Guild Wars 2

Zelkovan.2630:

But then the whole issue isn’t that the system is poorly made, the issue you have is that you don’t get what you want when you want it. I understand that you would rather be able to pick which masteries you want to level in a non-tier order but the result is the same as the current system, you end up with some masteries taking much longer to get. So it isn’t so much that the system is bad/poorly designed, it’s just that you don’t want to level up the other tiers of stuff to get to the one thing you want, you don’t want to take a long time to get them, and you don’t want to do things unrelated to them is what i’m getting from your posts. Also that heart example was terrible example because once you do a heart, it’s finished. Hearts in a map are not one giant cumulative, they are separate things.

Yes, you can’t choose and pick from your skills anymore. Okay, but is that really such a game-breaking thing? Like, are you that flustered that you have to spend 12 skill points before getting the specific shout you want on your warrior? Or having to do 5 HoT HP’s to unlock something you are looking forward to?

I hate to break it to everyone who agrees, but the mastery system was designed for long-term goals upon hitting level 80. It is a well designed system that allows you to do multiple things to earn experience for each mastery and provides incentive for playing all of the content. Maybe you don’t like that and that’s fine but it’s what Anet wanted to do with masteries and they aren’t going to change.

I can’t really debate about the whole system with you if you simply write it off as things that you don’t enjoy because then that’s your opinion. I’ve still yet to see what is so bad about the current mastery system from your posts and more just like “I don’t like this”.

I’ll also ask the question again, because everyone seems to side-step it despite wholeheartedly agreeing that the system should be like this: What is a viable way of obtaining a mastery through physical interaction with the specific task it is related to, while making sure it isn’t easily cleared and without being too repetitive or limiting?

I’m realizing that you’re just setting each of my sentences up as individual straw men and then battering them down… with (as you criticized me for doing) your own opinions, and it appears you directly ignore other comments entirely (or maybe you just overlook them).

I’m not sure why you claim that the hearts example was terrible, because when you have all the hearts (and PoIs and HPs and exploration areas), you have a cumulative whole that awards you with a map completion reward. Hearts are both singular and cumulative. Take the PoIs and HPs and other things away, keep the cumulative heart (mushroom) system by itself, and you have a viable option for training masteries. Sure, it’s not that simple for all the masteries, but it’s an beginning.

Stark.1350:

I’ve been on Ehmry Bay since the start of the game. I have no plans to leave.

Currently we are rank #12, right in the middle of the pack and have had a number of guilds transfer to us recently.

I remember the days back with guilds like [pk], [Void], and others and how we were a very strong server to match up against. I also remember days when we were bottom of the barrel and it seemed like we were going to be stuck there for some time.

I remember the days when we went through a giant bought of drama when guilds left us to try out higher tiered servers.

But I also know those days are behind us. We have an incredible core of people who have also been on Ehmry Bay since the beginning. We have guilds that were once a part of us, returning. And we have new ones transferring because they’ve heard of the little drama and friendly atmosphere of the server. [TV], [PS], and [Rekz] to name a few.

I think the biggest selling point for this server, is frankly, loyalty. You just have some people that will never leave, good or bad, getting stomped or rolling.

Come give the Bay a try. www.ehmry.com

EB for the win! =D

Same here, been on EB since launch and have no reason to leave. Got some amazing guilds like Ebay and CoT on WvW most days.

Come on, borderlands are empty… at least give us back our nice alpine maps to run around on! Desert map’s a bit of an eyesore… not to mention there are about thirty ways to die that do not involve even meeting another player. O.o

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

Swift.1930:

And thus the burnout. We’re forced to level and go through entire trees of things we will never ever use just to unlock something minor.

Bingo. Not only is the training of the masteries completely divorced from their purpose (as you, myself and others have pointed out) but you also make the excellent point that we’re forced to go through things we don’t want to get to what we do.

Case in point: I’m on the last tier of the PACT Commander mastery, trying to get the ability to pick up loot automatically, a simple QOL feature that would affect only me and would reduce some of the administrative tedium in the game. Yet, this feature is the last tier and requires not only completion of all the previous tier which I’m not greatly interested in but it also requires an exhorbitant amount of xp. It’s not something worth working up to over months. It’s a useful feature that should be tier 1.

Instead, tier 1 is mentor, although it affects multiple people and is causing a lot of headaches because it’s so easy to get. This is a mastery that should be tier 5, and should take months of effort to acquire, to demonstrate that someone is worthy of being a mentor.

Imho these two masteries should have been reversed. But what do I know?

Mentoring, yes, that was a funny one. Tier 1 (free) Apple-store-customer-support commander tags for everyone. You don’t need to know how to play the game to hit level 81, hah.

(On that note… while I’m probably just misremembering, wasn’t the level cap supposed to go up to 90 with the addition of specializations?)

I for one would like to see Anet add smaller halls as options for smaller guilds – and scaling services/utilities accordingly.

I still remember guild halls in GW1; they didn’t take much at all to purchase/maintain/upgrade. Certainly gold (or rather, platinum), but everyone accumulates that. Not sure why the mechanic changed so much, since it’s the same world/lore/setting. Seriously, this is Guild Wars, not just Alliance Wars or Server Wars; there should be more support for continued guild play for guilds of all sizes.

For you big-guild chaps: come on, you don’t need to act so important. Glad you’ve got a big guild. Good for you. You’re probably getting the best-optimized experience.
For you little-guild/bank-guild chaps: yeah, you’ll probably always be hamstrung by the fact that you need a few more than 1-10 people to get serious progress without being left far behind. If Anet does ignore you, you might need to look into recruiting…
For the rest of us: we ought to be urging Anet to improve gameplay for everyone. It shouldn’t be about giant complaints or about flaming people who suggest changes, it should be about constructive criticism. Glad to see that most people do include legitimate suggestions.

Mitz.5741:

DeWolfe.2174:

Exciton.8942:

3 years, they show absolutely zero love and zero support to this game mode. It deserves to die.

As much as I may not prefer the new BL for WvW purposes, someone put A LOT of love and effort into creating it. We should consider that while presenting our opinions on it.

Yes, someone clearly put a lot of love into the new maps, the question is, Who the hell told them its a good map for WvW

It’s not that they should remove the map from the game – it can always be used as an alternative map, like EotM – it just can’t stay as the borderland map. Someone put serious doses of love into the old borderland map as well – and it turned out beautiful.

Kaiser.9873:

style.6173:

ANET knows they failed. Not really sure why they would post something to just validate the obvious.

Funny reset story: I am in NA T2. On reset night there was a 50+ queue for EB and the BL maps had no queue,

Sounds like T1 at this point.

Not to mention that most of the borderlands are actually empty (not just lacking queue).

Neural.1824:

The Dreamer was the first legendary I crafted, and while the whinnying was okay a while ago, the current sound setup is just embarrassing. It’s not that I don’t like it, but when I use the bow all I can think of is how annoying it must be for other people. As a result, it tends to spend more time in my inventory than in use, not because I don’t personally like it, but because I respect that other players are annoyed by it.
Much as I find it nice the way it is, there needs to be some change.
I do like, however, that it seems to stop making the whinny noise when in group battle. It’s more pronounced and audible when in low number combat situations. Not sure if it’s a sound bug or intentional, but at least it’s not making the noise 100% all the time.

On the flip side, apparently only I can hear my revenant’s channel noise with elite skills… it’s such a nice background harmony that suits the herald class (and reminds me heaps of Crystal Oasis music in GW1), but unlike The Dreamer (which is annoying) only the player can hear it.

I’m not sure why, but I get more crashes out of the 64-bit client than the 32-bit one, but I also get bluescreens out of both occasionally. Now I’m actually worried about my computer every time I load up GW2… =/

Win8 64-bit
16Gb RAM
4Gb vRAM
… and plenty of other nice specs. I’m not running the game on a doorstop; right up until it randomly crashes, the game runs absolutely beautifully.

ezd.6359:

Why do you need to grind xp? You need to finish something exactly at particular date? One week later is not good enough, right? You have other things to do? If they are so important, finish them then return to gw2 and play without grind.

Masteries is just another type of experience. Why nobody complains about leveling in MMO? Why don’t you complain about WvW xp and WvW abilities?

If they will remove masteries and add 80 regular levels instead, you will be more happy?

Most GW2 players/fans came straight from GW1, which was designed around a system that capped leveling at 20. Was very quick to the top. The rest of the game revolved around customizing skills, collecting new skills, and figuring out combinations and strategies to take out foes.

Even though GW2 started with a different focus, it still retained elements of that. But the updates directly preceding and during and after the HoT expansion tore GW2’s customization into shreds (especially for new characters, with the skill circle update).

If you’re not sure why people are complaining about GW2’s development direction, you seriously need to look into GW1 and its playerbase. They are invested in the game’s legacy, setting, and world. We’re not just playing an MMO. We’re playing Guild Wars.

Kraggy.4169:

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Hmm…Gating on Personal Stories. I’m sure I’ve seen that somewhere before….

Not in the base GW2 game,m unless you mean the LEVEL gating, but that was LEVELING to increase your character’s power, which of course doesn’t happen in HoT.

Elite spec?

Only if you want to play it, and frankly I level a Ranger as a ranged DPS, not a second-rate trinity healer.

Tons of things are now gated, unfortunately… vanilla GW2 was so choice-based, but now even loading out the skills you want requires unlocking skill circles instead of trees. Pretty hard to live with, since (most of us GW2 fans) came from GW1, which was very flexible about customization and playability. Not a lot of gates there, apart from tutorial islands.

Zelkovan.2630:

Swift.1930:

Zelkovan.2630:

Swift.1930:

EsarioOne.9840:

I’m seeing alot of discussion about how mastery relates to burn out, that’s not the case.
Mastery = Millions of experience
Millions of experience = time buffer so people don’t realize the mastery system is non-beneficial and shallow character progression.
At its core, mastery is just something to keep consumers occupied. You aren’t doing anything original or unique. It’d be a different story if the player actually learned the itzel language (etc.) by doing related activities.

Ah, I just made a comment to this effect on another post – you’re exactly right; if mastery was related to trying to do the things you are mastering, it would make sense and wouldn’t be a 9999999999999999XP grind (which is a lot of veteran spiders, by the way). Like trying out jumping mushrooms ~40 times before it actually takes you in the right direction and doesn’t get you nearly killed, or something like that.

The issue with that is it’s easily bypassed. I could literally just stand next to one mushroom in one corner of a map and jump on it over and over again until I unlock that mastery. Same thing with Itzel lore, just talk to the same npcs over and over again. So how do you slow people down so they don’t unlock all the masteries instantly and devalue the point of masteries meaning to be the long-term horizontal progression?

I mean, that’s a viable way of leveling a skill… it’s not a bypass. As the game currently stands, you can stand in one corner and bash a single dinosaur over the head until you unlock every single mastery.

If you want to slow down masteries presented in that fashion, you just need to make sure the people can only gain, for instance, a certain number points in a mastery level from a single NPC or mushroom per day. They can always come back and do it again tomorrow, but if they want it quicker they will need to seek out other NPCs/mushrooms. Gliding would be slightly trickier, but I see nothing wrong with a “total flight time” being the requirement. Makes a lot of sense for glider players, and also encourages using gliders more.

So here’s the real question: why don’t the Guild Wars 2 devs seem to care that the leveling system is completely detached from the actual masteries? I could be leveling mushroom jumping without ever even SEEING a mushroom. By hitting a dinosaur with a pointy stick. In that abandoned little corner you mentioned.

But it is a bypass. The whole point of Masteries was to provide a long-term horizontal progression once you hit 80. If all it took was 40 mushrooms to master mushroom jumping mastery, someone would literally just keep using the same mushroom over and over until they unlocked it. That wouldn’t take very long. Okay, so you say you limit a mushroom to once per day. Okay, fine. But then you get people complaining on the forums that Anet is “gating” content again by forcing you to wait a whole day per mushroom. You end up in the same scenario where people don’t like the situation, much like yourself. Another issue is, it would be very easy to reach the 40 mushroom requirement, even if it was once per day per mushroom. So once again, you hit the issue of masteries being cleared in a few hours/days after launch.

Okay, so let’s say hypothetically you raise the cap to 200 mushrooms. Now that’s a grind, because every day I have to make sure I jump on every mushroom I see, whereas before I could just do whatever I wanted in the new maps and reach the same goal. Same principle with NPCs. You would once again end up with people complaining about the system on the forum. Sure, getting xp to jump on mushrooms has nothing to do with physically jumping on mushrooms, but it’s a smart way of making sure masteries take a while, while at the same time not restricting you to what you can do to level it.

Sure, I could just sit in one corner of the map and bash a pocket raptor over the head over and over again for masteries. However the difference between the current system and yours is that you would literally have to be insane to do that in the current system because you would receive so little xp. Thus, you don’t have incentive to sit in one corner bashing a dino’s head because it would literally take months/years. However, with your system (assuming no daily cap) you have incentive to sit in one corner, constantly jumping on one mushroom.

So once again, I’ll ask the question. What is a viable way of attaining mushroom jumping through physically interacting with the mushrooms, while making sure it isn’t easily cleared, and without being too repetitive or limiting? Or any other mastery similar to it? Unless of course, you forsake the whole idea of masteries being long-term progression, in which case you just go with what you proposed. However, that’s not Anet’s goal with masteries, so the point is moot.

If someone can come up with a reasonable way to accomplish all those goals and implement it well, then Anet messed up on their part. I have yet to see such a reasonable way.

Funny, because first you say that unless the thing I said was implemented, what I said would not be viable. If you’re arguing that a single-mushroom daily limit is a gate, then clearly you’ve not seen the current mission gates based on masteries… single-mushroom limitation is not a gate when you can still wander around and find more mushrooms. Think map completion – we can’t sit around and complete a single heart eighteen times over to complete all the hearts on a map. Do we consider that gated?

The real gating is when you lock masteries behind each other. For instance, if you could pick and choose any of the masteries to level at any given time, and then the next one costs more xp, etc, etc, it would be less gated. But currently each one is tiered, even though (apart from the gliding mastery) nothing is related to its preceding mastery point.

A bit like the new skill circle setup (which replaced the old pick-and-choose skill tree), where we have to level our skill trees with 80% of skills our characters wouldn’t even pretend to practice or care about before unlocking the skills we care about.

And thus the burnout. We’re forced to level and go through entire trees of things we will never ever use just to unlock something minor. This is a huge change compared to the vanilla release of Guild Wars 2, which (minus bugs, but certainly not closed to additions) is what we paid for.

Also, keep in mind that at least 60% of the GW2 playerbase came directly from GW1, and there were very, very few gates in that game. Nearly pure customization.

Keeneruption.4602:

I don’t understand the complaints on the elite spec. I was able to almost fully unlock it (only shy maybe 10 points) as soon as I logged in. I had that many extra hero points. Did no one else? I didn’t do anything special. I had every thing on my character unlocked day 1.

Yeah, elite specs weren’t too hard (unless you really really want to try them out on characters you haven’t mained, like a lvl60 thief).

Masteries, on the other hand…

It’s happening quite a lot. Try fixes/workarounds such as the 64-bit client (and make sure your vid card drivers are updated), but you may be in the same boat as some of us who still get at least one crash to desktop per hour.

Zelkovan.2630:

Swift.1930:

EsarioOne.9840:

I’m seeing alot of discussion about how mastery relates to burn out, that’s not the case.
Mastery = Millions of experience
Millions of experience = time buffer so people don’t realize the mastery system is non-beneficial and shallow character progression.
At its core, mastery is just something to keep consumers occupied. You aren’t doing anything original or unique. It’d be a different story if the player actually learned the itzel language (etc.) by doing related activities.

Ah, I just made a comment to this effect on another post – you’re exactly right; if mastery was related to trying to do the things you are mastering, it would make sense and wouldn’t be a 9999999999999999XP grind (which is a lot of veteran spiders, by the way). Like trying out jumping mushrooms ~40 times before it actually takes you in the right direction and doesn’t get you nearly killed, or something like that.

The issue with that is it’s easily bypassed. I could literally just stand next to one mushroom in one corner of a map and jump on it over and over again until I unlock that mastery. Same thing with Itzel lore, just talk to the same npcs over and over again. So how do you slow people down so they don’t unlock all the masteries instantly and devalue the point of masteries meaning to be the long-term horizontal progression?

I mean, that’s a viable way of leveling a skill… it’s not a bypass. As the game currently stands, you can stand in one corner and bash a single dinosaur over the head until you unlock every single mastery.

If you want to slow down masteries presented in that fashion, you just need to make sure the people can only gain, for instance, a certain number points in a mastery level from a single NPC or mushroom per day. They can always come back and do it again tomorrow, but if they want it quicker they will need to seek out other NPCs/mushrooms. Gliding would be slightly trickier, but I see nothing wrong with a “total flight time” being the requirement. Makes a lot of sense for glider players, and also encourages using gliders more.

So here’s the real question: why don’t the Guild Wars 2 devs seem to care that the leveling system is completely detached from the actual masteries? I could be leveling mushroom jumping without ever even SEEING a mushroom. By hitting a dinosaur with a pointy stick. In that abandoned little corner you mentioned.

The thing that put me off was that it suddenly looked like GW2 had become an Apple store… shudder… Otherwise I think it’s a pretty good idea, so long as mentors are continuing to be willing to assist people while tagged up.

ezd.6359:

- Nerf this
- Nerf that
- I did not eat for a week and i finished all my goals (leveled up one toon using tomes of knowledge)
- QQ unsubscribe

next addon plz

GW2 is about skins and fun from just playing the game. Addon adds more to these categories. If you don’t like to play (collect skins, achievements, chat with friends, RP), why do you play GW2 at all? You are wrong almost in every point

Erm… addons are fine. A lot of things HoT did were replacements (like dragonhunter elite spec virtues, which don’t work with other specializations properly, or like WvW borderland maps), but even some of the actual addons were implemented poorly (pure one by one XP grind for masteries, most of which are completely unrelated to each other).

IAMANDLOVE.3095:

sorudo.9054:

IAMANDLOVE.3095:

sorudo.9054:

there are two things i like to see as improvement.
1.) a better, more engaging battle system.
i feel like playing on autopilot all the time, a game like ESO let’s you influence the battle by your own skills, not letting the game it self decide your powers.
in GW2 however, i feel like i have to do barely anything at all, it’s more like the game it self decides what i can and can not do.
levels is the biggest problem with this, in GW2 you just have to be 5 levels lower and you’re practically useless, in ESO you can still take on enemies about 7 levels higher on you while not losing even one health.
so as i said, player skill instead of player level.
2.)a world that feels right.
i personally find the world of GW2 less fun then the one of GW1, maybe it’s nostalgia but i think it’s just a small bit so.
the reason why i like the maps of GW1 allot more fun is because every single place has a story behind it, the environment speaks for it self.
in GW2 every single map is pretty dead, it doesn’t tell a tale at all and even with NPC’s trying to fill the gap it just doesn’t do it.
i just think GW2 maps are to bare, not much thought has bin put in place and that’s a pity.
forests have toothpicks as trees, mountains are way to per-determined and even caves are made way to much with big groups in mind.
i actually like to get lost in a forest, i like to try and find my way though a labyrinth of caves and tunnel networks.
the whole fun of getting though a map is to find your own way, discover new places, places you might have missed for over 3 years.

i personally think Anet did it as save with GW2 as bioware did with SWToR, use old systems and try to make something new.
the cost with that is that the game becomes pale and empty, nothing really new can be found and the longer you play GW2 the more you’re gonna feel this.

I never played guild war 1 so I wouldn’t know, But i did play Elder Scroll Online. I can say ESO failed because they didn’t have any really good endgame content. For example the dungeons are hard very hard, but after you beat it you dont get level appropriate reward! Another problem with the game is the class is too diverse for its own good, it might look fun on paper but in reality when you give so much choices to the player it creates unreasonable complications, and only the most elite of players can properly navigate through the maze and find the optimum build! there are so many other things wrong with ESO that I wont go over and off course graphic is very bad!

unless you got blind after line two….
i never said anything about anything else but the battle system, i never talked about end game…
oh and the graphics of GW2 are childishly bad compared to ESO, the maps are also constructed so much better then any GW2 map made.
but i digress.
i talked about 2 specific things and you start badmouthing ESO on points that doesn’t even make sense, if GW2 was really so much better why are you even wasting your time reaching the end game in the first place.

ESO engine was based off of SWTOR, they could have made ESO graphic really great, but because they were going to make ESO a multi platform game they had to dumb down the graphics so the cheap console boys can play it!

here are 10 reasons why ESO sucks

QUEOTE from an expert ESO PLAYER

1. The text-chat will ruin immersion.
2. There will be those annoying people spamming trade requests on the text-chat.
3. Hackers, hackers everywhere.
4. There will probably be a high chance of the player-base being people who never even played Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, or Skyrim because Elder Scrolls Online is F2P.
5. Story is bland due to multi-player.
6. There’s no freaking Nazeem or Nelkar.
7. You’re just an ordinary adventurer, unlike in Skyrim, you’re the Dovahkiin, while in Oblivion, you become a legend by defeating the Oblivion crisis.
8. You cannot mod it (none of your favorite Skyrim mods like SkyUI, SkyRE, etc.)
9. Judging by the graphics (which I went to), it’s more worse than vanilla Skyrim’s graphics (probably due to multiplayer) and multi platforming.

The thing that ruined ESO for me was the lack of exploration. I wanted to go eeeeeeeverywhere with my main (not plow through storyline until I could reach other lands that are instanced purely for people of my alliance who have reached the same point of storyline). Not to mention the fact that so many places are still unmapped.

The plus side for GW2 is that GW1 was its only prequel. If it was GW6, I would be complaining tons and tons and tons more about the lack of travel/exploration. Just because the old game has that terrain doesn’t mean I don’t want to go there with new shiny graphics/effects and my current main character.

EsarioOne.9840:

I’m seeing alot of discussion about how mastery relates to burn out, that’s not the case.
Mastery = Millions of experience
Millions of experience = time buffer so people don’t realize the mastery system is non-beneficial and shallow character progression.
At its core, mastery is just something to keep consumers occupied. You aren’t doing anything original or unique. It’d be a different story if the player actually learned the itzel language (etc.) by doing related activities.

Ah, I just made a comment to this effect on another post – you’re exactly right; if mastery was related to trying to do the things you are mastering, it would make sense and wouldn’t be a 9999999999999999XP grind (which is a lot of veteran spiders, by the way). Like trying out jumping mushrooms ~40 times before it actually takes you in the right direction and doesn’t get you nearly killed, or something like that.

Soon.5240:

lordhelmos.7623:

Somehow, at the start of Living Story part 1, the core developers left and the people left behind had this idea seeded in their head that everything was wrong with the core game and that it needed to rapidly change to survive.

You completely nailed it. +1

This was my first MMO, except for about 60 hour in Final Fantasy 14 (prior to it’s reboot). I love games like The Elder Scrolls, Gothic, etc. – RPG’s which offer large maps with plenty to explore.

When Living Season 1 was issued, I was completely turned off, and just spent all my time in WvW and farming PvE largely to support WvW.

They threw out everything that made the game such a critical success and turned PvE into little more than a platform game.

Ah, exploration. That was the biggest reason I put 1500+ hours into Guild Wars 1.

Zodryn.4216:

Majic.4801:

But is it fun?

That is, after all, how ArenaNet measures success.

I think a big problem is that Anet gives us a choice on how we progress. In Metroid, if I want the grapple beam, I beat a specific boss. To get to that boss I have to get other power ups from other places and play through chunks of the game. In HoT, if I want updrafts I get experience. I could beat challenges, do adventures, progress throught the story, help others etc. I could also grind my brains out doing one thing. It’s the equivalent of Nintendo letting you buy every upgrade from a shop in Zelda, and players farming grass for hours to buy everything instead of actually playing the game. Is it fun? That’s up to you, because Anet gave you a choice.

On the flipside, it’s a choice without heart. For instance, learning Nuhoch language simply takes killing monsters rather than attempting to talk to Nuhoch. Learning to jump on mushrooms should be something you gain xp for by trying mushrooms over and over (and until you gain a level, your jumps can be completely off-target or something) rather than, again, killing things. Sure, you have a choice, but it’s 1) not an intelligent choice and 2) ends up being more a chore than a choice, because unlike attempting to level multiple skills to level 1, you’re leveling tiers of mastery that cause the next level (even if it’s something completely unrelated) to take twice as long.

One thing that I thought was good about GW2 originally was that to learn new skills on your weapons, you killed enemies with them. It didn’t take a very long time to unlock them, but it was still a progression that encouraged experimentation. (Flip side to everything, though – I still feel that weapon skills were a bit of a cop-out compared to the GW1 skill system.)

Just a flesh wound.3589:

IAMANDLOVE.3095:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

That’s the problem with your suggestion. It would invalidate years of work for millions of accounts. And for what? Some shinier graphics.

Hey i would not be here if it was not for the graphic and the fantastic gameplay!

The graphics are ok. The gameplay… Compared to Guild Wars 1, this is straight “dps everything down” compared to a strategy game of positioning, careful use of skills and interrupts and targeting the most important first.

No kidding – like the fact that engaging enemies almost always was a group fight, and you actually had support skills in your group, mesmer/ranger interrupts/disables, damage reflection (not just retaliation), monk/rit all-round support, etc, etc, etc. Getting slightly bit bored of the 1v1 – hit, hit, hit, hit – PvE gameplay design in GW2. =/ On the flip side, they did add dragonhunters, and that made things a bit more tactical for me. Still not as challenging (in a fun way) as GW1 though!

AIex.4105:

glad that i did not buy HoT yet, ok make kitten harder and on top of that the new maps are very iregular and you need to “glide” seriously….. im intrested only in ranger and guardian, druid just dumb only worthless healing skills, dragonhunter is “meh” traps traps traps not realy worth anything in pvp or wvw, Talking about wvw the new maps are realy bad wich 90% killed wvw at least in my server, fractals? same boring thing as before, dosent realy worth doing higher level fractals since the rewards are bad at all levels. Grind for new skills that I want to get if I buy HoT? no thx.New legendaries? dungen gold nerfed so pointless.

Only things I liked so far are the new tonics, the new ranger pet, and the guild hall. But I wont buy HoT just for that, those things should be in the Vanilla game in the first place and some tipe of GvG with a global map with castles, so team pvp in this game would mean something.

Curious, because I’d say that dragonhunter is my favorite part of the update. I’ve got concerns about the forced replacement of virtue skills, but I’m living with that because dragonhunter longbow skills and traps are an extremely fun evolution of the guardian’s normal gameplay.

On the downside, revenants are nowhere near as fun as ritualists were… even with a full elite spec. Really miss weapon enchantments, spirits, channels, and urn skills. Pretty much everything that made a ritualist. Quite a sad replacement, since rit was my GW1 main (although I guess revenants would have been called ritualists if they were supposed to be identical).

Lothirieth.3408:

lordhelmos.7623:

-World Meta events take HUGE amounts of time (2 hr+ each meta), fail regularly, and the game spawns dead maps faster than then the U.S. Treasury prints money. Either I never have time to finish an event from 1 hour of map hopping to find an organized one, or spend 40mins before realizing there is no hope at all that the map is even going to make it to the end phase. Rewards like the bladed armor chest are RNG at the end, so you can go through it all and get nothing.

-General focus on world events creates this feeling that I don’t have control over my own progression, that I’m sitting here waiting on 200 people on a map to do their stuff right so that I can get anywhere. As player, I generally don’t feel important anymore. Getting anything in this game seems to be just sheer luck. Whether is getting a precursor drop or getting into a good map. There is no player control over their growth at all.

This. So this. And this is mostly what we have to do in HoT. Very long meta events in which we have to rely on lots of other strangers for progression and rewards.

I’m tired of fighting with the megaservers, tired of searching for “good” maps. I’m tired of spending 2 hours in Verdant Brink, in a map I joined advertising t4 push, where I worked really hard to do my part in advancing events and reclaiming and defending rally points, only to fail to reach T4 and yet again receive no bladed coat box. I don’t like my rewards being tied to others who can’t be bothered or aren’t capable of participating in the meta events.

Or when I try to join with gw2 community, spend literally THIRTY minutes trying to get in a map with them, spamming ‘join’.

I do like the meta events, but to realise this is pretty much what the game is offering right now is… deflating. When you look at all the new collections, masteries, it’s all tied up with grinding the same four maps, over, and over, and over, and over.. and over.. and over. Then add all the bother with megaservers and finding a decent map. Or crashes/DCs near the end of the events. (Seriously can we have districts already?!)

I do like this game. It’s gorgeous, I love the game play, I like the lore, but these event-only maps, they’re not what I want to do with the majority of my GW2 time. And with no new dungeon cluster (instanced group content has always been my bread and butter. I’m still doing fractals, but.. those are all old. :/ ), I’m often finding myself thinking “huh.. I’m not sure what to do”, I think because I don’t want to struggle with map finding, don’t find it so fun to play with a map full of strangers, or want to spend 2 hours straight keeping up with same events I’ve already done more than a few times now, all with a decent chance to fail and feel completely unrewarded for the effort I put in because maybe there wasn’t enough people on the map or enough people simply didn’t care.

HoT was just released. I don’t want to be feeling like this yet. :/

Yeah, you can have more than 150% participation and get nothing. I’m also not convinced that participation should be determined by the number of events you complete; sometimes you put in tons of effort but were glued to a single long event rather than many little ones. Pretty bad feeling when you get 40-60% when you gave it your all for a whole hour.

I like to mention it a lot, but finally I’ve found someone else who has stated the same thing about event-only maps! Yeah, seriously… there are so many event-only maps now. It started with basic meta events in vanilla maps, but those were okay. Southsun Cove was the first one I remember that was just a massive jumble of (mostly) unrelated events. Hard to see them through the karkas latched to your face, but still… And then The Silverwastes. Dry Top. And now the expansion. I’m plenty sure that the event-rich maps require huge dev investment and budgets, and I feel that a lot of that is a waste of budget and dev time. What happened to all the open space in Guild Wars 1? I know it was instanced, but seriously, there was a lot of land to explore, and I’m sure I’m not the only one here with serious wanderlust for the various lands in Guild Wars. It couldn’t be hard for the devs to devote a couple of people to creating maps that are simply landscapes with towns, villages, and maybe two or three small events. But mostly landscapes to traverse. Light-content maps are cheap, and still encourage all of us players from Guild Wars 1 to remain invested in the game. And seriously, they could always use those maps later to add living world content or something. But more maps, more maps, more maps… I’ve got serious GW wanderlust that I really hoped would be quenched in this title. The cost of HoT really got my wanderlust hopes rising (even though I’m not a fan of jungles) – I thought there would be as much territory to cover again as vanilla.

Fingers crossed for the future…

Zodryn.4216:

In less than three weeks, I’ve enjoyed exploring the new maps, testing different builds with the new specs, doing a minimal amount of events, making some easy money off people who have to have everything now, and working on a few achievements. I haven’t really experienced any stress or burnout thus far, and I don’t intend to.

Don’t make things a grind. Play for fun and do what you enjoy. And change things up. Even if what you enjoy is map meta events, running them all day every day is bound to get boring.

I’d say the worst thing is that masteries are a meta-event grind. You simply can’t get them by farming mobs (dare you to try), and unfortunately you can’t choose to level HoT masteries while playing vanilla maps doing random other things to mix up gameplay… plus mastery XP scales pretty insanely per level. So if you want to get anywhere with collections/masteries/HoT progress, you really do have to be on the maps doing meta-events 24/7… =/

I’ll admit, this crossed my mind as well. I’ve been lucky enough to run into groups 50-60% of the time, but anything that requires 3+ people to succeed should be at least called something different – such as a party challenge rather than a hero challenge. Simply isn’t enough DPS to knock the champs out alone within the provided time limit (let alone absorb the full focus of the champ damage without some serious dev modifications to heal skills).

And when the maps empty out, they simply won’t be completable without friends.

ekarat.1085:

Einlanzer.1627:

Vayne.8563:

I’d take the four maps I got with HoT over all the maps in EotN any day. The complexity of these maps is astounding.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved Eye of the North. But then, we haven’t seen raids yet, and Eye of the North didn’t have expansion content coming in reguilarly either. We have to see what the new content delivery cadence is. Also EotN offered nothing at all for PvP.

I think it’s okay to do a little of both. I sort of hope the next expansion/set of maps we get goes in a different direction – specifically – reduced complexity and greater quantity.

It seems to be a common mantra that quality > quantity, and that was a major design goal for GW2, but I’ve long argued that you really need a bit of both and should strive to find a middle ground.

I’d actually argue that too many maps is bad because it stretches out the player base and encourages abandoning old maps. At the very least, it’s better to have 1 large map than 2 maps at half the area each — it’s the exact same amount of content either way.

So, it’s not just complexity, it’s also size, and the new maps are much bigger than GW1 maps.

Wait, which ones are bigger than GW1 maps? I completed a large chunk of hard mode maps back in GW1, and most of them felt at least the same size as large maps in GW2.

I’d like a lot more exploring in GW2 personally. I loved that I had all four parts of GW1 and could run around (nearly) countless maps with different villages and people and monsters and places everywhere. I’d much rather Anet not only provide high-resource maps like the HoT expansion did. They could add event-less maps purely for wanderers/explorers to traverse. Those come cheap, and quench wanderlust. (Maybe include one or two basic events on each?) I’d enjoy the calm emptiness of exploration maps, as well as the the lack of events staring me down every corner I turn. Since such maps come cheap, it couldn’t hurt the devs, either.

And cheap exploration maps could be developed in the future, too.

-Zero crashes pre-HoT. Okay, maybe four in three years.
-Thousands of crashes at HoT launch. Quite a few nasty bluescreens (poor computer…). Updated video card drivers and cut the crashes down to 1 or 2 per hour. Only one bluescreen since.
-Read up on crashes and assumed that my hourly crashes may have been due to memory or something else; subsequently I found and tried out the 64-bit client. That raised me to ~6 crashes per hour.

Haven’t really changed my windows setup since running pre-HoT flawlessly; what’s going on, exactly? Computer’s clean; I keep a very neat system tray and process pool, and I never let junk like Norton near my computer. Only thing I can think of that might be messing with things is the SLI build, but that would be manifesting in a stutter issue rather than hourly crashes. Everything runs butter-smooth (even in zergs) and cool (a little lukewarm during zergs) until crashes. Crashes do appear to occur more often during large events/bosses, but I have had them happen when I’m completely alone in vanilla maps as well. Thus I decided that it’d have to be a memory leak, which is why I tried out the 64-bit client. But more crashes than 32-bit? (I know what beta means, and wouldn’t have questioned old client if it wasn’t crashing regularly; however, the 64-bit client crashes a good 300% more often.)

There’s very little in GW2 that even tries to graphically or processorly or memorily challenge my PC, so I don’t get why I can’t run the game anymore with either client… =/

Yeah, weekend passed and still no-one there, hah. And our defense guilds were on the offensive, too.

Pink Ninja Man.4375:

PokerStar.5081:

Simple and best solution to get WvW back on track, cause right now many guilds don’t even bother anymore cause it takes 15 mins to run to some towers which is silly.

If by run do you mean role play walking?

Well… that depends which map you’re talking about. EBG? Sure. Dying in borderlands sucks right now, because there’s only one spawn point per team (other than the portals to LA).

Also, don’t auto-run on the new maps. Seriously. (Thud.)

joneirikb.7506:

Swift.1930:

joneirikb.7506:

Or just reduce from 3 borderlands to 1.

Heck for T8 we probably can’t fill a single map…

This system will not work as long as it doesn’t adapt itself to the players and number of players. The WvW system is to rigid, it needs to adjust itself dynamically to numbers/players.

4 Maps is just overkill for the lower tiers, I don’t think any server in T8 right now could max more than 40 players each during reset, we’re not even half-way to a queue on a single map. All that means is that whoever leads gets to own 4 maps.

Honestly it doesn’t even matter if it is Desert or Alpine maps, there is still 5-40 players from each server trying to control 4 maps.

• Remove the HOME borderland system
• Run single map for Borderland
• Rotate Alpine back in (when it’s ready and updated again)
• Run EBG +BL map
• Use the EotM system to make more instances of maps as needed

Having one borderland would be tricky to manage (who gets the citadel? Or is it cappable, so the map would be a bit like a mini-EBG?); it might be a beneficial idea to expand EBG to include lanes based on (or cut and pasted from) the borderland maps behind each starting area, though – and then for Anet to increase server population capacity in EBG. (A bit like a 3-armed boomerang.)

Honestly, I think giving red Citadels would work fine (in most cases). Red is “usually” the weaker server in a match-up, so a slight map-based handicap (not fight-based) isn’t bad.

But the Alpine map would have to get the “services” (all the stuff in the Citadel) equalized, either removed or added to the south spawns as well.

But if they wanted to add some work to the map, then putting Citadel as a “Castle” does sound fun, but it is placed in a pretty weird spot for that. It would have made more sense to have a “Castle” somewhere in the ruins, but that would be way too much work on the map to be expected.

PS: You don’t want to expand EBG, most people complain enough about the lag as-is with 3 way battles in SMC. There are some pretty bad consequences that can happen if you start messing more with adding to map sizes and user limits. I think you would be much better off with just spawning a new copy of EBG, instead of increasing the limit to 200 per side.

Hmm, yeah, I see what you mean. I wouldn’t vote for a copy of EBG, though…

Curious, though, because Elder Scrolls Online handles the megaserver WvW quite well. I’ve encountered little lag in Guild Wars 2, but surely they could improve servers if they were consolidating onto one map?

I know I’ve said it before, but I still don’t quite understand… why did we need to lose the old borderlands? Couldn’t the new ones have been part of a map rotation? (There’s three teams, so three maps can potentially swap owner per reset!)

I don’t like that the expansion replaced the old content rather than expanding upon it.

Notsoperky.2348:

Zepher.7803:

Love the new map and the new mechanics, it’s a new thing that allows me to get all kitteny trying to figure out all the nifty angles and tricky things to do…the old map map was old and used up. it’s new and no way in hell do I want the same old crusty bl back.

So, it looks good and has some pve mechanics and gimmicks in it.

And there was me thinking wvw was about, well, world vs world in epic battles and smaller battles, when all along apparently it’s just a pretty map to look at and figure out how to get around in…

Good call, yeah… PvE is for figuring out angles and looking pretty. But hey, the old maps were prettier anyways! Not sure how dusty cliffs are prettier than rolling hills and rivers.

After a further week of the new maps, I have to say that they REALLY need to bring gliders in. Otherwise they need to revert to the old map. (I’d take the old maps over gliding, but without gliding the new maps are absolutely loaded with dead ends that make it even harder to get from one side to the other (especially without the waypoints in the keeps). Makes it very unappealing to even consider trying to get back into battle. Hence the queues for EBG continue…

Swift.1930:

Odyssey.6523:

The issue of account binding is a strange one to me. So many people are protective of the idea that if they worked hard for the best equipment, they should keep it, over someone just buying it. I think these people are foolish. Foolish because they don’t realise the economic oppurtunity in the game they’ve sacrificed. Yes, opening account binding to everyone, or even guild binding would allow people who have not worked toward a craft 500 have the highest level gear. But who benefits off that? The people who did work toward craft 500, and now hold the market share on capitalizing off that.

Lets be honest, did you really work hard to get crafting to 500? No, you probably did what most people did, and grinded/saved a few hundred gold, then purchased a crafting guide, and sat there for 2 hours recreating recipes to level 500. This has devalued crafting entirely. It is now just another 2-300 gold required gating your first set of ascended. Because of the way crafting is built/implemented in the game, it literally serves no other purpose than ascended crafting. In reality, removing binding from crafting devalues crafting for the average player, which in turn, raises the valuation for crafters. It actually gives crafting as a whole more meaning, not less. Your best items are now acquired as a community, not as an individual.

Great points, and I agree. You pretty much voiced the outcome of the following (initially negative, as per the title) thread:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Stop-making-holiday-event-stuff-tradeable/first#post5724443

Also, the economy can only gain from being able to buy any crafting over the TP. Supply/demand will fluctuate no matter what happens. People who are purists can farm up their own equipment. (Maybe even sold ascended equipment will bear the line: “crafted by XYZ” to retain the fact that it was bought?)

A little bit of a tangent from the “guild-bound” topic, but still valid and related.

Galen Grey.4709:

Werdx.2059:

Spirited Was Eceni.3869:

I took this from the Eye of the North website:-

The expansion introduces:
41 new armor sets, including rare, stand-alone pieces
100 new profession-specific skills (10 per profession, none of which are elite)
50 new PvE only skills including 3 elite skills
10 new heroes
18 Dungeons
124 new quests
The Hall of Monuments, a place which allows you to obtain unique titles, companions, weapons, armor, and miniatures in Guild Wars 2 based on your achievements in the original Guild Wars.
More than the previous campaigns, Eye of the North is full of easter eggs and “hidden” quests, which are not immediately accessible.

For those who may not know, Eye of the North was the only expansion Anet released during GW1, the other releases were separate campaigns within the same world.

I’ve not delved too deeply into HoT so far but for those that have, how does what we bought compare to the previous expansion in terms of content and value for money?

EoTN cos about 60.000.000$ to make,HoT price was about 250.000.000$

Guild Wars 2 is made pure for money milking.Guild Wars was made out of love.

not exactly sure how your math works but shouldnt it be the other way round? when you make something out of love you’re willing to invest more in it so generally what ends up costing more is considered more of work of love then something that cost less to make.

Dont really personally agree that cost is any indication of love but if it were I’d say the highest cost is the best example of love.

Other way around – we’re pushed to put love into the game (so if we don’t love it, we can’t get much out of it). The post was that Guild Wars was made out of love (by the devs); Guild Wars 2 is a money sink. Gotta agree on this. I love the Guild Wars world, lore, and setting(s), but GW2 throws so many more purchases at us than world and lore it delivers.

Anybody remember the old hard mode map gameplay from GW1? Made us go back over old maps and explore them from top to bottom eliminating foes and giving quite decent rewards and neat titles. It was nice that exploration was encouraged by the gameplay. “Been there, done that” was a dull title in my opinion. Too much of a negative tone to the title… made me think my character had become as bored of exploration as the devs have.

It sounded like a tangent, but it’s an example of the love Guild Wars 1 inspired from its fans that Guild Wars 2 doesn’t quite reach. Maybe an Asuran dev team took over? Pretty sure the original dev team survived the searing of old Ascalon.

Majic.4801:

Let The Market Decide!™

^ This, yup.

Eponet.4829:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Valky.2574:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Oh I love the flutes! Dulfy has previews of these up.

Off topic but i love your name – The wheel of time is imo the best fantasy novel ever
good book to listen to why grinding it’s like 400hrs long got me from 1-80 and map complete with out banging my head on my desk out of boredom

Might have to brake it out again for these masterys to

Thank you

It is a great series. I’ve read the paperbacks, as well as listened to the audio books. Since I drive an hour to (and from) work each day, it gave me a lot of time to enjoy the series again. Definitely a series I’d recommend to people that love a good fantasy setting (even if sometimes R.J. could get a little repetitive in his descriptions).

I…liked it up until book 6 or so. Then the padding started to become more noticeable. It’s thanks to the series that I picked up on Brandon Sanderson’s work though.

Off-topic, yes… but I was a little confused as to why Wheel of Time was so successful when it was a copy of Lord of the Rings, and each sequel of Wheel of Time was a copy of Wheel of Time… xP

(Reached book four…)

Although maybe it works better when accompanying grindy gameplay.

Odyssey.6523:

The issue of account binding is a strange one to me. So many people are protective of the idea that if they worked hard for the best equipment, they should keep it, over someone just buying it. I think these people are foolish. Foolish because they don’t realise the economic oppurtunity in the game they’ve sacrificed. Yes, opening account binding to everyone, or even guild binding would allow people who have not worked toward a craft 500 have the highest level gear. But who benefits off that? The people who did work toward craft 500, and now hold the market share on capitalizing off that.

Lets be honest, did you really work hard to get crafting to 500? No, you probably did what most people did, and grinded/saved a few hundred gold, then purchased a crafting guide, and sat there for 2 hours recreating recipes to level 500. This has devalued crafting entirely. It is now just another 2-300 gold required gating your first set of ascended. Because of the way crafting is built/implemented in the game, it literally serves no other purpose than ascended crafting. In reality, removing binding from crafting devalues crafting for the average player, which in turn, raises the valuation for crafters. It actually gives crafting as a whole more meaning, not less. Your best items are now acquired as a community, not as an individual.

Great points, and I agree. You pretty much voiced the outcome of the following (initially negative, as per the title) thread:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Stop-making-holiday-event-stuff-tradeable/first#post5724443

Fuzzion.2504:

I guess the only good thing for wvw were the changes made to some of the classes and that they kept EB.

Thank kitten for eb!

Haha, and EB is the epitome of zerg-fests usually. Not that I mind it when it’s 50 VS 50, but 70 attacking 20-30 is boring for both sides.

Aenaos.8160:

erKo.9586:

Im just wondering how many are like me:
-Played 100% wvw & LOVED IT! before the expansion and new maps.
-Can’t handle the new maps becuase they are to big & messy & pve.
-Just play some EB sometimes but… the fun is gone because the maps are empty & everything about WvW just feels….lost becuase of the changes.
-Have actually tested PvE since the expansion but.. well it aren’t so fun as the old-days-WvW.

If there were enough players to fill the new maps you’d be having fun.
You compare a map you played for 3 years to the new one.
It’s normal that you feel confused and not accustomed to the layout.
Play this map for 3 years and it will look as simple and normal as the
old one.

Eeeeeexcept that WvW wasn’t designed for meta-events like knocking down everyone’s gates with dinosaur-farmed cannons.

joneirikb.7506:

Or just reduce from 3 borderlands to 1.

Heck for T8 we probably can’t fill a single map…

This system will not work as long as it doesn’t adapt itself to the players and number of players. The WvW system is to rigid, it needs to adjust itself dynamically to numbers/players.

4 Maps is just overkill for the lower tiers, I don’t think any server in T8 right now could max more than 40 players each during reset, we’re not even half-way to a queue on a single map. All that means is that whoever leads gets to own 4 maps.

Honestly it doesn’t even matter if it is Desert or Alpine maps, there is still 5-40 players from each server trying to control 4 maps.

• Remove the HOME borderland system
• Run single map for Borderland
• Rotate Alpine back in (when it’s ready and updated again)
• Run EBG +BL map
• Use the EotM system to make more instances of maps as needed

Having one borderland would be tricky to manage (who gets the citadel? Or is it cappable, so the map would be a bit like a mini-EBG?); it might be a beneficial idea to expand EBG to include lanes based on (or cut and pasted from) the borderland maps behind each starting area, though – and then for Anet to increase server population capacity in EBG. (A bit like a 3-armed boomerang.)

Dream In A Dream.7213:

No.

I mean, the best response to that one is “yes”, but I’ll put some thought into mine…

I enjoyed small fights in WvW. There were a lot of good 10-20 vs 10-20 fights going on when strategy was peaking. But zerging became the response to those fights – the team with the bigger stick wins.

The new map won’t stop zergs completely (unless it stays empty), but one thing it kind of prevents is spotting zergs.

I admit that I was hasty when I said WvW is zergs. Yeah, it’s not just zergs. Not even sure exactly why I mentioned zergs. But the pop drop is still the map. At least one thing’s for sure: without pop, we won’t have zergs.

Phantom.5389:

My list of changes from HoT that are pretty amazing :

(1) The new sentry detection system is great. It mades sentry more useful and allows players to not lose time going where the ennemy is not (it goes well with point 2). This new sentry was also suposed to kill yaks and get people to go flip the sentries… sadly… yaks are useless so on that part it failed to hit the mark.

(2) The map calls when a structure is taken by X server is also great. It might only be a solo roamer, but it will still improve the information network. This combined with a sentry that scouted a group of players earlier allows you to walk directly to where you think the group will be in the next few seconds.

(3) I like the fact that lord HP scales up with the number of players. It gives people a better response time to gather enough folks to get a good fight instead of getting structures flipped without a good brawl in the lord room.

Here is a list of things that needs a little tweak before being things that could be decent for WvW.

(1) Auto upgrades seems awesome on paper… But I think simply making it so upgrades are forced to be in a specific order would of solved the troll problem. Make it so yaks count! Yaks are useless now. Also, waypoint on T0 keep makes WvW lose its touch. I remember when we did map calls on every map to get our people to defend our T3 keep with a waypoint. Those were fun fights in the lord room. Now? Keep flips and it doesn’t matter since we will grab it back while gaining access to the only upgrade which truly did matters as a welcome gift. Also, removing Bay and Hills waypoint on the new map just bring less fights (less incentive to actually go defend it since it will never get a waypoint).

(2) The new event in the Desert bordeland map. This event seems great and all. But I still think that a big area with a cap point could of been a better choice than to kill those PVE monsters. Imagine a large cap where there is a timer ticking down for every second your server control the point. I feel like it would be more appropriate for a players vs players environnement. King of the hills kind of tournament would of been amazing I think. Atleast the event as it is is not so fun, it’s just that those Dinos don’t really belong to WvW if you ask me (my opinion, sorry if some people love those Dinos XD). A king of the hill tournament could of been one big platform or up to 3 big platform where each platform control gives you -1 second on the total timer. Once it reachs 0 the canon is yours.

Things that I think are negative to WvW

(1) The non players automated things in the Desert borderland map. I’m talking about those slow turrets, those flame turrets, those winds turrets and those earth walls. They are annoying more than anything. As to replace those things, I would simply take them off and get the blessing of the element when near that area (no more need to actually go and click the shrine to get the move speed boost). I would also take back the combat boost that those elemental buffs gives, environement should not give such a potent stats boost which vary depending on the region you are playing on (same with the imune to burning in fire keep). Also, invisible zergs is simply a bad concept, but I got no idea how to replace that buff without imbalacing the fights (need help finding a solution so I can edit that part later on) .Finally, since earth keep have 2 automated things, (turrets and walls). I would simply give them a detector (like a sentry would if it spotted an ennemy) all over the keep so it can detect any hiding ennemies inside that keep and in the close periphery of that keep.

(2) Fortified gate… Those are new and they are slow to take down. Also guild catapults got nerfed to the ground so breaking a fortified wall takes an army or will simply take forever if you are a roaming squad. But gate is now also fortified… So it just means more time raming or catapulting those objectives…which in the end me and my roaming friends just leave them be since it’s too much of a chore.

(3) The pathing of the map seems to be worse than what Alpine borderland offered. Zigzaging and going up and down makes the map that is slightly larger to feel like walking from point A to point B to take much more time than what it used to be on Alpine borderland. Or atleast it feels less straightfoward and more about dodging the ennemy than to engage them. Those keeps are just so vast with so many pathway. Keeping it simple is not always a bad thing.
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
Basically, I think a tweaked Alpine would be better. Alpine had its flaws, but people still loved that map after 3 years (sure they asked some fix there and there, but a total revamp of the map doesn’t seem to get us to a better place, fixed some problems only to make new ones arise).

Maybe they could fix invisible zergs by thickening the sand effect, removing the invisibility buff, and making players untargetable while in there?

Buy Some Apples.6390:

That dev post was a month ago!

Hah, whoops. Gotta pay more attention on old threads xP

Vayne.8563:

Grim West.3194:

When GW2 came out, every server every night had wvw ques and every zone was packed. Events scaling created epic events in low level zones because of all the people.

Just before HoT GW2 still had a ton of people on the top servers queing up for wvw and there were plenty of people in low AND high level zones.

After HoT released there was a weekend of fun when a good amount of people showed up to try the new stuff, it wasn’t epic like GW2’s release but it was mildly amusing.

Then HoT killed GW2.

Now the whole game is basically a ghost town. Sure there are occasional events that get packed and once and a while ONE zone gets filled up. But the sad truth is that HoT pushed many players away from the game and made it actually worse than before it’s release.

ANET failed and only the totally clueless can’t see that.

We’ll see who’s clueless moving forward as profit reports come in. Not just now, but in the future. No one in my guild left, and everyone bought HoT. HoT didn’t kill the game.

There’s definitely a problem in WvW though. Fortunately WvW isn’t the game, but only one part of it.

I’m not so sure… WvW was a big part of the game for a huge playerbase, and rather than adding a lot of interesting content, HoT added a couple of long-event-chain (meta?) maps. I know it’s still a matter of time before numbers truly roll in, but I’m under the impression that HoT was too little content, too heavily imposed (WvW borderland map replacement), with overly-limited implementation on the additional mechanics introduced (we can glide, sure, but in no more than four maps).

PokerStar.5081:

DeceiverX.8361:

PokerStar.5081:

You only need to change a few lines of code for this to happen

Now THAT’s funny. I have a feeling you don’t know how programming or game development works.

Seriously, this would be a massive undertaking. Unless ANet has some super-secret seamless-integration system for all of its world assets that allow building and combining huge world assets into a simple package with resolved triangle meshes and not yielding a performance hit, and have a self-correcting rendering solution to get computers running the game more efficiently, no.

You are wrong, The code for the new maps are already written..

Step 1: They paste old code back over new maps to get back old borderlands
Step 2: They paste new map code over EB to generate new map

This is very simple to anyone who can program, I’m not telling them to write any new Source since it’s already written.

Anyone with basic C/C++ skills can do this in minutes.

Hahaha yeah, that was a funny response you caught before I did.

The code also already has map rotation set up in such a way that it would be (once again) a tiny change to allow us to use multiple borderland maps and change borderland on a match-by-match basis.

But what was that I heard earlier? Replace EBG? Really? EBG is a pretty cool map. Anet shouldn’t be replacing nice vanilla maps (or even bad ones); it should be adding alternative maps. It never hurts to leave some variety. It actually makes for good comparison – they’ll be able to see which maps get played and if any are abandoned.

Better to add new maps either as completely optional or add them to the potential three-map borderland rotation. Replacement is NOT what an expansion is supposed to do; by definition, an expansion expands on gameplay.

Edit: certainly there are other things to consider in the coding, but when it comes to simply pointing our buttons on the WvW screen to a different map to load up, the change is very simple. (I’m not sure exactly which way they added it in, but in reality it would be as quick as changing either a folder link or a code variable from mapAlpine to mapDesert.)

Stand The Wall.6987:

Who knew that new content would entice people into playing it… omg anet human nature op pls nerf. Seriously, give it some time, most of the WvW players will be done with HoT in another month and will be back for WvW. If they dont come back, then I would say that there are grounds for this discussion, but right now it is way too early to complain about HoT.

Not really; it’s already happened, for the most part. Ehmry Bay’s EBG rarely filled up until HoT released, and now it’s pretty much constantly full. WvW players have returned to WvW, but they are queuing up for EBG. The borderlands remain empty.

I’m not sure if it affected anyone else, but for some reason the topic went blank until I created this reply. So for now this is a placeholder.

I have changed the topic title, as it looks like I started off on the wrong foot. The last few posts have clarified the idea. My idea wasn’t to give ascended equipment to everyone and his dog for cheap, but rather to give more value to craftsmen in guild-centered gameplay. Something that makes their profession more than ornamental.