I’m linking this video now, because I keep seeing people trivialising the cost for past episodes as “only 200 gems”. It’s “only” 200 gems per episode, which is currently 600 gems (or $7.50, or 95 gold as of the time of this post), and that cost will only increase with time. If season 1 was charged at “only 200 gems” per each of the 25 episodes, that costs “only 5000 gems” or $62.50 plus tax, or 790 gold and likely more as the cost will inflate. You’d have to really, really want to play that content to justify putting up the cost.
You don’t buy the living story when you buy the game. The living story is extra. We are fortunate that we can get it for free by logging on regularly.
The cost of past episodes is a matter for the sales staff and new customers. The episodes have to be priced so as to be good value for the people who buy them. If anyone feels that the story chapters would not be value for money then they don’t have to buy them! That’s a far better solution than arguing on forums.
You should not take your morality from computer game characters. You should have your own morality and make judgements on what you see based on your own morality.
When the computer game asks you to do something in game that you don’t agree with you can either (a) morally object for your personal satisfaction or (b) do it anyway as it is just a game.
Condition damage would be very competitive in PvE except for the condition cap and condition stacking (duration not intensity). The condition cap forces the zerker ideology. PvE mobs do not even cleanse conditions.
The problem with many control skills in dungeons is that walls and corners provide better control: missile defense, grouping mobs up, etc. Whilst that is true it doesn’t matter what else happens to the redesign of crowd control.
I agree that an open world zone with group content would be a good idea. The problem is how to stop players tackling the content as a zerg instead of a group, which they inevitably would do. I’d therefore like to see a group based dungeon that acted more like an open world zone with group events happening in different places at different times. Players would have more choice of the events to do and where to go, there could be rare events that don’t start every time, and there could still be major bosses at the end that need defeating. It would essentially be a non-linear dungeon.
The Karka Queen was at the end of a single time event with Ellen Kiel leading the Lionguard across Southsun slaughtering the karka. As you can imagine, the server loading was dreadful and the designers haven’t repeated single occasion events since.
One of those posts again, I know, everyone loves and hates to hear these, why cant we have expansions, or why don’t we just scrap Living Story.
The answer is this:
Living Story depends on DLC level content that comes in short and unsatisfying packages for the long term
The solution is much simpler. The Living Story should deliver short and satisfying packages that contain longer term content. This means more of content like Dry Top, Tequatl, Three headed wurm, Fractals. No expansion. No level cap increase. No gear grind. No 9 month wait for expansion. No need for anyone to pay real money for the expansion.
Don’t expect good things to come in any expansion without a price. The accountants put a ‘must have’ feature into every expansion to ensure sales and these must have features are good for the accountants and bad the game. The most common ‘must have’ feature is the level cap increase and GW2 players do not want that!
GW2 has a future but it needs to deliver more content. Simple as that.
Lord Faren says hello too. He’s the best fit for character, motive, and opportunity.
There’s no real reason to make these things salvageable. Sure, players want more loot, but it doesn’t need to happen. MMOs have always had top line items that are actually worthless to anyone who already has one.
Sell excess rings to the vendor. All problems solved. No issues outstanding.
Quite a lot of RPGs do this, not only MMOs. You’re looking at a lot of voice content when you have different races and different genders doing the same dialog. Some games cover this up better than others though.
Dailies are not meant to be a list of extra chores for players to do. Crafting items just the for sake of it is a chore for AP, sorry. The new dailies are better at rewarding players for getting on with playing the game, whether it is open world, dungeons, events, WvW, whatever.
The game lore suggests there are six. There is no evidence to suggest there are more.
There is no need put trivial, repetitive content into the game with high reward just to satisfy farmers. The farmers may vociferously ask for this but it is just as bad design in WvW as PvE.
To be honest, I’ve also found the dungeon changes to be perplexing at times. They seem like clumsy attempts to make players tackle dungeons as the design intended, generally by making everything else more punishing (more dredge!).
If they’ve changed the safe spots for the Colossus Rumbulus then it is hardly surprising. The original design probably intended for the whole area to be subject to environment damage so that players would use the NPCs for protection. If any safe spots remain then they shouldn’t.
It’s a really nice idea but it is the players that will cause the problems. As soon as some people in a group want to bail out and some want to stay in then there are going to be unhappy players. Unhappy players every run.
The game design should allow players with restricted time to manage that time carefully. If someone can manage an hours worth of time they can do something productive for that hour and log off satisfied. Endless dungeons really exclude that sort of player and only rewards those people who stay online for hours on end.
(Farmers should not prevent other players from having a nice game to play).
And other players should not prevent farmers from having a nice farm to farm
What I meant was that the designers shouldn’t take nice things away from players just because farmers were causing trouble.
I don’t really care if farmers have anywhere to farm or not. Good game design should reward enjoyable, challenging, successful activities. If that was in place then everyone would be wanting the same content and there would be no distinction between farmers, fun players, achievers, or anyone else.
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How about withholding rewards till successful event completion? If event fails you get nothing (other than usual xp, karma, gold) and if it succeeds you get the loot from all the champs that you tagged.
All players should always have every encouragement to join any event at any time for a share of the rewards. They should not be dissuaded by a lack of loot if it fails. We should not throw away this good design principle just to clean up the loot problems.
(Farmers should not prevent other players from having a nice game to play).
I think the OP has found the right cause of many problems but hasn’t suggested the right solution. To my mind, the introduction of the champion purses was not fully analyzed by the designers. The purses changed the game rewards across events, open world, dungeons, all sorts of content. It cut across the original reward system in a clumsy way. So yes the purses have caused a lot of problems and due to the lack of analysis the problems are continually being exposed in the live game rather than prevented by good design.
I don’t think the champion purses can be just removed now though. It would be just as traumatic a change to the loot system as their introduction was. The concept of players mobilizing to fight in end game zones against scaled up foes for better loot is fine. The delivery isn’t so fine but that concept should stay. Fighting scaling up foes with extra challenge for no extra reward was the original problem that champion purses were brought in to solve.
The real problem with event rewards is that nobody wants the event rewards. Karma and experience are meaningless to most players. This means that events are completed for other rewards than the actual event rewards and this will always pervert the design.
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Nobody is entitled to a legendary weapon. It doesn’t matter how many hours they’ve put in.
Playing GW2 with the goal of getting a legendary weapon seems like the wrong idea. You’ve got to enjoy the game, first and foremost, and then there’s no regret if the time put into the game hasn’t resulted in a virtual reward.
If they are going to do anything about it they might as well make AC into a level 40 dungeon. The barter rewards can be put to level 40 for explorable as well. The NPE seems to have slowed down player development and if anyone is worried about new players getting scared away from the game then they should be worried by the AC explorable paths.
I really wish someone on the development team was on top of the analysis of the design changes. The impact of change often seems to be underestimated and not fully controlled.
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There are some simple improvements that need putting in place before introducing punishing world bosses
- Improve graphics performance for massive events with many spell animations
- Reduce graphics flare over bosses so that all animations can be seen by all players
- Force players at long range to dodge and move
You’ve got to remember that a lot of people who want difficult content are also the people who pick optimum builds and get tactics from web walkthroughs. The existing explorable dungeons are genuinely hard without those, so just how hard does any new content have to be?
For example, (almost?) nobody soloed Lupicus until many months after the game release and all PUGS fought him at range. He was seen as a tough long fight. Now PUGS expect everyone to melee him, even though it would be very painful for a beginner to learn the animations and dodges in play (rather than watching a walk through).
The OP did actually suggest one of the better solutions. Reduce the number of champions spawning when the event scales up and have more elites instead. This event should keep a quick repeat time and not leave players waiting around to do the Living Story chain. The farmers will be unhappy of course but … so what?
Actually, mobs dropping loot immediately is a good thing. It keeps people happy. It encourages players to join and assist any event, whether or not it might fail, whether or not they can stay until the end. Players are not doubly penalized if they disconnect. Immediate reward for killing mobs is a good thing.
So do we have to lose good things because farmers can abuse them? I certainly hope not. The issues with champion purses go deeper than the Coiled Watch problems.
Don’t rule out a seventh person either. My personal theory would have Mr E coming in as the thief. That would give us Guard, Ranger, Necro, Mesmer, Engineer, Warrior (Canach), Thief (Mr E).
Actually players should be given kill rewards for any event, failed or not. Players should always have every incentive to join and attempt an event and they should never be dissuaded by a lack of reward if it fails. The actions of the farmers should not deprive the majority of the player base of beneficial design, such as rewards for assisting an event.
Clearly players shouldn’t be rewarded more for failing an event than for completing it. The root of this problem is actually the broken currency, karma, which is an undesirable reward for finishing an event.
The combat engine doesn’t work properly underwater. First of all there are the camera and depth perception problems for players. You could argue that players should get used to it but actually players just don’t like it. More importantly though the combat engine is designed for 2D land combat with fields/traps/aoe in two dimensions. Ground targeting is not applicable underwater. This means that the weapon sets are dull, hard to use, or almost broken. Utility lines are lost without ground targeting and so are the traits to support them. This leaves some classes unrecognizable from their land based versions. We haven’t even started talking about different builds for underwater, re-breathers, or the helpless surface state.
Underwater combat is alright for skirmishes for but not alright for any major content.
I have seen the griefing go both ways on the map and both are definitely wrong. They will end up nerfing any champ farming in the end by their behavior. Yesterday I was doing the Frostgorge champ train and one individual was dedicating himself to making sure the coil succeeded to thwart the coil farmers and then came over to the champ train and took things down before others could get there. Obviously he got satisfaction out of messing with folk, but the chat just kept inciting him. He did not really reply to anyone but was obviously feeling very validated by the constant toxic comments a few were making. The rest of us ignored him and he finally left.
The game is designed so that everyone gets a share of the event rewards from participating in the event. If you contribute to the event you get your share of the rewards. He is entitled to start any event and finish any event. He cannot stop you from getting those rewards if you fight with him. Those events are not your preserve and if you want to do them then you can help him do them. If you want to do them ‘your way’ then wait for them to respawn. If you gave him verbal abuse then it was not surprising he was inconsiderate towards your game play.
The scaling of events to include champions with purses is a game mechanic and not a reward principle. It is a not a game problem if individuals complete events with the scaling that is correctly appropriate for them.
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It used to be the case that some stolen items would not work underwater and you could not get rid of the bundle. I’m guessing that was fixed ages ago but has come back again.
Complete the megaserver implementation (rather than paper over the cracks)
Rebalance champion purse loots (so they are never a problem again)
Address karma pools and make karma into a viable currency again
Revert parts of the NPE and return all the Personal Story in the correct order.
Take LFG tool out of beta
There is a theme here. Content is put into the game without complete analysis of the effects. Some changes, such as champion purses, are causing continual problems so a complete analysis of changes prior to their implementation would have been time well spent.
If it is mentioned it is likely to be in the story again. Anything that isn’t in the story isn’t worth considering (like why didn’t Rytlock go into the tomb with his warband instead of Rox).
We don’t know. Nobody bothered to ask the Pale Tree about the Nightmare Court and Mordremoth. Faolin could be involved somewhere as she is mentioned in a Scarlet web story and there’s still Caithe’s secret (from TA4) to be worked out.
The problem with an expansion is that the accountants in charge of the content will always decide that there must be “must have” content inside the expansion. It makes financial sense for the company to induce all players to buy the expansion. So whenever people talk about an expansion I know that I will probably stop playing because I will not buy the expansion and I will not get the “must have” content.
At the moment we receive updates to the wallet, trading post, cosmetics, etc through free updates. If an expansion is released then all quality of life improvements will be put into the expansion instead. The best cosmetics will require the expansion. New skills would be put into the expansion. However the big “must have” content that is usually put into expansions is a level cap increase (or some other way of boosting character power through gear treadmills and grind). Virtually all MMOs do this. Any claim that a GW2 expansion would not include a level cap increase, power creep, gear grinds, gear treadmills, is unrealistic speculation. These are the most favored tools of the accountants to make players expansions. That is what you ask for when you ask for an expansion.
Bigger isn’t better.
- Groups take longer to form
- Have more kicks, afks, disconnections
- More group politics
- Less appealing to casuals
- Less personal contribution towards the outcome
- More graphics flare and visual confusion
- Probably little extra game play that could not be done with 5 people.
Lion’s Arch changes quite often, and is being rebuilt at the moment, so there’s little point putting rework into the Personal Story now when it would need to be reworked again in the near future.
If you are just adding skills to a class then just add skills to a class. Calling them by a fancy name might sound good but …
This is a PvE grinders change. In the original PvE design players had access to skills quite quickly and could experiment with play styles and class capability quite early. WvW and SPvP are still designed with the expectation that players have skills available and there aren’t quests to unlock skills in SPvP. After the recent trait changes and NPE changes have locked almost all class capability away, I don’t want to see any more class capability needlessly locked away.
There are some people at the camp above the lake who explain things? No?
The OP has many good points however there should always be an inducement for a player to join an event. If they arrive late and help at the end then they should get a reward for doing so.
So we should all get along and take turns: group fails it once then people succeed on another run allowing us to get progress.
This seems sensible except farmers are only there because of the reward for time spent.
Honestly why don’t A-Net just make all Fail/Win timers the same? This will stop all this failing on purpose shenanigans.
This are problems with this. The first main problem is that casual players who are wanting to explore a zone just want to wait five minutes and have another try at the event. Coming back later isn’t an option for them as they will be adventuring elsewhere. The second main problem is that progress events for the living story, dungeon access, Orrian temples, etc. should be frequently repeatable and should not be unavailable for long periods. It isn’t fair on players who arrive just after an event fails and are forced to wait a long time for their first chance to get it done.
Now farmers have found the event restarts to be a weak point in the design that they can manipulate for gold. So they do. Does that mean the good things, like frequent event restarts, have to be taken of out the game because farmers abuse them? I hope not.
I don’t see Anet doing anything about it because they’re fine with players failing the event to get more loot.
I don’t think they’re fine with it. They patch up the failing events (eventually). However they will not intervene in real time unless there is griefing or exploiting. That would be griefing with deliberate malice rather than just annoying others when pursuing personal goals (loot).
The game is generally well designed and players usually share full rewards when working together. It makes the exceptions more noticeable.
Swap weapons for each battle. Swap utilities as you go. Learn to play a variety of styles in the same dungeon. It doesn’t matter if you have perfect traits/stats as long as you use a good tactic.
There’s no point revealing a secret lore based identity for Anise if that identity isn’t actually mentioned in the game lore. Livia is hardly mentioned in GW2.
In a game where you have a source of guaranteed income (DUNGEON RUNS, which also happens to be the best source of income outside of TP flipping I might add) deflation is NOT a problem. Deflation is only a problem when income fluctuates. If we lived in a world where we could guarantee an income of resources no matter what, we would actually run economies with as much deflation as possible.
Deflation is a problem when supply is in excess of demand. Without the forge there would be little demand for plain exotics and rare items and they would drop to the salvage value. It wouldn’t matter if players have 1 gold in the bank or 10,000 gold, any such item wouldn’t be traded for more than salvage value. With all these items getting salvaged the supply of ectos and crafting components would rise, so those prices would drop too.
Demand is important. Demand is what pushed silk and other components above the vendor price. There is no demand for leather and with no change in demand the leather will always stay at vendor price, no matter how much money comes into the economy.
The mystic forge is actually a balance for the market. If items at one tier are cheap and items at the next tier are expensive then players can try convert the cheap into the expensive through the forge. This prevents excess inflation at the top tier. It also takes items out of the game so that the endless supply doesn’t create deflation.
Pirate sylvari will travel the world and meet interesting people.
Perhaps someone could persuade the developers that adrenaline decay is similar to revealed for thieves. The class mechanic needs to be less strict in PvE.
The simple answer is that rangers get damage from weapons and pet.
It’s unpopular to say it but the OP is right. Path buying is about maximizing rewards for time spent. Path buying is not about fighting through the challenge of a dungeon for the sheer fun of it. We do supposedly play these games for the fun of it and not just for virtual rewards that eventually become worthless when we quit the game. If people want to get dungeons done just for achievements and fanfares they could just play Farmland instead.
So if people want to buy, does selling cause a problem? Well the buying/selling does reduce the size of community that runs the paths for fun. In a massive community this is fine but in GW2 the fun runners are a small community anyway and for some paths they are almost wiped out. This can create a viscous circle where new players can’t get full runs, so they buy the paths, and this means even less new players making groups for full runs.
Intervention to stop players from selling runs looks impossible, in practical terms. It isn’t worth any effort by anyone. However I think dungeon sellers/buyers should realize that although their service improves the time/reward ratios for individuals there is an impact on the wider dungeon community.