Guild Wars 2

I think it is funny that people are complaining about not being able to completely take over a portion of the open world in an MMO for the private use of themselves and their friends.

What you really want is instanced content, so just ask for that instead of trying to argue for maintaining a broken and empty MMO world that you have become used to squatting in.

People worrying about Orr temples and dungeons: the mega-server means that they will always either be open or in the process of being opened. You are still thinking that there are going to be a bunch of empty maps with dead temples and closed dungeons. However, only maps full of players will exist – new shards will only be created when all previous maps are full. Depending upon how popular a map is, there might only ever be one version of that map for the whole game.

This leads into people complaining about gathering. There will only be a handful of copies of each map – maybe only one for a less popular map – and they are not random each time you enter. They will persist and can be mapped. I don’t know if each shard will be visibly identified somehow or not (FGS1, FGS2, FGS3, etc.)

One suggestion I would like to make is that there be one uncontested waypoint in each map that is free to travel to if it is still going to take a second hop to get to anywhere in particular.

Go to less popular maps like Snowden Drifts. You will meet new people there.

Awbee.8405:

What about things like “today at 7 PM, there will be an event on [Server], everyone is invited!”

How can such things even happen anymore with megaservers?

“Today at 7PM, there will be an event in <map>, everyone is invited! Add Awbee or XxxLegolasXxx to your friends list and click Join.”

Anaal people who can only focus on doing one thing at a time will always try to find the optimal way of achieving their one goal while skipping everything else. The only way you can eliminate that is by eliminating choice.

I’m only concerned with making it so that you are not a complete idiot for doing everything. Currently, you are stupid if you don’t skip the trash. Fix that.

I don’t know why ANet forgot what worked in GW1. The trash dropped the stuff you collected (ectos, shards) and the end chest had a chance at a drop that was unique to the location.

Remove dungeon tokens as a reward for path completion. Add dungeon tokens as a possible drop from trash mobs.

Add a substantially increased chance of dropping a specific precursor as a reward for each path completion.

Yes, they should offer refunds for everything and then roll back accounts to the point of purchase because the months of having those things were apparently not important.

Dynamic events are dead! Long live dynamic events!

Seriously, ANet has killed dynamic events. The Dynamic Events forum has been closed and moved to the archives. Open world is Living Story now.

solid foundation = no traits until level 30

I wouldn’t write off TESO so quickly. They seem to be willing to make big changes based on feedback and it already looks a lot different from the start of beta. They have junked being locked into newbie island for a boring 10 levels so that instead you now can immediately start exploring the open world, and they have added BODY-BLOCKING to PvE combat to give it more weight which is huge in my opinion. I wish ANet were as nimble in responding to player feedback with such dramatic changes.

Just wait. “Removing restrictions” means NA <→ EU server guesting.

ANet has abandoned events as a key part of the game on their own. They still have events as part of other stuff like living story and world bosses, but they have no interest in the rest of the events populating the world. They are no longer fixing them, and the Dynamic Events forum has been closed and moved to the archives.

ANet is basing its decisions upon in-game metrics. Their metrics show that 90% of players simply ran past 90% of the content they put into the game. Currently in open world PvE, 99% of players are doing LS, champ trains and world boss events; only 1% are doing all the rest of the events scattered throughout the open world. The Dynamic Events subforum has been closed and dumped into the archives. They aren’t even trying to fix the old DE’s any longer – it seems like even more of them are broken now than were broken at launch!

Instead of making an expansion, they are going to introduce new areas through the LS which they know people will play instead of just running past everything. These new areas will only have events that tie into the LS instead of wasting a lot of time making a bunch of random DE’s that most people ignore. These events and areas will remain in game for people to continue to do when the LS moves on, just like Southsun, but ANet knows they already got their money’s worth out of them.

They cannot afford to invest in making an expansion with a huge amount of zones that people will just treat as short-term leveling areas like people do now with the open world.

It is great that GW2 is so pretty and that all NPCs are fully voiced and that dynamic events are much more engaging than “kill 10 of those hippos over there” quests, but this leads to a huge amount of development effort that has to go into making anything new. I think people are grossly underestimating the amount of time it would take to make an expansion of any decent size. I suspect that ANet has looked at it and doesn’t think it is worth the effort (not even close.)

What would they put into an expansion? I don’t think they know which is why they won’t make one. Most of their original development effort went into making the open world which they now largely consider a wasted effort.

They have come to realize that people will only give new content a quick try and then go back to grinding whatever they thought was optimal unless the new content is backed up with a laundry list of (temporary) achievements. Just look at the October 22, 2012 patch notes and then the helpless plea at the end of the November 1, 2012 path notes. That was the final nail in the coffin of adding more unfocused “explorable” content to the game and thus gave birth to the highly focused living world content plus achievements.

They aren’t going to waste years to just dump a huge number of new zones on the players all at once that will become ghost towns in a month or two. I really think they don’t know what else to try in an expansion, so they aren’t going to do it.

It doesn’t have to be the dailies. It just seemed to me that it has been a very long time since they have become tired and repetitive, so I was suggesting to repurpose them instead of coming up with something completely new. However, there’s no reason that it couldn’t be something new instead:

Each day a different map area is the featured map. On that map, events will give increased rewards and you get a +300% MF boost and a gathering boost. Also each day a different dungeon path and a different jumping puzzle are featured and provide a bonus reward the first time they are completed.

With regard to the comment about adding hard mode, down-scaling is supposed to be the answer to out-leveling content. That is where the concept that the whole game is end game comes from (as said by ANet, not me.) Down-scaling could use some improvement, too.

There is all this largely abandoned content sitting out there. It was never intended to be used only for leveling and then discarded. A small nudge to get people to give it a second look while encouraging the population to play together (yes, just like LS) seems worth the effort. Maybe people just don’t like the content (bad news for the game!), but maybe a little nudge will help a lot:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/27/your-money/27shortcuts.html?_r=0

A level 34 character also can’t do any dungeons except AC, but apparently that works. Not being able to do some content for a while is a consequence of deciding to have 80 levels.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s not much of an issue to have the trickle of new players miss a few dailies so that the maps aren’t dead for the rest of the 99%+ of players. A new player with only a level 34 character probably doesn’t even know what a daily is; they are still messing around with all the shiny “new” stuff. The new players also benefit from the maps being populated instead of empty.

Old suggestion:

… then make the daily achievements more specific. Each day one map area in the game should be chosen (not a whole region like Shiverpeaks, but a map area like Iron Marches or Harathi Hinterlands) and then have events, kills and gathering achievements in that one zone. There should be one specific dungeon path each day as an achievement and one specific jumping puzzle each day as an achievement. This will get the player base playing all of the content on a rotating schedule and will let people know when and where to find other players to play with.

This was a great success when it was implemented as the Zaishen Quest System in GW1. Content that was gathering dust was rediscovered and it became possible once again to find people to play with in the forgotten content. The current daily achievements try this in a halfhearted fashion, but Maguuman Slayer and Krytan Killer are not specific enough to get people out of zipping through the dailies in the same zones over and over.

New suggestion:
Each day a different map area is the featured map. On that map, events will give increased rewards and you get a +300% MF boost and a gathering boost. Also each day a different dungeon path and a different jumping puzzle are featured and provide a bonus reward the first time they are completed.

Q4 = Christmas

Anything with a heartbeat does well in the US in Q4. That is good news for GW2 because it means it still has a heartbeat. The real test will be the Q1 numbers, however, which will indicate whether or not GW2 revenues continue to slide towards Aion numbers.

If they released a new expansion for GW1, I would play that. I played GW1 fanatically for 5 years, so I’ve had my fill of the current content in the game.

GW2 is actually GW3. The original GW2 was the things we loved about GW1 in a persistent world, but sometime in 2008-2009 they pretty much junked everything and started over, getting rid of things like secondary professions and adding things like fixed weapon skills.

I had fun in the first 1-2 months after release exploring the GW2 world, but that was enough for that game. It has almost nothing that I loved about GW1 and that kept me playing for 5 years. I still check in from time to time to see if the declining revenue will ever get them to radically change the game’s direction like they did in 2008-2009. In the meantime I have found many of the things that I loved about GW1 in an aRPG format (admittedly not my first choice of format): Path of Exile.

nexxe.7081:

ESO is terrible. Believe me. That game will crash harder than Swtor did.

SWTOR had rising revenues over the past year. GW2 had declining revenues over the past year. Beware your comparisons.

Declining revenues at this point isn’t so much about less money from box sales as it is about the gem store not picking up the slack.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

edit: looked at the report.

Where are you getting 22.9M for GW2 sales? the report says 24.5M for GW2.

This is a decrease from 28.9M from last quarter, implying the game is losing players, or at least players who spend money.

22.9 million US dollars = 24.5 billion Korean won

GW2 sales trends (boxes and gems):

2012 Q3 = 45,841
2012 Q4 = 119,013 (+160%)
2013 Q1 = 36,382 (-69%)
2013 Q2 = 28,899 (-20%)
2013 Q3 = 24,481 (-15%)

It is not one bad quarter. It is a trend. Gem sales are small enough that overall sales results are still being driven largely by declining box sales. B2P works by giving people something to buy at regular intervals. That is how GW1 was a success. The overwhelming majority of GW2’s revenues to date have come from box sales. From a business perspective, why are they not making another box?

The Living Story is nothing new or innovative. It was done in GW1 to try to keep people around while GW2 was always “just around the corner” for years. However, the War in Kryta, Hearts of the North, Winds of Change, etc. content did not bring a bunch of new players to GW1; it was just an attempt to hold on to the ones that were still there waiting for GW2. It seems like this is the current strategy being taken in GW2 – not trying to make something spectacular that will bring in new growth, but rather an effort to just hold on to what they’ve already got. Even that only worked in GW1 because people were waiting expectantly for the GW2 release, but that is not the case now.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

the report only shows box game sales declining
q1 2013 – 36,382
q2 2013 – 28,899
q3 2013 – 24,481

the report does not say how the gem store sales are doing.

It is all sales for GW2. Note that they say that the Lineage sales numbers are down due to Lineage in-game item sales being carried over to Q4. We don’t know the breakdown of the numbers between GW2 game box sales and gem sales, but either gem sales are also declining or gem sales are so small that they are dwarfed by declining game box sales.

NCSoft Q3 quarterly earnings report was just released and GW2 revenues are down 15% from the previous quarter. We now know what was the impetus for the Collaborative Development stuff that appeared in early October. Is that going to make any difference? The numbers show that the Living Story content has not been enough to stop the continuing decline in sales – if anything, the decline has accelerated.

I think at this point the only thing that can turn it all around is a new box expansion. The longer they wait to do this, the more radical the expansion will need to be to get people back.

It’s called Guild Wars 2 because the multiple guilds you have joined fight with each other to get you to represent them.

Wolfheart.1938:

You pretty much covered all of it, except leveling alts.

Leveling is farming – making the numbers go up. Playing different professions for a while could fall into the fun novelty category though, sort of like profession exploration. It was fun to try out builds and eventually figure out which build I liked best to play for each profession.

Gizmo.9178:

Tasty Pudding.3764:

Gizmo.9178:

A good guild always comes up with fun and new things to do in the game.

Such as what? Or are you just saying to hang out with friends? “Do random stuff with friends” doesn’t really have anything to do with GW2.

Guilds totally have to do with GW2

Which isn’t the point. I’m trying to get ideas, not argue semantics. Do you have some suggestions of what to do, or is it really just hanging out with friends?

Gizmo.9178:

A good guild always comes up with fun and new things to do in the game.

Such as what? Or are you just saying to hang out with friends? “Do random stuff with friends” doesn’t really have anything to do with GW2.

I want to see if people can help me identify all the fun things to do in GW2 as opposed to things that are done just for farming. I’m tired of Skinner boxes; I want to be engaged and have fun. So far I have:

• Dungeons/FOTM (no speedclears, no exploits, no skipping)
• WvW (especially away from the zerg, ignoring the daily AP checklist)
• sPVP (for fun, ignoring the daily AP checklist)

Some things can be fun in small doses:

• Jumping puzzles (for fun, not chest running)
• Mini-games (for fun, not to make AP numbers go up)

And there are things that are fun once (or maybe a couple times) for the novelty factor:

• World exploration/completion
• Temple/dynamic events
• Personal story (try all branches)
• Instanced story portions of Living Story
• Mini-dungeons
• Jumping puzzles (as part of exploration)

I would really like to find some more fun things to do since I have long since finished the novelty ones and the main ones are starting to feel stale. Please help!

You’re doing it wrong, Ôòtårïðñ.

Answer: The time it takes to get to level 80 because that was what was originally promised for this game.

Draknar.5748:

Impossible to BiS gear 8 characters? Uhm, how is it impossible? Maybe it’s impossible for you to gear 8 characters in the ONE YEAR since the game’s release, but what do you really expect? That is one of the most ludicrous complaints I’ve ever heard on these forums.

Game sucks because I can’t gear all 8 of my characters in the first year of release. Sounds like its working as intended…

lol, oh the irony

The last quarterly report was for months 8-10 of GW2, not 1 year. Even with only 100k box sales per month at that point, that is still $15m in revenue which would only leave $11m for gem sales.

Robert says he was laid off and is collecting unemployment. You don’t get unemployment payments if you quit.

Arenanet quarterly sales (from ncsoft 2Q 2013 earnings release)

2Q 12 = 412
3Q 12 = 14,104
4Q 12 = 52,790
1Q 13 = 14,376
2Q 13 = 11,459
(unit: millions of Korean won which would be slightly less than thousands of US dollars)

I think a lot is riding on the release in China.

Wayfarer’s Reverie event – GW2 anniversary celebration (in GW1)

For completing the main quest for the event, you get your choice of:
1 – torment weapon (if you didn’t get one last year)
2 – Rytlock mini
3 – everlasting Rytlock tonic
4 – everlasting Rytlock summoning stone (one skill point per use)
5 – bag of a bunch of consumables

How does that compare to your GW2 birthday present? lol

99% of GW2 content is now as stale as GW1 content. With the announcement that no true expansion is currently in the works, GW2 is essentially as “dead” as GW1 as far as I’m concerned. Once I fully realized these two points, I went back to GW1 as my main game since I like it better; I even bought a new account – GW Trilogy and EotN – to get the full experience. I still play GW2 from time to time when I feel like doing something different. I now consider GW1 and GW2 to be siblings rather than predecessor and successor.

Set a hot key for “Targeting – Next Ally” and you can cycle through everything nearby even if you can’t click on it.

Anet has discovered the secret formula that Super Mario Brothers outsells WoW. Expect more platformer and less FRPG in the future I guess.

Perhaps Southsun is intended to be guild raid content?

+1 to fixing defiance.

I would rather not have to trust your version of jquery. I suggest using the googleapis version instead:

I would like to suggest making dungeon tokens tradable (not account bound). To make it so that acquisition of dungeon gear still represents completion of the specific dungeon, the player should only be able to talk with the dungeon vendor if they have completed the achievement that is gained for finishing all of the paths for that dungeon.

If a group of friends each wants different dungeon gear, it is currently much more efficient for them to split up and PUG the dungeons rather than play together. With this change, the friends don’t need to split up to get their gear in a reasonable amount of time. It would also be easier to get friends to join a dungeon run because the tokens would no longer be useless if they didn’t want that dungeon gear.

Devs are usually bad at their own games. That means that they don’t see things the same way as most players do.

Here’s a fire build posted by Darothm on a different forum:

“30/30/0/10/0 – Fire VI VII XII, Air III VI VIII, Water VI
Healing: Glyph of Elemental Harmony
Utilities: Glyph of Storms/Mist Form/I usually switch between Frostbow, Arcane Shield, or the Fire Signet
Gear: Full Berserkers with 6/6 Scholars and Fire Sigil’d Staff
Sit in Fire and spam 2/3 off cooldown while autoattacking, only switching to other attunements when a Mobs/Boss needs to be CC’d.
You should only be getting downed by agony attacks since staff is so safe. I’ve gotten up to Fractal 40 so far with this build.”

There are two reasons you stay in fire. First, fire 2 is the main DPS and you can’t get back into fire after switching by the time fire 2 is off CD. Second, water/air 2 may be better than fire 1, but you are going to be stuck with water/air 1 for a while which is much worse than fire 1. Once you decide that attunement switching isn’t the main focus, then not putting trait points in arcane also means more damage.

This game isn’t for me because it isn’t actually a sequel to Guild Wars.

I like everything about GW1. I have spent the last few days playing vanilla Prophecies and everything about it was just pointing out that I don’t like much of anything in GW2. I would be less critical if GW2 had been properly called World of Tyria since the Guild Wars lore is the only part of Guild Wars in it.

Vayne.8563:

First of all, you can only really compare Guild Wars 2 to Prophecies at launch. At this point in it’s development, Factions wasn’t out yet…

GW2 has been in development for 6 years. It was less than 5 years from the start of development on GW1 until the release of EotN.

Also, the developers haven’t had a brain wipe in between developing GW1 and GW2. If the things that made GW1 great are not in GW2, it is because they chose not to put them in, not because they haven’t thought of it yet on some hypothetical development timeline.

It’s an issue for both players and guilds. If it’s made a toggle for players, then it also need to be a toggle for guilds. Our guild wants to “turn off” members that aren’t repping. Right now the only thing a guild can do to get “not repping” off the guild roster is to kick people.

It would just be easier to make not-repping = offline in the guild roster. It would have no effect on the Contacts (friends) window, so people would always show up online there.