Guild Wars 2

Henry.5713:

People already complain about the high difficulty level of HoT content.

The thing that annoyed me when I started HoT was constantly getting downed while traveling through the zones. Pocket raptors, mushrooms, chak, rolling devils attacked you all the time. They were much more powerful than any other core Tyria enemies. When you tried to fight them solo and accidentally pulled some other enemies, you were pretty much dead.
I can imagine that many people felt like that, but with the time you got used to it, you knew where to go and how to survive (plus earned the elite specialization). Eventually, I liked the difficulty of HoT to an extent and the old content often felt dull compared to it.

However, they added a lot of power/strength to the HoT enemies. The described smarter enemies should not be more powerful but react to your skills and attacks. That would make the combat more challenging as you don’t always hit them, but on the other hand the enemies are not dealing more damage (like the HoT foes did).

Talking about PvE enemies, most of them are just standing in front of you no matter what you do. Attack them with ‘Hundred Blades’ and they will just take every single strike instead of dodging away and cover until you finished. Start a ‘Meteor Shower’ and they will just stay inside of the AOE field and wait for meteors instead of evading.

Looking at the newest release, the Sons of Svanir in Bitterfrost Frontier can now one-hit you with a special attack but they’re not evading either. Instead adding power every new release they should get the ability to be smarter and step aside.

Let’s focus on the general aspect of AI here, of course some enemies will be smarter than others related to the lore. But this is more about the technical challenges. Would it be possible to see smarter enemies in future releases?

IndigoSundown.5419:

1. MMO’s essentially consist of lists of things to do
2. Many of the things to do in MMO’s take time
3. MMO business models depend on players playing the game over extended periods of time
4. 2 and 3 are related
5. Meanwhile, a significant portion of the MMO player base have an expectation of immediate (or short-term) gratification
6. 3 and 5 are often in conflict; it’s against ANet’s business interests to give players anything they might possibly want with little time investment
7. So, such complaints are likely to fall on deaf ears

Farming gold is not a good way to keep your players playing for a long time, as for many it will be too grindy and repetitive and they’ll just stop doing it.

Achievements should contain challenges, tie them to bosses and events and storylines, they should let you actually play the game instead of forcing you to mindlessly farm gold.

The Cultural Attaché achievement (Aurene) consisted of running to different merchants to buy souvenirs for gold and karma. A different approach would be: Do these events/kill specific bosses in Kryta to help the humans and get the first souvenir as reward. Do those events in the Shiverpeaks and get the Norn souvenir as reward,…

That way, the achievement actually involved the player, showing him the different cultures he’s collecting souvenirs from instead of just letting him farm gold and buy it.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/an-interview-with-queen-jennah/

But they continued with an asura and its moa.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

tl;dr if you don’t like Momo et al, don’t read the story and rest assured that it’s not slowing down the release of anything that interests you more.

Except for the fact that we didn’t hear anything from Auris Weirdbringer for 2 months. Instead of working on a completely unrelated story line about a moa, we could actually hear where he comes from, who he is and how his studies about the rifts progress.

We can now place bets if we will ever get background information on his character in the context of the current events or if there’s just no time to go deeper into that story line and he stays a generic Charr with a special name.

Provide some background stories to the White Mantle and the bandits, as the Living World episodes showed that they won’t go too much into detail in general. Talk about the population of Kryta being upset since Caudecus brought up the Charr-Human conflict with the posters we eventually removed. Riots against Queen Jennah and the treaty?
There are really places we could need three pages a month in the main story.

ShinjoNaomi.1896:

-rolls eyes-
I don’t know how many people might be working on the short story… But I’d hazard a guess it’s one person in their free time…

Of course everyone can decide what he wants to do in their free time. But we don’t know when they’re actually working on it.

drunkenpilot.9837:

It’s a fun little side story about a character exploring Tyria. They aren’t heavily investing development time into this. This is not detracting from work that is actively progressing.

Can you be sure of that? How?

ShinjoNaomi.1896:

In fact… hey, let’s make the argument that the devs and anyone else working on this game should be just shackled to their desks and flogged for even /thinking/ about anything even remotely like Tyrian Travels…

You may have heard of the scrapped story parts of HoT? And the plot holes that existed for years? Some devs (of the story department) left the team and 70 devs were assigned to work on the expansion. Maybe… just maybe it would be helpful to focus on the main thing in the current situation.

drunkenpilot.9837:

We just got a new map, like, a week ago. Put down the pitchforks. Yowza.

Yup, I can’t believe how story driven the last episode is. Killing endless oozes, farming ingridients, killing endless mobs in a cave and oh wait the ending really did contain a small part of the story.

The “current events” were usually released every 2 weeks. The last one was added 2 months ago.

Do we know how many devs are part of this project and when they are working on it?

My post started off with “If it’s really actively written by the devs in their working time (?),” as a question. You assumed they’re working on it in their free time? Do we have any information on that?

Everyone expected Vermignus, the giant fire worm in Ember Bay to be a new world boss as we saw it in the trailer.

They decided to let a golem fight against it.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Why would anyone be upset? It’s all part of the Tyrian universe, and thus promotes the game.

If it’s really actively written by the devs in their working time (?), I can understand the people who disagree with this project. The idea of writing the story together with fans is fine, but I thought it’s just part of the MomoCon.

Example: Notes from Rata Novus created the necessary bridge between the plot of HoT and the current Living World season. It provided some background information about Taimi’s research and the arrival of other asura in Rata Novus we could then see in the Living World episodes. It’s been part of the main story.

There are tons of places where we would welcome some additional background information in the story. If not scrapped HoT story lines, then just consider the current events, adding some deeper level to Auris Weirdbringer and his theories about the rifts we experienced. Don’t let him just be a generic NPC that just handed us the rift stabilizer. Give him a background, let him speculate on the events and make us curious about the next step. With all of those possibilities mind, I can’t understand how they decided to create another completely independent story line that has no reference to the actual story.

ShinjoNaomi.1896:

Because people like getting upset at stupid, inconsequential things…

Seriously though, if someone is going to get mad at a Dev writing an 1,100 word chapter in a (very) short story every once in a while, then frankly, they are just looking for things to get upset about…

I’ll just remind you of the argumentation of the whole GW2 forum: New playable races? There are more important things the devs have to focus on and it doesn’t really add anything to the game. New weapon types? See above.

How can they start a completely unrelated story line of an asura and its cute moa if there’s so much left to write about contributing to the main story of the game? Everything is justified with priorities, we can’t have that because other things are more important. How did Tyrian Travels become more important than the main story?

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Thus, one would assume written by Leah Hoyer and Ross Beeley (and probably the whole Narrative Team).

Leah Hoyer seems to have left Arenanet, posted on Twitter, September 23.

I always understood that the devs started the MomoCon story project together with some fans, creating the characters (asura and moa). But who continued it remained a secret… If those side stories are really actively written by GW2 devs, many people will be upset. The team is already split up between the expansion and Living World so it would be questionable to go even further and assign them to another side project.

I think (and hope) that these side stories are written by fans, but it would surely be great to have clarification of someone who is involved.

Diovid.9506:

It’s just a fun little story, probably written in some off-time of a dev.

Danikat.8537:

It’s basically fan fiction written by someone at Arenanet

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Then, the Devs said they would write a story using said characters.

It would be really helpful to finally know who’s actually writing these stories. As the people on reddit claim otherwise:

You think a developer is writing these lol?

Who is ‘we’ in the following text?

In September, we sent out a casting call to the community on the official Guild Wars 2 Tumblr asking players to submit profiles of their own characters. In this and future chapters, we’ll be selecting real player characters as needed to play minor roles in the story. We’d like to thank everyone for the incredible response we received!

The last current event (Burden of choice) was released October 4.
Since ‘A Crack in the Ice’ didn’t continue the story line, it’s been 2 months without update on the events.

I’m aware of Halloween and Thanksgiving but Wintersday will be there soon. Will we get an update next week?

Shwyx.8190:

What happened to “you can have fun instead of having to prepare to have fun first”?

They already implemented ascended gear afterwards, in order to do higher tier fractals you’ll need to grind to get your armor and infusions first because of agony resistance.
In GW1 you just had to do one part of a story mission to infuse your armor.

And I can’t stand the endless collections in GW2: You almost completed one, but you have to complete another one first which requires another one to progress.

With HoT and the new Living World maps, you’ll see more of the x locks y locks z:
In order to get to a point of interest in the newest map, you’ll have to get an elixir which requires you to farm ingredients. These ingridients do only drop if your character did the story (even if another character already did it).

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I had trouble adjusting at first. Heck, when I heard about the first five skills being determined by weapon choice, I considered skipping GW2 — it sounded awful.

After playing with the system for a few weeks, I couldn’t imagine going back to GW1’s.

How did that work? How can determined weapon skills be better than letting you choose whatever skills you like?

Just a flesh wound.3589:

You’re very free and easy with other people’s money and time.

In real life business have income and expenses. They have a budget and can’t just hire new devs as they wish. Each dev already has a full plate of projects. Which means that in order for a dev to do one thing something else can’t be done. This means they have to prioritize. If a project is too much work for too little gain then it’s not going to be done.

And there are things the company needs to do in order to provide a decent product and keep the people playing. If you can’t even sit in the GW2 mmoRPG, as well as interact with other players or have enough emotes, your roleplay community will switch to another game.

If you don’t have enough build diversity or a good balance among the classes, players who care about the combat and competitive aspects will switch to another game. And so on.

Each time they don’t care about a thing people will notice that and remember it.

The workarounds described in the other thread provided easy solutions without having much work.

maddoctor.2738:

So a “forum developer” says it’s easy, while an actual developer says it’s too much work. I would go with what the actual developers say over some random forum poster with zero knowledge.

The suggested solutions are workarounds Anet might not have thought of. They’re certainly not perfect either, but better than having nothing at all. Adding an emote is surely not too much work.

Too much work? Here’s another thread:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/Please-give-us-chairs-to-actually-sit-on

1. Add a new emote /sitchair

Actually… i remember City of Heroes had a sitchair emote (s), where would put your character on said position. That way you wont have to redo all chairs. Sure, depending the chair you’ll have characters feet clipping through the floor… but I’d prefer that over nothing.

2. More work, but earn money with it. I found the suggestion funny:

Animation where you pull out your own chair.
Make it scale to character size.
Add new chairs to gemstore like mail birds.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

It’s easy for some forum person to say, ‘oh, just hire new devs’ but did you see the last quarterly report? It wasn’t exactly overflowing with money for these new devs.

It’s not like there were better quarters, too…

You could assume that people who played the game for years noticed that nothing will change, no suggestion will be implemented and parts of the game have been scrapped because of their internal problems. Consider that this is a reason for people to leave the game and think of the low quarters again.

However, they recently added a tamagotchi instance with a new minigame where we can play fetch with our cute baby dragon and feed it. Seems like they do have the resources for things like that…

Just a flesh wound.3589:

So, essentially you’re asking for ANet to take devs off of making new Living story episodes, new maps, off of the next expansion and all of their other current projects and move these devs to making marriage related dialog for untold numbers of NPCs that someone might want to marry.

Considering to hire new devs would be a new point of view in the overall argumentation of this forum. Honestly, how many times did we hear that now, no matter on which topic. Not directly related to this thread: Over the years there were some great suggestions made by players, but we ended up with nothing because everything would take away devs from more important things. It’s not a decision of either getting Living World episodes, new maps and an expansion or player’s suggestions.

Anakita Snakecharm.4360:

I think this sort of mechanic tends to work better in single player RPGs than MMOs.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

And that’s why people invented role play.

Somehow GW2 doesn’t really provide roleplay elements in general. We’re just a homeless character being dragged along by the story of fighting dragons. We don’t have choices in the story (apart from the small things in the personal story): We can’t decide if we sneak into a place and infiltrate the White Mantle or just hack n slash our way in. Compares to other MMORPGs, the amount of player and environment interaction plus emotes are ridiculous. We can’t even sit on a chair as someone else just posted in a new thread.
So I don’t consider GW2 to be a mmoRPG, but just an MMO game instead.

Interacting with furniture? In GW2?

Wait for the obligatory “there are more important things” and “they don’t have enough resources, I’d rather have the devs focus on other things” posts in 3… 2… 1…

Edit: Oh, I forgot the most common one: “It’s not really adding anything to the game, so it’s not worth the time and money” coming along with “Did you already work with their enginge? You have no idea how hard it is to implement”

BrotherBelial.3094:

You don’t know history do you.

And you don’t seem to know how to read as I pointed out twice that I’m not talking about the position of the gladiators but the fact that there was an audience, being entertained by the fights.

You claim that it’s just an ego thing of the duelers and everyone else would be annoyed to see them fight. But you ignored the people who find it entertaining to watch.

I actually meant to say that the audience has been entertained by the fights. So in GW2 there might as well be people who watch players fighting in a duel.

BrotherBelial.3094:

maddoctor.2738:

Someone mentioned it earlier, asking for duels everywhere as attention seekers, asking for duels in many places so you can have an audience. The audience and the attention is what matters or the act of dueling?

I think that last line is the real reason. But no one would admit that.

Both of you are claiming that it’s a bad thing to ask for an audience. Did you ever think of gladiator fights in amphitheaters (Ancient Rome)?

While I’m pretty neutral to duels in PvE, I wouldn’t have a problem with seeing them as they can be interesting for both sides, the fighting players and spectators.

So I’m sure it is wrong to call people attention seekers if some like to fight in the presence of an audience.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

One player’s “plot hole” is another player’s lever for speculation. I know some of these gaps have been around for 4 years, but honestly, I prefer that we aren’t told everything and that we’re allowed to guess about what’s going on. Perhaps our imaginations produce better stories than what ANet could deliver is the short narrative time they have during Living World.

[…]

tl;dr I’m happy with the status quo of ANet leaving holes in the backgrounds and futures of key figures.

Each to their own I guess. There are places where you can leave a story open as a dramatic device. The plot holes of GW2 are definitely not like that.

tl;dr It’s the job of the story department of Anet to write a good story. It’s not the players who should find an explanation to their plot holes.

Einlanzer.1627:

Every new map is phenomenal both in event mechanics and aesthetic beauty. It actually kind of amazes me that people aren’t coming back in droves.

The events and bosses in Ember Bay are simply boring just like the Bitterfrost Frontier “meta” event and champions. Since you just started the third season, did you already try out every map? The maps of the third seasons were designed to please people who complained about fixed timers of meta events in HoT and the overall difficulty.
On the other hand, people who liked larger events and the difficulty of HoT are disappointed of the new maps. It’s always personal preference.

OriOri.8724:

Well tbf the Mursaat tablets seem to imply that they went head on with Zhaitan, whereas the Pact took a much more thought out approach of cutting off his armies, starving the dragon itself and then blinding it (taking out the mouth and eyes) before fighting Zhaitan. Overall its much easier to fight anything if you starve and partially blind it first, especially if you can take away its source of renewing its armies.

Vayne.8563:

Not to mention Dr. Gor worked on a very specific anti dragon magic energy ray the he tested on minions of Zhaitan.

After we weaked the dragon by starving it of it’s food, took away part of it’s ability to make more undead, and partially blinded it. Zhaitan was hurt by a fleet of ships before we finished killing it.

Yup, we had a strategy. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re able to kill them at all . In my opinion the difference lies in defeating them completely.
Even if we let Zhaitan starve and blinded him, the anti-dragon-magic-energy-thingy shouldn’t be able to kill an Elder Dragon. It may weaken him or put him to sleep for another hundreds of years. The fact that we killed 2 Elder Dragons extremely fast and we’re about to defeat the other ones in the near future makes all of the past lore look ridiculous. They’ve always been a part of Tyria. They were able to push complete races away from their homes and take control over Tyria. In the end of GW1: EotN we were just able to kill a champion of Primordus, the Great Destroyer.

Now we’re killing tons of those champions as a routine every hour, how many Claws of Jormags did we already defeat, how many Shatterers? And after the personal story and HoT, killing Elder Dragons is now routine. It’s just ridiculous how easy it is after everything we heard about them.

Vayne.8563:

However, I’m highly entertained that there are people in this thread that would have been find having a boss fight and killing Zhaitan with their tiny swords, where as a giant airship with five giant anti-dragon magic guns are apparently not enough to do it.

It’s understandable that players want to see an actual fight. We are clearly talking about the gameplay here. If you’re fighting them with a real army, gathering all of the races of Tyria to fight together, each of them contributing their strengths (asuran technology, charr artillery and warriors, etc.) it will feel much, much more legendary and epic than pressing “F” out of harm’s way. The anti-dragon-magic-cannon would be a small part within a large battlefield. We want to see how tiny we are individually compared to an Elder Dragon but yet huge as an army.

As I said, I would be happy if we weren’t able to defeat them at all, but as it is right now, I’d like to see an actual battle instead of Taimi pressing a button and sending the message “Jormag is defeated” through the communicator. Great interactive storytelling…

If they stick to Taimi’s plan to neutralize either Primordus or Jormag (or both) without fighting against them, I’ll give up on the story of GW2.

As you said it’s been ridiculous how we defeated Zhaitan. An Elder Dragon! Shooting him with a magical laser cannon by pressing F while other ancient, powerful races tried to fight him hundreds of years ago and failed.

Here’s what the Mursaat tablets in Ember Bay said:

We Mursaat and the Forgotten forged armies of powerful constructs to destroy the dragons.

We assaulted Zhaitan with our army of jade constructs and enchanted armors. We failed, and many Mursaat and Forgotten died.

I can’t believe that we defeated him as if it was nothing.

The best thing that could have happened to GW2’s story is that we accepted we couldn’t defeat them, that they’re too powerful, that they’re an irreplaceable part of Tyria and all that we can do is put them to sleep again. There are enemies you simply can’t defeat, no matter how smart your asuran technology is.

If you play through the third episode, you’ll get some information referring to Caudecus.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Then, it would be disingenuous to state that the only was to obtain keys is to purchase them.

Again, key-farming is a thing that players can participate in.

P2W: When you are paying for advantage which normal players don’t have access to unless they either pay too or will have to grind very long (weeks and months).

In BDO you can also grind and farm months to get to the same level as people who payed. Yet, the players didn’t take it and left the game.

Now here’s the patchnote referring to the item:

The Bitterfrost Vantage Point item has been added as an uncommon drop for the duration of this seasonal change.

The drop is also time limited. I can’t take my time, do a map completion now and then, because the drop will disappear again. It’s now or never.

@drunkenpilot: As some players mentioned in the first 10 posts, this isn’t purely about the single vantage point in Bitterfrost Frontier. You have to understand that it can set the first step for more pay2play areas to come. In 4 years, this is the first time we’ve ever seen a non-convenience area being locked behind RNG gambling. We’ve seen so many games that went downhill because of financial conflicts (paying systems). Now add the fact that the last two quarters of GW2 have had the lowest earnings ever. Let’s hope that GW2 won’t take the same way. I contributed my concerns to the feedback thread of the episode and hope that they will think about it.

Plus, as I’m playing to explore Tyria, I’ll always know that there’s one point I’ll never see. Do you really consider watching a youtube video as a solution?

@Inculpatus cedo
They do drop from map completions, yes. But you’ll get way more transmutations charges compared to keys. How many maps do you have to complete in order to get the right amount of keys? How many characters do you have to get through the personal story? In the end, you might have put endless hours into it and end up with no item at all, because it’s completely random.

Telemin.7380:

If you could only buy black lion keys with real cash, I would see/have a problem.

As long you are still able to obtain them with gold, I do not.

I am all for gold sinks.

There are different views of p2w and similar terms, here’s one of them:
When you are paying for advantage which normal players don’t have access to unless they either pay too or will have to grind very long (weeks and months).

As far as I know, BDO had a huge kittenstorm and many players leaving because of that. You can either pay money or grind for a long, long time to get to the same things as those who paid.

Who knows how much keys I need to buy in order to get the item? It’s random. You can buy 25 keys for 2100 gems. Do you know how long I had to farm and grind for that?

EphemeralWallaby.7643:

There are plenty of places across Tyria that other players will never see for many reasons. I think you mean that it’s a place that some players won’t potentially see due to BLC RNG, is that correct? One reason is as good as any another why someone might not see something.

Reasons… like? Everyone who bought HoT has access to every map in GW2. No one is left out on anything, you’re able to explore everything. But you don’t have access to the vantage point unless you bought keys. That’s the difference.

EphemeralWallaby.7643:

And, just to split hairs a bit, you’re not locked out of it if you don’t have the item… I’ve seen nothing that states you can’t use the Teleport to a Friend item to get up there. If I’m wrong on that, please point me to that info, and I’ll strike out this part.

If it worked, your access to the mountain depends on another player who bought keys. You can’t go there anytime. A time gated, random chance to explore a place is not a solution. Plus, you can’t even buy Teleports to a Friend. They’re also part of Black Lion Chests or birthday gifts.

EphemeralWallaby.7643:

RNG exists throughout GW2, whether it be via BLC or mob drops. RNG is a staple function within MMOs and most other games in existence… whether it be computer generated , a roll of the dice, or a shuffle of the cards. Every time you kill a mob, you’re gambling even if you’re not thinking about it. RNG isn’t shady.

But it never prevented you from getting to a certain place in Tyria.

EphemeralWallaby.7643:

How should BLC’s function? What kinds of rewards should they give that would encourage someone to farm or buy keys? Do you feel all items in the BLCs should be obtainable by other means?

The Black Lion Chests were updated recently. They do contain the chance of random wardrobe unlocks now. It’s been a reason why people started to buy keys again. Starting to lock areas after the game survived 4 years without it is surely not the only solution they have.

EphemeralWallaby.7643:

And again, I don’t share your perspective. It’s not locking part of a map.

Could you please take an objective look at it? It’s not about perspective, these are facts: The player who bought keys and obtained the item will be spawned in a beautifully designed place in the mountains of Bitterfrost Frontier other players will never ever see. So they did exactly lock a part of the map.

Plus, the only way you can get access to it is gambling. Tell me more about how this isn’t shady.

Goatjugsoup.8637:

Meh, misleading topic title. What content are you missing out on exactly?

An explorable area in Bitterfrost Frontier. It’s subjective if you want to see it or not, but players have to buy keys to get access to it. Some of them use it as a third waypoint in the map.

EphemeralWallaby.7643:

Sorry, I don’t share your concerns or perspective.

I think it’s a neat bonus thing to get out of a BLC, and keys are obtainable to any player w/o having to spend cash. And, if cash is spent, it’d be closer to a P2L than a P2W since it deprives you of mobs and drops. Speedier travel (in this case by gliding from a super-high ledge) is never P2W.

People clamor about how BLCs aren’t worth the effort or money to obtain keys… well, this is a step towards making it worth it… and again, it’s a non-P2W step, which is the kind of step I want to see.

~EW

Gliding above the enemies grants you an easier way to navigate through the map. You can also see it as an additional waypoint. Furthermore, the maps of the Living World belong to HoT. We paid for our expansion, so we surely won’t pay again in order to experience 100% of the maps.

You do know that if people agree on this they will go further and lock larger areas each time? You can see the concerns of the people in this thread. Black Lion Chests are gambling and are therefore not meant to lock maps. I think ArcheAge has been accused to be P2W because they started to put more and more into RNG boxes. Do you want GW2 to be like that?

Serophous.9085:

Ehhh….seems more on par with the airship ticket to me.

The airship ticket is a convenience area you can buy with gems.

The Bitterfrost Vantage Point is part of a Living World map, and you have to gamble, pay for keys to get access to it.

Serophous.9085:

Convient, but not needed

You could say that about every single vista in GW2. They are beautiful places in Tyria, but not needed. Would you like to pay for each of them?

Felahr.9830:

the special place being a ledge and a tree is pretty stupid though. whats the point?

If you read through the thread you should have seen this:

It could be a “slippery slope” kind of thing. Today its just a ledge and a tree. A year and several examples later, its half a map locked away in a BL chest.

It’s not ok to lock parts of a map behind RNG, forcing you to buy enough keys to get the item, to be able to explore the complete map. Their way to earn money always consisted of cosmetic and convenience items. And it should stay like that.

Being impressive is subjective.
It’s a part of the new map and you’ll have to buy keys to get a chance (RNG!) of getting access to it. That’s a shady move.

They could have sold it for map currency like the portal scroll. Right now, it’s a pay2play part.

In the recent patch they added an uncommon drop to the Black Lion Chests, giving access to a beautiful place in the new map Bitterfrost Frontier:

Here’s what it looks like

Anyone who likes to explore is now suggested to buy keys to get to a certain point of the map. It’s not a convenience area (like Lava Lounge), so it really grinds my gears that it’s locked behind $ RNG $ in Black Lion Chests. Explorable areas should be available to everyone without having to pay money!

Does anyone know if there’s an alternative way to get there?

cptaylor.2670:

Anyone else find Rox’s talk about picturing a beach when she was frozen in the ice kind of strange or out of place? Like they drew quite a bit of attention at that moment to her experience of being frozen.

Could this be a subtle hint at either future locations or somekind of wonky Mordremoth-mind meets Steve foreshadowing? I’m probably reading a lot into it but it just seemed out of place to me…

#CrystalDesertConfirmed – there has been a leaked picture of the Amnoon Oasis. But I don’t think it had any meaning to it, probably just smalltalk things of Rox.

Arden.7480:

Things I noticed in Epizode 3:
1) in Far Shiverpeaks we just found one icebrood corrupted by magic of another dragon.

Right, seems like Jormag didn’t absorb as much magic of Zhaitan and Mordremoth as Primordus. So Jormag could really be weaker than Primordus.

Arden.7480:

2) About Characters, who were in chapters:
The Commander- after this big argument with Braham, everything starts to getting worst. The friends, in which the Commander could rely on, start to be our enemies- Marjory didnt listen to the Commander, Braham wants go his way and he doesnt care about the consequences. We have 2 dragons and we should be united against them, but we are not.

If it continues like that, the story will finally feel alive! It shows that the NPC’s are also human/norn with feelings, making emotional (wrong) decisions at all! If everyone takes orders from us and nothing goes wrong, the story will be boring. So I want them to make wrong decisions, I want to see plot twists, I want us to finally lose a battle!

Arden.7480:

Braham- an annoying Norn with a vengeance.

Although his reasons are meh, I really really hope that he will take the way of a Norn and proudly start the fight against Jormag. Otherwise Taimi’s theory to ‘neutralize’ the dragons without a real fight will happen and we’ll see the most boring end of an Elder Dragon since Zhaitan.

I really liked Braham’s reaction, questioning if the commander is the only person allowed to fight against the dragons. With Braham and Marjory doing their own things, the commander is eventually not the almighty storyteller he used to be.

Sol.6213:

I did enjoy the Aurene content. Some cute every once in a while is fine with me!

Personally, I don’t like all the cutesy stuff in the story and don’t want to see more of it in the upcoming episodes. The Aurene part today felt especially forced and artificial: having her playing hide and seek, stomping on the floor while laughing and ’don’t ya eat that fishy, Aurene!’ and the like has been too much. I know that she’s still a young dragon, but she should at least have some influence or instinct of Glint. Right now, she just wants to play fetch with us.

The shiny Skritt stuff in Ember Bay doesn’t even remotely fit the atmosphere or lore of the Fire Islands, where only the toughest and strongest creatures should survive.
Seeing Quaggans as sensitive, cute creatures in the dangerous new map is exactly the same.

I hope that they’ll stick to the actual lore of GW1 again, adding dangerous creatures like Hydras to the Fire Islands instead of Skritt. It feels like they replaced all the mystical stuff of GW1 with cute, funny stuff .

The first part with Aurene has been a little tedious, too much dialogue and explanation for self-explanatory tasks.

I didn’t like the endless ‘gather things for the grawl, gather things for the elixir, get 4 times x, 4 times y and 4 times z’ part, it felt like generic fetch quests from any other MMORPG.

The endless static trashmob fights within the instances have been pretty annoying:

• First wave of Svanir, wait. Second wave, wait. Third, wait. Fourth.
• Walk a few steps.
• First wave of wolves, wait. Second wave, wait. Third, wait. Fourth.
• Walk a few steps.
• First wave of spiders, wait. Second wave, wait. Third, wait. Fourth.

These breaks really interrupted the overall flow of the story.

I liked Braham’s changing character and hope that he will do it his way rather than constantly take orders from us.

Arden.7480:

I cannot agree with theory, that will be the battle of two dragons, because:
1) they are too far
2) even if they could meet, the whole Tyria would be destroy. And we want avoid this.

A giant battle in Tyria would be amazing! Just imagine how cool it would be experiencing Primordus vs. Jormag. And if Tyria is getting too dangerous, we’ll set off to Elona or Cantha! In the end, we can go back and defeat the winner. If everything’s destroyed, we can start to build a new civilization in Tyria. That would be a massive Living World chapter.

Sykper.6583:

Going to make this clear yet again.

The raid story is not relevant to the main story.
The raid story is not required to understand the main story.

Stating that you are missing out on critical lore by not doing the raid encounters, which are irrelevant to lore purposes, is disingenuous at best. If Forsaken Thicket never existed and everything else was still exactly the same, even the notes you pick up in Bloodstone Fen with the references intact, it does not impact the main story whatsoever.

Stop using Lore as your scapegoat.

I quoted Bobby Stein’s statement: Raids are not part of our Living World episodes; they are separate game elements.
The fact that they contain lore related to the White Mantle (+ bandits) shows that they are part of the Living World and not a separate game element.

It doesn’t matter how much it is, raiders experienced more lore than non raiders.

You just picked my post apart, split my statements mid-sentence and changed their meaning. Great way to turn down an opposed point of view.

The problems I mentioned do exist. If you’re just closing your eyes, I won’t be able to explain it to you. And honestly, your post is nowhere near a constructive discussion, with statements like:

Nobody is excluded. You exclude yourself from raiding if you don’t want to.

The shard thing is a problem, I agree but you can play Escort (Raid wing 3 – first encounter) which is more an event than a raid encounter, and open the mastery for ya to obtain shards again!

If you are not willing to you could also buy a raid kill from an offering guild. Prices are not that huge nowadays.

The sidestory doesn’t give an valuable information to the main story.

• Suggesting to buy raids in order to solve a problem provided by Anet?
• Stating that no one is excluded from the hardest game mode, in the most casual MMORPG nowadays?
• Telling non raiders to do the first encounter of raid wing 3 in order to unlock masterys – knowing that you already need those masteries to do it?
• ignoring legendary armor completely

I’m sorry but that’s not helpful.

It is true that with raids they made some of their worst decisions for every non-raider:

1. Release with HoT and resources Dungeons were scrapped and the last fractals were released in November 2013. So what did they do? They released raids instead.
It took them almost 3 years (July 2016) to release a single new fractal. Don’t you think that the manpower of the raid team could have been needed in the fractal team instead?
We always hear Anet doesn’t have enough resources for that. We won’t get new weapon types, new playable races, new dungeons because they don’t have enough resources. Yet, they decided to provide a raid team for a game mode that currently appeals solely to a small percentage of players.

2. The split and exclusion of the community: With the whole attitude even the devs now showed, they stay to the exclusion of 95% of their playerbase.

No matter what caused the financial reports of the last 2 quarters, if you’re in Anet’s situation, you’re not in the right position to exclude the majority of your players from anything right now.

• They are excluded from obligatory mastery tracks, needed to get xp (and spirit shards) in HoT and LW3 areas. If you want to get xp again, you have to raid. Can you imagine how frustrating it is to do events and the living story, getting 50.000xp but they’re just gone? Your xp bar will forever stay at 0/0, no matter if you’re in Verdant Brink, Ember Bay or the new ice map, that has nothing to do with the Maguuma masteries.

• They are excluded from legendary armor. A project that would keep players busy for hundreds of hours. But if you’re sure you don’t have the time or the skills or the people to raid, you’ll just log out when you finished your daily routine. Maybe you’ll even take a break for months until the next episode of the Living world is released. That won’t increase the finances of Anet.

• Bobby Stein stated that Raids are not part of our Living World episodes; they are separate game elements.
  They broke that promise with the third raid wing, being the introduction to Bloodstone Fen. Non-raiders missed the plans of the White Mantle to revive Lazarus. They got to Bloodstone Fen and wooosh Lazarus appeared out of nowhere. Great job of providing raids as a separate game element that are not part of the Living World episodes.

All of those problems could be easily solved if they opened raids for everyone.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

tl;dr ANet changed its mind about what the game needed. GW2 Raids aren’t done the same as in other games, so there’s no contradiction (implied or direct) between what I’ve said and the game.

Seeing the devs constantly changing their minds, they might as well open raids for the other 90 – 95% of players.

In general: GW2 has been different in the beginning, but soon Anet decided to appeal to players of other games (adding gear related progression, raids). Loyal GW2 players however left the game. Their focus on raids for an exclusive, small minority of players made others leave the game.

It’s not only that HoT didn’t provide a single dungeon or fractal but raids instead. They also decided to lock legendary armor and even mastery tracks and xp gain behind raids. GW2, known as the most casual MMORPG ever, refuses to open up this huge amount of content for the majority of players.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Clearly ANet has evolved their thinking about what works best for the long-term success of the company and the long-term enjoyment of the community

Makes me wonder about the financial reports of the last two quarters and hundreds of pages of dissatisfied players related to raids.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Plus, one of the things that sets GW2 apart is that it doesn’t try to do what everyone else does simply because everyone else does it.

So please tell me why they implemented raids at all? GW2 never meant to have raids but to provide challenging dungeons (later fractals) instead. They wanted to do it their way. With the implementation of raids, they did exactly the opposite of your statement.

Oh wow thank you for reminding me, I already forgot about the painting! Hope that we’ll see something White Mantle related there!