Guild Wars 2

My consolidated feedback on Wintersday 2014:
There’s many things that ArenaNet does right. Wintersday 2014 was not it. If I was feeling very charitable, I’d grade this as a C-, at best. It’s like going to your favorite restaurant, ordering something you know you like, enjoying the first bite, but then finding a hair in the food on the second bite.

1) Bell Choir. Buggy and frustrating. At least half the time, I join and every note I play is wrong, but if I stop playing notes, I don’t take damage and get a perfect score and not credit. Most of the rest of the time, I enter an instance which is or nearly is completed. So between these two problems, I spend most of my time in loading screens, “waiting on additional players”, and not enjoying the activity. For something that is identical to last year and should not have changed, this is a complete failing grade, F. Suggestions: Fix the bug, lower the waiting time between songs, and don’t allow new players into an instance that has started the second song.

2) Winter Wonderland JP. Only small changes from last year, and I’m fine with them. There seem to be a lot of people complaining about lag, but I was not one of them. Only real problem I see is the falling damage on the candy cane. Grade: B+. Suggestion: just turn falling damage off for the whole instance – everything else is highly scripted so it shouldn’t make any difference anywhere else in the puzzle.

3) Grawnk. Perfect. Short, sweet, light-hearted. A+ Need more things like this.

4) Toypocalypse. It’s not Wintersday if I can’t play with my friends. I realize that code changes were required for PvP (and I’m enjoying PvP more than I used to, so that was good). However, it was entirely a choice to not devote resources into fixing this activity. Why it is even in the competitive activity format is kind of a mystery to me anyway. I’ll be generous here and grade this as a D. Suggestion before next year: allow me to join with friends, of course. Or if I’m asking for the stars, a complete competitive activity overhaul. I’d like to play with my friends in other activities as well. Parties should end up in the same instance – not necessarily on the same team, as that may make some things like Snowball Mayhem and Keg Brawl unfun going up against a premade – but at least put us in the same instance so after I launch a snowball volley at a friend I can laugh about it with them on teamspeak.

5) Snowball Mayhem. No changes needed with the exception of what I just said above, as it can be difficult to get into the same instance as friends. Grade A.

6) Infiniarium. Seems there was some variations or additions for some of the tasks – this is a good thing. And as always, running around doing the SMASH EVERYTHING thing is so cathartic. A+.

7) PvP reward track. Perfect. A.

8) Divinity’s Reach, Ho-ho-tron/Dolyak Event. Again, perfect. A.

9) Achievements. Mostly fine, but more thought needs to go into the cap for repeatable ones. 30 rounds of Snowball Mayhem for 3 points? With 5-10 minute matches, plus starting/loading times, that’s about 6 hours. That’s just a bit silly. Grade B.

10) Wintersday Presents. I feel like I’m being trolled by Arenanet here, even after the update. It’s like some awful meme: “Yo dawg I heard you like RNG boxes, so I put RNG boxes in your RNG boxes, so you can risk getting banned for using an autoclicker while you rage about RNG.” Seriously, Arenanet: stop it. RNG lottery isn’t fun. Boxes in boxes is absurd. No grade for this, please go to the principal’s office for detention.

Kitty.1502:

My biggest issue with how rng is handled in this game is just how much fun you potentially may have is based on it. You want a precursor? You can spend thousands of hours farming for the gold to buy one, or get lucky and get one and be happy.
Everything in this game revolves around rng, and honestly at times, can be very frustrating and sickening.

I was just “lucky” – and I’m definitely not happy.

5745 hours. Finally got my first precursor drop. On Christmas.

Rage.

Rage is right. Thanks for the lump of coal.

Happened to me today on same mission, and on the next mission Source of Orr.

It’s not a sound setting, the character models in the cutscene didn’t open their mouths at all, they just stood around staring at each other as the text went by.

Virtute.8251:

Michael, it looks like you need a spectator mode without your own character model being rendered. The match interference is in the fact that for whatever team you’re currently flagged as, the opponent teams will try to kill you with extreme prejudice. That alters their decision making, and causes group leaders to lose control of their teams.

I originally called it a mistake because I felt that the above should be obvious in deciding how such a GM account would interface.

Furthermore, the visibility of your GM guild tag is going to alter the behavior of nearby baddies.

-So when they’re invisible, complaints that the GMs are doing nothing are all you hear.
-Now that they’re visible, the complaints are that they’re altering matches simply by being visible because players choose to turn into mindless idiots chasing a tag kill.

Make up your mind.

I have no problem criticizing Anet’s actions regularly, but in this case, they are perfectly fine.

+1 in support of (sometimes) visible GMs running around with the ban-stick.

My thoughts:
-Horrible change.
-It’s not Wintersday if I can’t play with my friends.
-While it may have been necessary to change parts of the code for PvP, it was an optional choice to devote resources into allowing parties – a choice that ArenaNet knowingly decided not to do.
-This thread will be locked like all the others.
-After spending months trying to improve communication, shutting off discussions with ultimatums has kittened it all away again.
-It is impossible for ArenaNet to improve it’s communications with customers when they have a policy of not communicating with their players. Change the policy or this will continue to get worse.

Year 1, couldn’t join with parties. EVERYONE hated it.

Year 2, fixed. Happy days.

Year 3, same nonsense as year 1.

This is a horrible change. I want to play with my friends. Anything else is not acceptable.

Currently bugged on .38.154

Maybri and crew are inside. No quest icon over her head, but gives the option to join forces. Clicking does nothing.

Finley at the SW bridge into the kraal. No quest icon over her head, but gives the option to ‘countme in’ – clicking does nothing. Captain Gregory dead way inside near the POI. See screenshot.

Since you guys can’t seem to figure it out, how about putting in a failsafe? If none of the events have completed in 15 minutes, everything is forcibly reset back to the beginning. No individual event takes more than about 5 minutes, so if anyone is actively doing it, this wouldn’t interrupt them.

Queues repeatedly popping while in a match just now. Uh, what?

tevoro.1587:

John, I don’t know if it specifically falls under your department, but many people including myself wonder exactly how magic find effects drop rate/RNG. Anet has not given us any specifics about it, to the best of my knowledge. You commented closer to the beginning of this thread that it helps immensely, but provide no more details about it.

They have said how magic find works.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Magic_find
Look at the Notes and References links.
“Everytime you kill a monster you roll on a number of tables, inside these tables are different rarity categories. Magic find increases the chances you will get higher categories. For example if there is a 1 in 10 category, and you have 200% magic find you will have 3/10 chances to get that category. This improves not just the rarity of the items you get but can also improve your chances at getting trophies and rare crafting materials like lodestones.”

And magic find works fine for the majority of things that drop. The problem of distribution happen only on the very low to extremely improbable items. e.g. precursors and rare drops that only come from a single limited source.

That’s why I don’t think suggestions that involve increasing the chance for x, or increasing magic find for x are going to do anything for how it feels when you’re unlucky. If buying 10 or 100 lottery tickets actually worked, there’d be a lot more millionaires in the world. It doesn’t.

Lowering the outlier rate? Will turning the unluckiest fraction to simply very unlucky make them feel better? I don’t think it will.

This is the perfect thing for the gem store. +1

I don’t think I’ll be getting the griffon, but I’d pay for something else. Maybe a flaming phoenix, or something very cute.

THANK YOU!
For the new version of the salvage highlight. This is so much better than what we had before. And the toggle-able option for the glowing new items is perfect. The little QoL stuff like this is awesome.

Mahe.7321:

this is entirely unnecessary from a technical point of view because there are no new meshes or textures to be load since the clones are exact copies of the already loaded player character.

It’s necessary for an entirely different reason than what you’re thinking.

Your game client doesn’t yet know what meshes to load onto the character. It knows that there’s a character model at that position, but it hasn’t gotten full information on what meshes to put on it yet from the server.

This way is better than the alternative: not seeing anything until the client knows exactly what skins a character is wearing.

Think of PvP or WvW. Do you really want your client waiting around until it knows every skin on that player that’s coming to attack you before it tells you that there’s even another player there?

Gaile Gray.6029:

I fully and completely understand the frustration. I truly comprehend that players would like us — someone, anyone! — to “open the floodgates” on information. That’s not in the cards. However, I have some ideas that I am going to float internally to see if we can say a bit more while honoring the overall communications policy.

Gaile, there’s a number of responses to your post overall. I’ll keep it simple:

A company cannot improve communication with customers when that company specifically has a policy that says it can’t communicate with customers.

Your job and goal to improve communications is completely at odds with that company policy – and that policy is simply wrong for so many reasons that I could spend an hour writing a response about. Don’t work to find some way to work within the policy. Get the policy changed.

Arenanet learned the completely wrong lesson from the precursor crafting thing. It shouldn’t be that you can never ever let anything slip that isn’t 100% confirmed – it should be that when plans and priorities change, that needs to be communicated.

You can never go wrong by being open and honest with your customers. Your customers will support you, even if it is “bad” news, if you are consistently open and honest with them.

TiredTracks.6245:

64.25.38.161:0

I put in a ticket on this weeks ago after my Teq group had a horrible experience on that same server IP, but gave up in frustration when support kept insisting it was general Internet congestion or wanting me to run connection tests.

I’ve seen the same server running Southsun and lagging horribly (KQ wasn’t even up) and Silverwastes as well.

.161 is broke. Someone please go fix it.

Ya, this is quite annoying. The’ve got a huge agro radius and once they’re on something, they won’t release it for anything short of dying or killing whatever they’re on. Caithe was on something else when I got to the boss, and just stood looking the wrong way for the whole fight.

Jory: “I’m worried about Kas, we have to find her as fast as possible.” :runs off to fight a vine way down a tunnel going the wrong way:

Gaile Gray.6029:

You mention wanting to know there will be more to the game. The new and continuing episodes of the Living World count towards that, right?

Gaile, there are 2 things to games.

1) The story or plot that your character is involved in.
2) The game mechanics or systems that we the player use to interact with our character and the world.

I’m perfectly happy with what Arenanet is doing with the story. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed pretty much all of it (even the parts of season 1 it seems many others did not).

However, I am thoroughly dissatisfied with having no idea what is going on (if anything) with how I the player interact with… well, every part of the game.

To answer your question directly, no, it is not enough by far. It is amazing to me that anyone would even think it was close to being sufficient.
5% – Knowing there’s more story coming
5% – Being told there’s a team working on features
90% feeling completely in the dark about the direction of those features and the game as a whole.
Please give me the other 90%.

Lunacy Solacio.6514:

Tamasan.6457:

Michael Henninger.7451:

To remove someone using hacks (teleports, speed, etc) we have to witness the act in game so you must use the in-game reporting tool.

I’ve been running into a lot of gathering bots in PvE lately. They’re underneath the terrain and I’m not able to target them, so there is no way to report them using the in game tool. I’ve been putting in support tickets – 5 or 6 over the last 2 weeks. However, it really is a serious pain to need to alt-tab, pull up the website, fill out the form, etc.

Can you look at providing us an easier way to report bots that we can’t target using an in game system? I’d guess this might help in WvW exploit situations, too.

You can type the name into your block list, and then report from there. I did that for the one gathering bot I saw under the map, but for some names that won’t be easy. Best way is to quickly screenshot and then do it that way. You can always use the character map tool in windows or something to get the special characters.

Yeah, soon as I see them now, I screenshot so I can report. Didn’t think of adding them to my block list. Guess that’s faster, but I’d still like a better way to report them than having to workaround having to target/rightclick them.

Why can’t I just type “/report Botname is a bot harvesting nodes from under the terrain in Mapname” and move on with my game?

Michael Henninger.7451:

To remove someone using hacks (teleports, speed, etc) we have to witness the act in game so you must use the in-game reporting tool.

I’ve been running into a lot of gathering bots in PvE lately. They’re underneath the terrain and I’m not able to target them, so there is no way to report them using the in game tool. I’ve been putting in support tickets – 5 or 6 over the last 2 weeks. However, it really is a serious pain to need to alt-tab, pull up the website, fill out the form, etc.

Can you look at providing us an easier way to report bots that we can’t target using an in game system? I’d guess this might help in WvW exploit situations, too.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

I see this, precursor crafting/scavenger hunt, brought up almost always when listing communication woes.

ArenaNet did keep us in the loop, announcing when it was being pushed back, and then when the current iteration was scrapped, and had to be started from scratch. The announcements have been quoted countless times in threads, and yet….it always seems to come up as something the Devs totally ignored and kept silent about.

Good thing it wasn’t something else, or it would be used as an example of how ArenaNet ‘over-hypes’ everything!

A real case of darned if you do, and darned if you don’t. /sigh

I’m sorry, but no, they did not keep us in the loop on precursor scavenger hunt thing. What I remember is it was part of the “things we want to get done this year” post, with a note that it was the most likely to get bumped. Year was over, no hunt. I’m fine, at that point I still felt informed. Then months go by, no mention. Patches, feature update, still nothing. I’m assuming it’s gone, but no word was ever given. No word still has ever been given to my knowledge. If I’m wrong, point me to the announcement and I’ll concede the point.

I read the forums at least every few days. I read every red post via the Dev Tracker. I watch many of the Twitch streams. The ones I don’t, I catch the notes on Dulfy. I occasionally check in on the Twitter feed, but frankly find it not useful for the purpose of being informed.

Where else am I supposed to keep informed?

Edit:
Ok, so someone dug up the post from 8 months ago. They told us then it wouldn’t be in the feature pack, but that it was being integrated into progression rewards. So… that was 8 months ago. Have we heard anything since? Do we have any clue on even the outline of what the progression rewards will be? We’ve gotten leveling rewards with the snafu’d new player experience, but it’s obviously not in that.

Wasbunny.6531:

Wait…is this seriously a thread demanding to know the ending (and thus being able to pre-approve the direction) of an open ended saga?

Yes, we as the audience are ‘completely in the dark’. As it should be. I mean if you’re really upset with how narrative arcs evolve do you read books backwards? Complain to the director that you sat for two hours in the dark without knowing the ending of the movie?

Edit: Sorry if that sounded hostile. I just know from experience the best way to kill any artistic project is to try to get a consensus on direction from the audience. The whole term ‘selling out’ defines this.

I believe the best approach is to realize that some will dig it and some will not, and leave it at that.

I don’t want plot details. And I don’t think anyone is asking for that. The thread certainly wasn’t going in that direction.

I want to know systems. Upgrades. Revamps. General information about some of the things Anet is spending their time doing.

Things like:
Will we see Cooking and Jewelrycrafting to 500?
Will we see more and higher level fractals?
New dungeons?
New WvW/PvP maps?
New maps/continents? Full size or the smaller ones we’re getting with LS?
New skills? Rebalances of existing skills?

And not just Yes/No answers, but goals and intentions. Instead of press releases that New Feature is coming out in a week, I’d rather see why this is coming out in a month or two, and what Anet thinks it will accomplish.

Gaile Gray.6029:

My question: Do you agree that it’s good to not share that sort of information, information related to the actual direction of the game saga as a whole?

No. A million times no. It is 2014. Arenanet run an online multiplayer game with continuing development. It is simply wrong from both player expectations and from a business model to shut your fans completely out of the general direction of what’s to come.

I said general direction. I don’t need spoilers for the specifics that are going to happen in the living story. If Anet wants to hold some system revamps or new releases as surprises, I’m ok with some of it being held close. Some, not all.

Your fans and customers deserve to know that some things are going to be released/improved/fixed.

So you like Harry Potter. Non-interactive fiction isn’t quite the same, but we can draw some parallels. JKR held the specifics of the plot close, and that was a good thing. But because of the structure of the novel, fans knew some things, without any doubt – even without being told or given hints – because Harry Potter was the classic “hero’s journey” plot structure. We knew that the story was going to come to an end, most likely at 7 books (at the very least you knew this by book 3 or 4). You knew that Harry was going to find some way to defeat Voldemort, even if you didn’t know exactly how it was going to happen. You knew that there were going to be various climaxes and character deaths, even if you didn’t know exactly who or what. JKR was a great storyteller because she knew those expectations, lived up to them but without being completely predictable.

Right now, your fans and customers have no reliable expectations at all even in a general sense. We are completely in the dark. The CDIs and other discussions are a start – the tiniest possible start – but they are almost all one way. All we’re doing is giving. We’re not getting anything back on how things might shape up or what the developers are even thinking or considering. And that is why you continue to keep getting thread upon thread of the complete lack of communication from Arenanet.

So I’m going to bring up what I did early in this thread again. A generalized PvE reward track system. There is so much good about the PvP reward tracks. In almost all of PvP, you’re gaining progression no matter what you’re doing – whether it’s hotjoin, solo queue, or team queue. Whether you’re winning or losing. Sure, the amount varies on activity and success, but you’re always moving forward to the reward. The amount you get by doing certain things is known. How far along you are is known – and importantly is visible. You can switch between tracks without losing progress on the original. And it’s expandable (and I hope from a code perspective, scalable).

A very generalized PvE reward track system that could work towards desirable items. Doing most PvE things would award some progress. Maybe killing a mob gives you 1 point (up to some daily limit). Completing a heart or doing an event is 5 points. A daily world boss 10 to 30. A dungeon path 50 to 500 based on time/difficulty. Maybe an underwater precursor is 100,000 points, an offhand is 200k, a main-hand 500k, and a two-hand is 750k. Maybe a bag of 3 to 5 T6 fine materials is 1000. 20-slot bags for 10k. Just throwing numbers and ideas out.

can it be seen as a grind? yes, but it’s a game-wide, do just-about-anything-you-feel-is-fun kind of grind. Would it replace gold or karma as a currency? To some extent, yes, but for most uses, no it wouldn’t. Gold would still be the standard means of exchange for everyday things, and this could be the locked-in, account-bound long-term progression towards individualized goals (assuming there are enough options to work towards). Karma feels like a dead currency to me for everything but obsidian shards, and a few other limited use items and I don’t think you’ll ever really bring it back because of the great variations and problems in how it was awarded from the early days.

Maybe it’s because I work in project management, but I like this idea because from the outside perspective, it seems both the best solution and would take the least amount of extra resources. I’d imagine much of the code from PvP tracks should be re-usable, so not a lot of extra resources would be needed there. It will take a lot of number crunching and decisions on what activities should award progress, how much they should reward, what rewards will be offered and their costs. But once the decision is made, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of unknowns to deal with.

Good things from the economy side – I’d think this would be easy to track and you already know how often we’re doing most of the activities (how many oozes have we killed again?). You could lessen gold drops if inflation is an issue. You can lessen RNG drops if needed – so long as you’ve got this safety net that allows progression.

laokoko.7403:

I like 2.5

Very simple to add to it is by achievements. After X amounts of tequalt you get a free teq ascended box. After X amounts of lvl80 rare weapon in the mystic forge, you get a free precursor.

Not a fan exactly.

Here’s why. The thing I feel GW2 has gotten most right is that I don’t feel forced to do any activity in particular in order to make progress towards most goals I can set for myself. Sure, a few skins like Sunless, Triple Wurm, or Fractal weapon have only a single way to get, but most other things you can eventually save up enough gold to buy, and you get gold from doing most everything (even in small amounts).

However, accumulating gold doesn’t really feel like progression. Even accumulating everything you need for a legendary doesn’t feel like progress when you know that precursor will never, ever drop, and you’re going to have to grind out all that gold by doing the best time-for-gold activities just to keep up with the slowly increasing price of them on the TP.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

We have 10 achievements for Tequatl, each giving a specific amount of achievement-points. What if you also get a Magic Find buff with each achievement (more for harder ones, proportional to the amount of AP you get) that is permanent and active at that bossfight.

example: player XY has

• “I found it” – 5 AP —-> +10% MF
• “Above the waves” – 10AP —-> +20% MF
• “Tail Flail” – 5AP —-> +10% MF

—> 10%20%10% = +40% MF during the Tequatl-Meta

Not a fan of this, either. It’s got the grind of needing to do the same thing over and over, with the even worse feature of extremely-low-probability events modified by insignificant bonus. Even if you made the magic find or equivalent +1000%, it is not going to feel better in the end. +1000% is only 10x your base rate. If buying 10 lotto tickets actually significantly improved your chances of hitting a multi-million jackpot, we’d all be millionaires. But it doesn’t in real life, and it won’t in game. You’re going to get alot more greens and yellows and even a few trash exotics, but it still won’t feel like you got anything – except if you’re one of the luckiest blessed by RNG.

(cont’d)

Echoes of the past is great. I haven’t done much in the Silverwastes yet, but it seems to have gotten good reception.

Why aren’t you making new currencies part of the account wallet? The wallet is one of the best QOL improvements, and you’re not using it!

At the very least, these items are permanent currencies (not seasonal) and must go into it:
Bandit Crests.
Geodes.
Tournament tickets.

Wonderly.1324:

Gaile Gray.6029:

Vladimer.7051:

I will add as a mini collector and a avid gem purchaser, I am rather ticked that the only way to get this mini is all based on RNG. I have already opened over 5k bags and nothing. I always buy the gem mini’s to complete my collection. I will have to stop now due to this matter.

boohoo to me I know, This is now the only aspect of the game I enjoy ( I am a digital Hoarder)

I understand, Vladimer. I am the same sort — I’m still playing sometimes for a MPB (Miniature Polar Bear) in Guild Wars during the Wintersday event.

If you continue the quest, I will wish you luck, as one collector to another.

I’m not sure you really understand the mentality of a collector, Gaile. I have every single mini in the game. Every. Single. One. For the sake of completing a collection, I purchased 2000 gems for Mr. Sparkles. For the sake of completing the collection, I’ve purchased every gem store mini, even the ones I thought were ugly and would never use. For the sake of completing a collection, I begged and bribed and formed a ToL team and trained for weeks to win a Mini Llama. I’ve spent thousands of dollars on gems, but always on gem store items, because I refuse to convert gems to gold for rewards that can be earned within game. If this mini were to be so unrealistically unobtainable that the statistical expected return would cost over a thousand gold in ToT bags and moreover this amount has to be amassed within a 2-week time frame, it would destroy my collection and eliminate my desire to continue pursuing a complete collection. This would eliminate my desire to further spend gem store purchases on minis, and also remove a core goal that drove me to play and enjoy this game.

I’m not trying to point fingers or start an argument. I’m only giving some player feedback on the matter. I only hope that my feelings are understood and considered, and I also seek to understand Anet’s perspective as well.

I think it’s great that some things are account bound, to indicate that the player participated in a specific event. I think it’s great that some things are really costly to obtain, to indicate the player has invested a lot of time and effort into the game. I think it’s great that some content is temporary/seasonal, to indicate that the player prioritized and participated in certain events during that time. However I think you need to carefully consider which combinations of these you put together, and combining all three, I propose, is a terrible idea.
I’m fine with Tequatl weapons because even if I kill Teq every day for a year and don’t get one, I know I’ll always have time to get one eventually if I’m dedicated enough.
I’m fine with precursors being the price that they are, because I know that I’ll amass the gold eventually, if I play long enough.
I’m fine with (and I have) every temporary living story skin that is no longer available, because they were all obtainable within a reasonable amount of time/effort/gold within the time frame that was allotted.
I am NOT fine with this Mini Gwynefyrdd because it is unreasonable to put in the amount of time/effort/gold required for the statistical yield of this item, within a two week period. Do you understand?

Well said. 100% agree.

I would also add that this situation promotes degenerative gameplay and is at least borderline abusive/manipulative to a sizeable fraction of your player base.

SweDreams.6984:

Anet, please understand something here and now.

Your players enjoy control. Just as any human being, we enjoy having control of our currency, making our own decisions on what content we would like to enjoy, and most of all, wish to feel empowered when we log into the game. This new system fails to satisfy any of those desires.

Shoe horning us into buying a set amount of gems, when once before we were given the tools to make decisions for ourselves on how many gems we would like to purchase and when we should purchase them is an insult to your player base. Worst of all, it comes across as INCREDIBLY greedy. When your gem store items range from 300-1000 gems in price, HOW does it appear to be a good idea to force us into buying specific quantities of gems?

I vehemently defend this game, and have supported most changes implemented into the game. From the changes in the leveling system, to the shifts of the wardrobe and even the Megaserver, I’ve continuously cautioned my friends to curb their doom saying and negativity, to first allow the changes to be implemented and try to evaluate them objectively. Each time, I’ve generally found that the changes were not detrimental and could even help improve the quality of the game. This is not to say that every choice you’ve made thus far was perfect. (I still feel Mega Servers could have been handled differently with similar outcomes accomplished.) On the whole however, I felt the the positive impacts on the gaming experience far outweighed any negative quibbles I had. I accepted that of course every change is going to incur some sort of unavoidable drawback, but each time a change has been implemented, I’ve seen the merits of such a change.

HOWEVER, now I fail to see any sort of positive impact this change relays to the players. You are taking away control from your players. Under the old system, you gave us the tools to make competent decisions about our in-game currency and real world currency. In short, the previous system treated us as intelligent human beings that did not require a guardian to make all of our decisions for us.

Understand that your player base will not respond well to being forced into decisions about their currency. Understand that you are harming your reputation with those who still defend and support your game/company. Understand that I have some serious concerns, which appear to be shared if any of the replies in this thread are any indication, about your attitudes towards your player base.

I ask you treat your player base with respect. I ask you treat us as competent human beings able to make choices for ourselves and to foster this understanding with tools that allow us the information to decide for ourselves what we wish to do within the confines of your game as you once have.

I do not often post in the forums but I could not keep to silence with my faith in this company so utterly shaken now. Please, take these words to heart.

Exactly this. Gaile, print this off, and get whoever is far enough up the management chain to matter to read it and actually understand it.

Why do we grab the torches and pitchforks? Because we do not feel like we’re being treated with respect.

robotempire.2451:

You guys have GOT to start giving veteran players escape hatches out of these newbie-friendly UIs and user experiences. Escape hatches need to become a first-order concern.

+1
Heck.
+eleventybillion

Gaile Gray.6029:

• A lot of newer players had trouble with the interface. That doesn’t apply to you, you’re veterans who have been around the conversion block a time or two. But newer players will benefit from the updated system.

I’m fine with changes made to make things simpler for new players.

I’m not okay with being forced to use dumbed-down versions of everything that worked fine for me because some people can’t handle complexity.

This is how I feel:

“The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal in every which way. Nobody was smarter than anyone else. … All the equality was due … to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General. …
It was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.
It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn’t think about it very hard. Hazel had perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all time. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would sound out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.”
-Harrison Bergeron, by Kurt Vonnegut
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron

Something like option 2.5 is my preference.

A system similar to PvP reward tracks would be ideal to me, where I can choose the goal, and many in game actions would progress me towards that goal. Something where I can shift to a different goal, and not loose my progress towards my first. Most importantly, a system that is transparent in that I can see where I stand and can directly see the progress that my actions have.

I see a rewards track type of system as much more expandable and customizable than a token-based system. Precursor track – would obviously need to be quite long – just throwing out numbers, but maybe need a million points. Some dungeons could award 1000 or 2000 points. World boss event might give 50 points. Maybe completing a story chapter gives 10 or 25 points. Just killing a random mob might only give 1. Maybe there could be a few precursor tracks – obviously the underwater weapons aren’t as desired as greatswords, so maybe one set is cheaper. Other named exotics, like the ones needed for some of the collector achievements could have a track. T6 mat track, maybe that one only needs 1000 points, and at the end is a bag with your choice of 5 or 10 T6 crafting materials.

Some tracks could be repeatable, others not, to control guaranteed supply of some items to once per account if that is needed.

Coverage/Snowballing
1) I think there’s merit in significantly increasing the points from kills (and not just stomps when you have bloodlust). Maybe 3 points per kill + extra 2 points if stomp + 1 point per bloodlust or adjust as needed. If done well, smaller organized groups could more effectively gain points even when out-zerged. However care should be taken not to completely diminish PPT, as that could just shift things far to the offense side and wipe out any point of defending structures.
2) I also like the idea of breaking the week long match into many shorter “innings” – e.g. 21 8-hour innings, or maybe 14 12-hour innings – with the overall winner being the server with the most innings won. If this route is taken, current upgrade costs/times for keeps/tower would be prohibitively expensive. Possible problems could show up later in the week when there’s no chance of comeback (though we have that already, so any improvement at all is arguably better).

Stagnation –
1) Handicap boosts would be my proposed solution – just increasing the outnumbered buff isn’t enough, since its a minute-by-minute thing and based on map. For each 5,000 points behind your server is, everyone gets 1% additional stat boost.
2) World bonus enhance stagnation. Turn them into only gold/loot/karma/gathering type boosts.

One overall thing we need is more iteration. So figure out an overall outline of what we think might work, and then adjust when results come in. There’s only been 3 or 4 changes to scoring since launch.

Proposal Overview:
Guild Fortresses (combo of GvG and Guild Halls – I know you said there’ll be a separate GvG CDI, but this concept doesn’t make sense without it)

Goal of Proposal:
To provide in depth and semi-customizable features for both Guild Halls and Guild vs Guild combat in a modular format to allow for expansion and iteration.

Proposal Functionality:
Instead of simply guild halls, allow guilds to build their own fortresses. These fortresses could be used for guild vs guild battles. GuildA challenges GuildB to a battle. Both of their fortresses are put in an instance some distance apart, and battle commences using some set of victory conditions, such as capturing the opposing guild fortress, killing their lord, et cetera. Or GuildA could defend their fortress while GuildB attacks from a camp or spawn point and vice versa. Should have customizable number of players allowed on each side.

The fortresses could be customizable with multiple configurations of walls and gates, siege weapons, and traps. Guild halls could be part of the fortress and contain much of the functionality other posts in this thread will undoubtably request. After it is built, it could be reconfigurable, so that changing meta or future features don’t lock a guild into a single configuration.

Not everything needs to be one guild against another. When a guild has a fortress, they could have PvE type missions such as tower defense type play against waves of enemies (e.g. “Save Our Supplies” just with walls).

There are a huge number of possibilities to expand on the concept, and I’m sure other players can add things I’d never think of. This is more of a framework around which ideas can be added on.

Potential Risks:
This proposal is a major feature piece that touches many systems. It could require a lot of development time and resources. My hope is that bringing it up here could provide more of a long term roadmap, and that development of GvG and Guild Halls could be built with proper hooks for this system and individual features added in regular intervals.

Mine’s back again after being gone for a few days. It’s on all my toon’s hair, not just the blonde or light colored ones.

It’s like there’s a (way) too bright light source that’s moving around and washing everything out.

John Corpening.9847:

Anyway, this discussion made it clear it is who you play with that’s important and a number of ideas in this thread preserved that without restricting the number of people who could play at a time. These have had a number of names but for the sake of discussion I’ll go with Alliances. The idea that I liked for Alliances is that it is a group of guilds and people that are guaranteed to stay together no matter how things are rearranged. There would probably need to be a size limit on Alliances and several of you pointed out that whatever limits are put in place it should be based on WvW participation.

I kinda like this idea.

With a few caveats.

-Absolutely the only way I can get behind it is if size limits are based on WvW participation. Preferably WvW participation while representing a guild/alliance. I do not want to have to kick members from my guild that only log in occasionally, or those that do mostly PvE just so my guild can fit in an alliance. It also cuts both ways – I don’t want to get kicked out of secondary guilds that might want to be part of a difference alliance because I only do PvE type stuff with them.
-I do not want to deal with queues. I’m perfectly happy playing on a medium populated server that only has queues on reset night and on a focused map during prime time. I want to play on my schedule, and I accept that I won’t be on one of the top ranked servers because of that choice.
-If at all possible, keep existing world designations for PvE/Megaserver prioritization. There’s no sense breaking those communities up because of this. SBI til I die!

Always been like this, as have all other channeled attacks.

If you need to evade, you can break the channel by moving, then evade as normal.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

What are the top 3 improvements you would like to see to Guilds in regard QOL and Logistics.

1. More granularity in guild permissions (specifically missions, admin ranks, bank access).
2. Visibility of chat in non-repped guilds.
3. Guild calender.

4. +1 on Asura Special Forces trebuchets.

You’ve reported what you think is a bug. Unless you have new information about it, move on. Spamming the forums or continuing to post in this thread in order to bump it to the top is just going to get you put in time-out.

FYI, it’s not a bug (linked dev post confirms that), and it’s not OP.

JonPeters.5630:

Great points here and I think what I am hinting at is that if there was a way to maintain the current guild functionality of multiple guilds but also add a way to really commit to a singular guild what are the features old and new that you think are important for your basic guilds vs your, for lack of a better term, “home” guild.

Jon

That statement really fills me with dread. Please do not take anything currently available away from what I’ll call a non-primary guild, and if you are going to be adding functionality, please make sure that if it is something that grants any kind of in game advantage (access to raids, buffs, areas, gear, skins, whatever) that it is available to smaller guilds.

My primary guild is about a dozen active people and another dozen or two that we see occasionally. I’ve known most of these people for years before GW2, and gaming in the same MMO is mostly what keeps us together.

However, most of my primary guild is also member of another larger guild of maybe about 30 or so people that we do missions and other random things with frequently – it started because missions are (and remain) such an enormous pain to try to do as a small guild (seriously, try even a tier 1 bounty with 5 or 8 people online). Yet I’ve gotten to know some of this other guild and I want to keep playing with them.

Please don’t make me choose between the people I’ve known for years and some kind of game mechanics that penalizes me for not wanting to spend most of my time in a huge guild where you’re just another face in the crowd.

Guild Permission Overhaul

More granularity is needed for existing guild permissions and to fill in missing permissions.

Missing permission for the Deep Cave section of the guild vault. Current permission is lumped in to the Treasure Trove, but no documentation or message tells this. (Also +1 on various other posts asking for increased functionality with the vault in general.)

Admin Lower Ranks include guild invite permission – again no documentation tells this. Split out a specific guild invite permission.

Mission Control is very lacking – all it controls is who can start the upgrade item in the guild panel. What it should control is who can interact with objectives, and who can accept guild credit. In even medium sized guilds, starting bounties or challenges before everyone is there is a problem and means some members don’t get credit and commendations. Accepting guild credit can also deprive members of credit for rushes or puzzles – say you’ve got a group of 30 people, and show up to a rush that another guild is doing – but there’s only 3 minutes left – it only takes one to run through ahead of everyone else instead of waiting to screw over everyone else.

RubiBayer.8134:

First, if you see something that you think isn’t working properly, please use /bug in game so the right people can be notified immediately.

How can we know what is intended when so much is intentionally left out of the patch notes?

Character portraits on the character select screen have changed considerably, and not for the better. They are really washed out.

A lot of good stuff in the patch.

However, one thing is really bugging me. The ‘highlight salvageables when clicking a salvage kit’ makes it really tough to tell the rarity level of items. Can the rarity borders be made much more distinct, or can we have an option to turn this new feature off.

Freeelancer.2860:

How many Mini Queen Jennahs exist in the game, and how many will remain after the Jennahcide patch (stole the name from another forum user)?

I have 59 Risen Priests of Balthazar. Balthazaricide.

+1 to this question.

Arrows arc, and shooting to a lower elevation increases your range. Pretty sure this has been confirmed as intended behavior, not a bug.

Branden Gee.2150:

• Increase max dolly (camera distance) distance
• Decrease min dolly distance
• Manual camera height adjustment
• Manual FoV adjustment

Those are the things I want most out of that list. I really want a much wider view of the battlefield – ****anywhere****, not just a half dozen boss fights.

I suggest any testing of camera changes you do includes two steps:
1) Do the jumping puzzle in the NW of Lion’s Arch as a Norn or Charr – if you’re not breaking things by the time you’re done, it passed.
2) Fight Shatterer with melee weapons as an Asura. If you can see more than his foot, it passed.

Stormdancer.4972:

Please, give your players, users, customers, more credit. I know that reading the forums here might give one a jaded view of the populace, but most of us really can figure this stuff out. Most of us can understand the concept of “if it hurts, don’t do it.”

And a big +1 on this. I want more control over my own game experience. I don’t care if you’ve got to hide it behind a menu and disclaimers. I’ll sign and fax you an 83 page document disavowing any future venting on the forums because I did something silly due to non-standard camera controls if it helps. Really, give us the options to adjust our own, please please please.

John Smith.4610:

In seriousness though we’re constantly working on improving performance and I expect the TP will get better and better over time.

I can’t help but wonder if it’s a waste of resources to query the database for the sell price for every item in bags every single time I open the TP.

Chris Cleary.8017:

I encourage players to remember that not everyone has the same goals when they play, and sometimes they will clash.

I agree that the change was needed from the toxicity angle. Just as it was needed for the Queensdale champ train.

But perhaps could have a wider discussion on game design and rewards. There’s a reason people want to farm these things: it’s because the rewards for most game activities are really weak, or at least feel really weak.

There’s little point slogging through the harder dungeon paths or high level fractals when you come out with blues, greens, and maybe a rare. There’s not much point doing most of the events when all you get is a couple hundred karma points. I don’t feel like doing those things advances my character, or gets me closer to any goals I have.

Evan Lesh.3295:

This is not intended behavior. One upset player should not be able to force other people to switch teams and stay in the match. Auto-balance is there to keep the team numbers even as people leave the game.

I agree.

My thoughts are that this whole thread is trying to fix the wrong problem, or is attacking a symptom instead of the root cause.

The cause is unbalanced matches (in my experience, completely one-sided hopeless matches).

Instead of worrying about spectate mode or team switching, I would propose to make auto-balance actually balance teams so that matches do not become so one-sided so fast. Currently auto-balance only reacts when there is a 2 person difference (3v5, 2v4, 1v3), and it reacts quite slowly: 10-15 seconds before it kicks in, another 10 seconds for volunteers to switch, then the person who switches is back to the spawn and is going to take at least 15 seconds if not longer to get back into the action.

Proposed changes:
1) If the match is in progress, and teams are even (4v4), the joining player cannot join the winning side.
2) If the teams are uneven (4v5), and the team with more players is ahead by 100 points (adjust as needed), auto-balance is activated immediately and moves 1 player to the losing team.
3) If there is a 2 person difference on teams (3v5), auto-balance immediately activates, and the person switched gets a 50% speed boost for 15 seconds.
4) Lower “volunteer time” of auto-balance to 5 seconds. Remove the 10-15 second delay before activation or at least lower it to 5 seconds.
5) When possible, keep players that have been on a team from before the match starts on that team when auto-balance activates (unless they volunteer), to encourage people not to sit and wait to join a team.

Once people learn they can’t just spectate/wait themselves onto the winning team, and that matches don’t(or rarely) get hopelessly one-sided, we’ll have more fights and less rage-quits.

Credit for guild missions is messed up again – its like the changes were reverted from a couple patches ago.

Did a guild rush with another guild – they activated it. More than 15 people completed the course (Quaggan Paddle). Stayed in zone, when timer on guild rush was done, got the pop up and accepted credit. Did not get the completion message in guild chat, did not get guild merits, and the rush is still active in our mission panel.

Can we have some update, or do you just want us to stand around waiting at these stalled events indefinitely? I’d like to finish the achievements for the open world content and maybe run other characters through.

1) I notice that on the collect sample portion of the Blazeridge chain, you no longer need the event to progress the story. Have you given up fixing that? If yes, when will the next server reset/patch be, so we might have a chance to get it done before it bugs? If no, how long will the open world content be available?
2) Same questions on the Frostgorge chain. I’ve never seen the capture Coiled Watch portion, it only seems to reset back to the defend part, or else it stalls.

And why are events required for LS content on such absurdly long timers? I actually like that there’s open world content as part of this, but needing to wait 20 or 30 minutes to advance to the next step with no idea when it will be available is just silly.