

People with quad cores cant run this game well yet you expect to run it on something that is 5-10x slower than a proper gaming PC: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/

With all its problems GW2 is still leagues above most other MMOs.
What i like to do (and did in GW1s time as well) is every now and then try one of those standard korean grinders just to remind myself how good we have it with GW2.

marnick.4305:

Sometimes that’s the only possible explanation. They can’t and won’t sue me. Why would they? And why would my boss fire someone who delivers good customer support? I love my job and try to do it to the best of my ability. It pains me to say that line but again, sometimes it’s the only possible answer.

And what if you wouldnt deliver a few times? Do you think that phrase would still hold as much merit with your superiors? Also as i said there is a big difference in who says it and to whom. Yes when talking about a very specific thing that can be the only answer but not in the case that we are talking about here.

As an end customer you bought the boxed product. All obligations from A.net’s side ended there. Indeed they have absolutely no contractual obligations to add one more update to the game. They do because they want to earn money through gems, so the only argument of value you have, is your wallet. No forum post you make can have more influence than the amount of real money you spend to buy gems.

In the MMO industry, “we’re working on it” means several months on average. Eventually A.net will deliver. If not, people will stop buying gems for $$, so A.net has a good reason to deliver ASAP, which in this genre means, hopefully by the end of summer. Hopefully being the key word.

In GW1, people demanded 7 heroes, claiming gloom and doom for the game. A.net delivered, but it literally took years.

So again, what does “timely” mean to you? Months? Days? Years?

If ANET is only looking at gems bought they have a serious case of bad management. MMOs are a service and those sales are the last indicator of its success. When they go bad it is already too late. That s why you also need feedback and that s what these forums are for among other things.

In the MMO industry, “we’re working on it” can mean anywhere from now to never. It is as vague of a phrase as “when its done” or soon™.
Having 7 heroes or dealing with technical difficulties are two completely different things. One is a feature request, the other is a problem affecting the majority of the playerbase.

GW2 is a case of bad game design where the devs either didnt judge their engine performance correctly or they didnt consider the hardware used by most people. So a proper solution for this should have been implemented before the game was even released.
But as far as specifics go… something like particle effect reduction shouldnt take more than a month or two even with a very small team. Some things in games can be very easily implemented. I requested the option to turn off depth blur somewhere in the last few betas and got that option by release. Of course other things take much more time but as i said they should at least be more specific and tell us what they are working on even if they cant give us the info when it will be done. And that also goes for other things like features and general game direction.

marnick.4305:

Guess what kind of meetings I have on a weekly basis. Guess what kind of customers I deal with. Sure it’s not gaming, it’s industrial grades software that’s used to produce things you use every day (your monitor for example). If we have a big fix to implement, it can take up to several months before it’s released. Currently we’re working on a very big overhaul. Such things literally take years and are inevitably delayed.
Customers understand that. I’m so glad I don’t have to work with entitled gamers but rather with Ph.D.’s who have a clue.

Dear Mr.Bigshot please start addressing my points and backing up yours instead of showing off how awesome and important you are on the interwebs. Also if you dont like dealing with “entitled gamers” then i ll ask you again: what are you doing here?

Let’s be clear here. I tell people “we’re working on it” on a daily basis. People who’s entire income depend on that statement. Companies who could lose millions of euros over such statements. They accept that because they know we are actually working on it, and who’d rather have a good fix than a rushed one.
So please understand that in my perspective, comparing millions of euros vs a mere videogame, that “we’re working on it” is more than enough to keep me waiting for something that will come eventually. If I couldn’t accept that, I would be a hypocrite. I’m not.

If you really work at such a high level i m sure the people who you say that phrase to can either sue you to oblivion if you do not deliver or at least fire you and i m sure you have meetings where your performance is assessed and graded and others where you have to explain things a lot better than with only that phrase.
However the end customer – developer or publisher relation is quite different and the phrase “we’re working on it” doesnt carry nearly as much weight in the game industry.
Game companies have no contractual obligations to their customers so please understand that the only thing we can do is bring this issue up with ANET on these forums. And no this has nothing to do with entitlement. As a consumer i expect any product i buy to work as advertised and if not for it to be fixed in a timely manner. If that is not possible i want to at least be given some proper explanation and not be kept in the dark.

marnick.4305:

However if it’s not from nVidia, this entire thread is pointless. The post hinges on the argument from authority that this is written by an nVidia employee. If it isn’t, there is no thread.

Yet there is a real problem, one acknowledged by nvidia. The post even if fake has many points based on facts. If you feel like this is not important then what are you doing here?

You make two weak premises here.
1/ you presume the engine doesn’t work just fine.
2/ you presume that, if it doesn’t, that a.net doesn’t know that.

The engine does not work fine. That is not a presumption and if you did any real research into it you would know what the main problem is and what needs to be done about it. Also i have no idea where you pulled that second presumption out of. If anything i implied that ANET knows and doesnt care enough about it to allocate enough resources to it to properly fix these issues.

I’ve seen the game become far more stable, less crashes, less graphical bugs and increased fps across the board.

I run an i7 920@3Ghz and GTX650. I’ve got everything on high with a few tweaks to optimize performance with extremely stable 40+ fps. This PC is 3 years old except for the GPU, I do not claim it should run zerg vs zerg at 60 fps on highest … yet some people with similar setups do exactly that. Such claims are dishonest.

Ever since the last few betas i have seen virtually no crashes or any artifacts but better FPS? No. In fact i can easily say the opposite when looking at places like Southsun Cove.
You are outright lying when you say you have 40 fps stable. The framerate in GW2 is anything but stable. The alleged nvidia post is right on the money with the performance variation statement. Yes MMO will vary more in performance in any case but it is very much up to ANET to keep performance on some sort of level either with proper coding or workarounds.

Post date: September 2012. A lot has changed since then.

Has it? Please provide proof for such bold statements. On the engine level besides the workaround in WvW virtually nothing of any significance has changed. The fact that GW2 is severely CPU bound and that it is only up to ANET to fix it is after 10 months still completely true.

Building an engine usually takes between 2 and 4 years of dedicated work. If you think a complete engine overhaul would take less than 10 months … you’re stupid. However a lot of incremental improvements have been made, which take far less time.

The “we’re working on it crap” isn’t crap if you have any idea about the amount of work you’re referring to. Some things simply take time. This isn’t a geocities website or ti83 game you may have built once or twice, it’s an actual videogame. And in the real world, these kinds of projects take time and are inevitably delayed. Happens all the time. I can’t imagine anyone over 20 not knowing that.

There are many other options besides making a complete overhaul of the engine. If you knew anything about game development you would know that.
ANET built a game around an old engine and while making many very good decisions they ignored one crucial thing: client side performance. The game simply does not scale well on a wide variety of PCs or rather CPUs. Even when faced with that fact they ve provided us with barely any options to alleviate this issue in all this time. Does coding a new option for reduced skill effects take 10 months? Did they redesign world boss and other events and WvW better to split up masses of people in 10 months? Did they implement other things to keep zergs under control? The list goes on and on. Sure the option to turn off other player models or using stock ones for PVE should be done soon but that is a very blunt solution.
As for the actual engine. Yes it probably requires an overhaul specifically on reducing the number of instructions in the main thread as most CPUs nowadays and in the near future do not run at 5-6GHz but rather have 4 or 8 cores. Does that take time? Yes. Does it take years? No. Unless the engine is so badly written that it was stupid to go along with it in the first place.

And as for the last statement again you completely misunderstood and went on to bashing me without even knowing my background. I cant imagine someone over 20 doing that… oh wait i can. So let me explain just for you again:
We simply want more info besides the “we are working on it” statements that we ve heard over a dozen times by now. In fact ANET hasnt even come out clean and acknowledged these problems properly or given us any info on upcoming solutions. If an engine overhaul is being worked on why are we not being told? And this awkward silence on their part isnt just on technical side of things but on general game future and development as well.