If anyone wants to take a step back from chasing loot bags they could do worse than taking an alt to Lion’s Arch to explore the map again. Enough things are different, including some jumps to the vistas, to hold the interest for a little while.
You want the items to have limited availability so you can be prestigious by having them. Other people want wide availability so they can have them at all. There’s clearly going to be no middle ground.
Maybe it is best if people wear something because it just looks good and suits them?
All these threads come up again and again and they have the same answer.
After the champion purses were introduced the players noticed that the rewards were too generous (when using zergs on group content) and made trains to cash in, immediately, in large numbers. The designers noticed it too and made fixes many months later. So everyone could see that it was too generous, and that is why it was popular, and it has inevitably been fixed. End of story.
If you’ve got complaints about farming then consider this. Farmers gravitate to the points in the game where the rewards for challenge/time are most generous. These are always going to be the points in the game that are out of balance and the most likely to get rebalanced later.
Existing dungeons do not need a wholesale revision. New content needs to be made better instead.
Players who insist on you doing things a dumb way because it is all they know.
People who attack at boss on high health from the downed state when I’m reviving them, especially when they’re in a shadow refuge.
My suggestion would be that husks are dead plant matter than has been magically re-animated, in some similar manner to necromancy. This would not restrict husks to any location, master, or purpose. It seems like the sort of thing that the Nightmare Court and Jungle Dragon would do to create brutish minions.
There are too many possibilities for Scarlet’s Rattle really. She’s been launching any number of toxins into the air, experimenting on prisoners, disrupting ley lines, blowing up reactors, crossbreeding races, and that’s only considering the physical stuff. I expect that it isn’t anything to do with Southsun but someone might want Canach to look into it. I wouldn’t be surprised if it is blight that comes from the Jungle Dragon.
Mr E is hidden anyway, so there’s little point creating a fake identity for a fake identity. Maybe there’s a Mrs E?
With the introduction of champion purses, champion loot became imbalanced when players embarked on a certain style of play (zergs on non-scaling content). The players noticed this and immediately took advantage of this in large numbers. The designers noticed this and corrected it months later. So the loot bags have now been fixed for exactly the same reason that the players went there in their droves. For some reason players deny this sensible explanation and come up with ridiculous plots and agendas about the gem store. There is no conspiracy, no hidden agenda, just game balancing.
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“Last year there were a few Tyrians who were saying that they were going to travel with the Zephyrites – where are these people?”
They are probably busy reporting back to the Order of Whispers.
Am I right in thinking that Rabsovich used to turn towards you as you tried to move away from his big attack, but now he stays on the orange/red line? That would explain why he’s so much simpler.
Yes I agree that it is too simple now. Great to see some new ideas here, great to have the bulk of the fractal cut down, but too easy now. Give Rabsovich some of his troops back. Entirely remove the mobs between Rabsovich and the end boss as they are no use for anything.
If Canach was going into domestic service, which he won’t of course, the guard must be thinking that this lady has an impressive house or estate. She would of course need to have cash on hand for this sort of deal. It also suggests the lady isn’t known to run an organization that takes recruits, such as the orders. It would be very interesting if the lady was a separatist who was hiring Canach as a terrorist to disrupt the peace treaty but I’m guessing that won’t happen.
I don’t think big business would touch Canach with a barge pole after Southsun. Anyone who does hire him will probably need to share similar goals as Canach will rebel somehow if he hates his job. Even so, Canach will probably be left to carry the can if anything goes wrong as nobody will put their own reputation on the line for him. His skills might be of interest to anyone dealing with Scarlet’s nightmare stuff.
If we boldly suppose that Canach will appear in Brisban wildlands area, then we might be looking for a human lady who has an interest up there. No nobles seem to have land there, nobody seems interested in any druids or skritt, but there are plenty of bandits around and a dragon. The Seraph are sending regular troops there, so my guess would be the Shining Blade hiring Canach to investigate a new threat in Brisban and find out what’s behind it.
“This is the second time you try to undermine the people you are discussing with by presenting them as lazy or whatever.
Why do you feel the need to do that?"
If anyone decides that they don’t want to put time (or money) into an MMO just to get a virtual reward then I wouldn’t call them lazy. I’d call them smart.
“Each patch has continually nerfed the ability for players to accumulate gold.
That forces players to the gem shop for gem to gold conversions – especially casual players."
Play the way you want doesn’t mean getting the best rewards for doing very little. It never has and never will. All the game content (except top fractals) is open to be played with rare gear and exotic gear and you can play the way you want in that content. Getting exotic gear isn’t hard. Getting anything else has nothing to do with playing the game, it’s about desiring game end rewards. If you are choosing to use your real world money for cosmetic game items then that’s your choice and you can’t blame the game designers for offering you that choice.
You may also assuming that you are competing against the game for money. You are not. You are competing against players who are playing the way you want but playing for twice or as long for twice as much gold. They will always force the price of trading post items out of your reach.
“No, From each patch – the reality is you can only play the way Anet wants you to play. That way of “playing” is directing you to the cash shop with each and every patch.”
That’s just the cynics view of everything in GW2. I’ve seen nothing in the gem store that I need to buy. I can play exactly the way I want to play without gems. I’ve seen nothing to convince me that other people can only play the game in the way they want to play if they visit the gem store. They might not be able to get the rewards they want but that is something entirely different.
What way do you want to play that is impossible without the gem store? Does it involve a reward of some kind?
This game has been advertised like " we make the game for you, the player, we let you play the way you want to play"
This has been happening for over a year now but after the recent nerfs, “the way of how we want to play” has become “the way we want you to play”
Notice the change? it is “you”
You can still play the way you want to play. Nothing to stop you. If the like scenery in a zone and people who adventure there then go back there and see it all again and again.
I guessing you’re actually complaining that you’re no longer highly rewarded for low skill activities, like the Queensdale champ train. Well you can still choose to play low challenge content for low reward if you want to play that way, can’t you?
“Who gave you lot the right to tell people to play the game your way and only your way?”
This isn’t about the way people play the game though. You can go there are play in exactly the same way you did last week. And the week before. And the week before that. So can everyone else. The only thing that has changed is the loot reward. The enjoyment is still there …. assuming that you were not just enjoying the loot.
“Meh. QD train was never that great for karma or gold, still was a good way to do events for dailies/monthly while chilling out in the best map of gw2 (most starter zones are more beatiful and well designed then endgame ones ).”
People can still do that. All the people who enjoyed Queensdale because it was scenic, social, friendly, relaxed, can still go there. Nothing is stopping them. I’m guessing the trains will disappear though and I’m guessing it will be due to the loot, regardless of the pleasantries.
A lot of events come in waves and each wave is scaled to the number of people present, I expect. Mobs that are already present will not descale if people leave. Some events with counters, such as bring me 10 collectables, can scale up when they start and remain that way over many hours until the event is completed.
Griefing through scaling is possible but doesn’t happen very often. Players can be deliberately dead on the floor in an event area just to upscale an event to make it too difficult for others. Separate scaling for each wave of an event tends to prevent much inadvertent upscaling by people passing by.
“When i see the direction things are taking here, do you think that there is an “attack plan” on the developers side to reduce how rewarding Orr Maps are?”
Not at all. Orr is the intended open world end game. Players are meant to be there at level 80. Players get scaling events that should provide scaled challenge and scaled rewards. The war against the risen is meant to satisfy big armies of players working together to complete events. The problem we are most likely to see with Orr is players migrating to any permanent end game zones that come with the living story.
I’m not why anyone could ever imagine that zergs fighting non-scaling champion mobs in low level zones was intended design. It is no surprise that it was finally fixed, even if it was popular.
“So what ANET is your vision about champs and farming them? What is your opinion of zerging and trains? Why encourage them through game design and then nerf?”
They blundered in the loot balancing when they gave out champion purses. After lowering the purse rewards a few times they’ve finally started sorting it out properly.
Their vision for farming is the same as it always has been. Players can fight in any size ‘train’ against scaling events that give greater rewards and greater challenge when more people are present. Orr was specifically designed for this. The scaling isn’t always great but that’s still better than zergs fighting non-scaling group challenges for the highest rewards.
Ok the status seems to be :
Peace treaty with Charr (excellent) – Peace treaty might yet collapse (bad)
Zaitan down (good) – new dragon appears and Kralk is still near Ebonhawke (bad)
Scarlet is gone (good) – she destroyed Kessex Hills (bad)
Centaurs are still outside Divinity’s Reach (bad)
Bandits are rife and have hidden alliances (bad)
Internal politics with the ministry (bad)
Gods are missing (awful) – Zaitan is no longer corrupting the temples (good)
Watchknights are unreliable (bad)
Jennah has no heirs (bad) and has Logan (bad)
The great collapse (bad) is going to reveal something worse eventually
All in all, not looking so good. If anything major happens there will enemies on all sides ready to take advantage.
Say it quietly, but the dredge fractal is probably too easy now.
Solo jumping puzzles ok. Group jumping puzzles bad.
I lose my patience in jumping puzzles as it is. I will lose patience even more if I’m waiting for bad jumpers, but I don’t kick. Other people will kick. I will lose patience with myself if other people are waiting around while I’m being rubbish. If everyone can always do the puzzles then nobody is going to lose patience but then why make these puzzle dungeons if they’re going to be easy?
There are lots of factors that make stacking viable that probably won’t change -
- small revive range in dungeons
- small boon/buffing radius in dungeons
- small combo field radius
- small radius melee attacks with cleave give highest total dps
- small radius of defense skills like missile defense
and so on. Theoretically players should be using skills/timing to control enemy positions to maximize the small radius attacks but stacking and corners do it much easier.
For every person on the forum who asks for a speed boost, there is someone else asking for waypoints to be removed so we have to walk through the open world for more immersion. In both cases there are far better things for Anet to spend their time on.
Sacrlet’s invasions were essentially ‘making PVE more interesting’ in the way the OP requested but players were actually more interested in loot bags. I’m not sure where the designers go with that type of event but I suspect we will see something like it again in season 2.
Some attacks are unblockable, typically siege weapons.
A number of the skins available from that emissary are already in the game from barter merchants in Ebonhawke itself.
Representation entirely kills this, even if it is desirable. Players who are in a guild but not representing will either
- be safe, in which case they will toggle the representation so they can ambush people
- be vulnerable, in which case they will just quit the guild entirely
You’ve also got to worry about players who are in both guilds. The guild membership system just isn’t going to allow this.
The technical quality is ok. I think the design quality is worse and too many fixes need to themselves be fixed later. Anyone who can remember back to games like Everquest I will not have a problem with the current level of bugs. EQ had servers down for 50% of the time after a patch and your character progress kept getting reset from a back-up (so you lost any progress and loot).
The dredge are similar to the centaurs and probably ogres too. They are intelligent, social, organized, enemies who are largely fighting for their own turf. Their conflicts have a historical basis but there are variety of practical, philosophical, and cultural factors as well. At another time, in another place, they could be allies of the major races but it isn’t going to happen at the moment.
If you want to see the Dredge as a neutral race you can easily do that and just consider them to have alternative philosophies and poor leaders. If you want to see them as an evil race you can see them as invaders who will raid for goods, drive people from their lands, refuse to trade (as that assumes individual property), destroy history based on racial hatred, enslave their citizens to a corrupt ideology, and so on.
Sorry but it will not happen. A big design principle of GW2 is that anyone can play the content. There is very little gating of game content that prevents anyone from experiencing the content. Fractals are the ultimate grindy dungeon content in GW2 but low level fractals are available to be enjoyed by any level of character. Putting new fractal at the end of the most horrible gear check in the game is going against the design principles.
What they could do is change some of the bosses so that they have completely new abilities and challenges. That might be fun. They would still be best putting that in starting at fractal 20 though so that more players have access to it. Requesting new content just for elites is pointless.
GW2 should be going pretty much in the direction it is now but with
- better quality of story
- more permanent content in the living story
- more ways to cycle historical content (like the marionette)
- ongoing resolution of old problems (like graphics flare)
- improved design so that things work when delivered (eg contested waypoints with megaserver)
- improved design of open world events with total scaling solutions rather than the haphazard scaling we have currently
In other words, it just needs a lot more technical quality in the design.
Grenth is one of the best of the world boss events as it can actually kill the zerg. For that reason alone it really shouldn’t be changed. It is the players who are at fault for essentially being rubbish and they should shape up. It would help if some of the NPCs gave helpful hints instead of leaving it all up to players, particularly now that the EU megaservers are multilingual.
Priest resetting – Yes any spurious resets should be fixed. Yes the shades should reset with him when he does this.
Shade health – Yes it is a lot for one character to deal with but this is a raid event and as soon as more players take on the shades they do die at the right pace. Nothing needs to be changed.
Corruption stacks – It is possible to dodge, block, blind and otherwise prevent the shade attacks. It only seems impossible because there are so many shades roaming around and that is due to the zerg play.
This is actually one of the events where waypoint rushing makes players worse. If players couldn’t run back and hope to zerg everything then they would learn, just as they did when waypoint rushing was removed from dungeons.
There is also no incentive for commanders to take a train of players to do the whole of Grenth based in terms of rewards for time spent. It all takes too much time and loot is only given for the final stage. If commanders were coming regularly then they would train up their trains to do it right. I can’t seen any events changes being made to address this though as Anet can’t assume how the players will organize themselves as time goes by.
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I’ll also suggest that corners give crowd control and missile defense. In fact corners are better than class skills at gathering enemies together. Walls can be popular since you can use movement skills and dodges into a wall but stay where you are.
Stacking isn’t a problem if you only want to play the game as an exchange of your personal time for online gold. By stacking you spend less time for the same gold. If you want to play the game for your personal entertainment then surely stacking in a corner (with limited skills and awful visuals) is some of the lowest entertainment the game can give you.
This penalizes the casual players. If they run content at the same time as hardcore players then they should have the same chance of drops, no matter how many times any of them have run this content before. I know that a lot of people want to be rewarded with virtual rewards for sinking more and more time into a computer game but … just step back and think about it first.
The luck system does already give a loot advantage to experienced players.
World events are easy for everyone. You can stand at max range and auto-shot for most of them. You don’t need to know tactics, don’t need to know your class, don’t need to know the enemy attacks.
Dungeons actually pose a challenge for the inexperienced. Surely that’s good? You can spend time in dungeons improving your play and facing a challenge until you learn your class and learn some tactics. Then the dungeons will unfortunately seem easy as well.
I’m guessing there could be some hidden technical reason why this hasn’t been fixed. Probably something to do with how the dungeon is linked to a server. It still seems strange that it hasn’t been fixed yet.
If it is changed though you will see more complaints about abusive kicking though. Someone will be able to join a group, invite a friend, and together kick everyone else out. It will happen.
Anyone who can kill all the dragons can then sort out any problems in the magic world themselves. The Charr certainly want to control their own destiny and not rely on mystical mega beings to solve their problems. I’m guessing the Asura think the same. The Norns, Humans, and Sylvari will just call upon their magical patrons for help as usual and it’ll seem a far better choice than falling into dragon corruption.
In other words, I don’t need a sheep to keep my grass down.
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I get the impression that quite often the designers know what they don’t want to do, since they’ve seen problems in other MMOs, but don’t actually have the vision to create something else that works. Horizontal loot rewards fit that bill, so do open world raid events, repetitive questing, etc. Let’s hope they have some new ideas for Season 2.
Loot balancing has been specifically bad though in GW2 and anything that has been fixed has generally had about 4 other corrections later to make the fix right. Champion loot bags are the prime example as eventually they even had to remove some champions.
There is actually no game problem at all if players just sell the unwanted rings. The game carries on. Rings only fill banks if players put them into banks. The top quality loot rewards in fractals may not drop often enough but the drop rate should be fixed rather than trying to make these rings compensate for that. They should not be a hidden currency.
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Guild Halls do have a game purpose, a social place for guilds to meet and hold events, but good guild halls come with a lot of customization and that all have to be put into the game from scratch. It’s a lot more work than it appears. Is there also a problem with zone populations being lower than guild populations? That would make it impossible to get a full guild together whatever else happens.
If players want to dance around and use fun boxes in a big guild hall then the Norn have plenty to spare.
There are a number of different ways to go about the thief business, in fractals particularly. Find yourself weapons you can rely on for basic encounters and then experiment with utilities and weapons for the hard stuff.
We knew when these events were withdrawn that they would be coming back later. It’s the right time. Let it happen.
There are a lot of problems with underwater combat but it is almost playable and there’s little point in removing it. No new PvP maps should have it except it remote corners though.
It’s just scaling. The Karka Queen did used to cause trouble for players. Now that a full zerg hits her every time there just isn’t enough scaling. There’s so much lag you can’t dodge even if you want to.
Larcenous strike tends to strip protection and might quite often.
“Side note: Does anyone think Scarlet’s mental deterioration from “whacky” to “dark” was communicated well?”
I’m guessing the voice actress tried her best but he writing didn’t back it up. Flame and Frost is a dark storyline to start with and the Marionette is just straight whacko Scarlet at the end.