Guild Wars 2

Have to agree with the sentiment that it will be mostly worthless afterwards. I am looking forward to getting an actual zerker set for my warrior once it is changed over. But since the replacement sets will be something that hasn’t been seen before, we may very well get something really neat. I’m hoping explorer’s gets either vitality or condition damage myself. So who knows, maybe we’ll get something really awesome.

I think it’s not in there due to how it was used in GW1 to help people get certain PvP titles. They would roll, losing team would forfeit, winning got a quick point towards the title. Since the only functional use it added to the game was something they didn’t like, I can see why they didn’t put it in there. Doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be though.

I like this, maybe I’d actually have a mini out if I had this.

Pretty sure they didn’t do it before because nobody used it in GW1 despite having the option. Of course, that’s mostly because weapon dying in GW1 was pretty lousy. I think they could do it way better and it would go a long way to improving the ability to customize characters.

Viking Jorun.5413:

inazuma.7021:

Viking Jorun.5413:

Elric.6971:

Also, the ability to fight one of the dragons in a giant golem.

Fixed that for you.

Can the golem be named Gipsy Danger?

GPC-DNGR, to fit Asura technology theming.

If this doesn’t happen, I would be wondering if I stepped into an alternate universe where GW games aren’t laden with pop culture references people will forget the source of a year later.

I was actually kinda hoping there would be a dungeon to explore one day in the bottom of that mysterious hole…

I for one would love to have some follow up quests to the various characters in my personal story, especially the early ones that hang around my home district. Maybe some additional stuff for my order as well. The home area story arcs were my favorite in the game because they had a lot of personality and really felt like my character was involved and not just a casual observer or passerby. The events really make the world feel more alive, but they ultimately are just part of the scenery. Some multiple zone spanning stories about these people who were a major part of our storyline would be awesome, and many of these characters deserve an epilogue, if not some sort of prologue. I’d like to know how my old krewes and warbands are doing!

I think it would be a good idea to point out that the daily achievements system isn’t really meant to be the equivalent of daily quests a la WoW. That’s more the bonus chests from world bosses (which is more directly built on the quest-equivalent events in GW2). The daily achievement is closer to the Rest Bonus (if my terminology isn’t perfect, forgive me, My WoW knowledge is second hand) as discussed by Extra Credits here which is in this case a form of Anti-poopsocking which you could say is trying to promote regular play over continual play.

People are right, it comes down to implementation, and I think the initial implementation was better than the current one. Initially, they were all generic and sized so that you could manage to get them by wandering through most zones in the course of an hour or two, as a player would be likely to do. The prizes for completing them were good, but nothing that couldn’t be counted as a bonus; even mystic coins could be bought for a reasonable price on the TP.

With the changes to it that introduced laurels and ascended pendants, it became a requirement, since to have the maximum stats (and maximum stats are mentally a requirement due to people’s desires for efficiency and effectiveness) these ascended items became necessary. Since this corresponded to the multiple achievements that include specific regions, it became mentally required to fulfill the daily achievement or permanently fall behind the time gated content.

And you can’t say we aren’t being forced to do them. We aren’t forced to do anything in the real world either if you don’t count the complex systems of reward and punishment that exists for our actions. You can not file taxes, but then you miss out on the money you would get on your return, and risk far more severe penalties for not doing so. You can not do dailies, but then you don’t get your laurels and therefore will be stuck permanently without the maximum stats or other bonuses that can’t be received elsewhere.

The intention of the change was good, since it was trying to coerce people into spreading out into the rest of the game, since that whole “everything is endgame” idea didn’t pan out too well and everybody just gathered in cursed shore where their efforts would be maximized.

The easiest solution to the problem would be to just add alternative ways to getting the pendants and the special infusions that would make the laurels not a requirement. I don’t see it as likely though, since the current trend in the game is to add progressively more time gated stuff.

Interesting thoughts, all and all. I would like the ability to replace the elite with a regular utility since the elite’s enormous recharge tends to make them awesome but impractical. As far as the recharge time stuff and their balance, I would be reluctant to make that claim. Locking skills down when entering a dungeon could be good, but since traits will make many skill choices sub optimal, I have a feeling most people aren’t switching them up as much as that. But making people commit in an instance might not be a bad thing.

The Radiant armor is by far my favorite armor set by far, despite it being incomplete set. I hold out hope that eventually we will have a complete set of the stuff. But I don’t use it on my main for the sole reason it lacks any dye channels. My main currently has Draconic dyed with Illumination, which has a really awesome golden color that pretty much no other armor set has (I didn’t even really like the Draconikittenil I got that dye). I would love to have the radiant’s glowy bits for at least the shoulders and maybe the gloves, except for the fact that the silver metal details stick out. The helmet and shoulders look like they have the necessary detail to support 2 dye channels, and I would absolutely love it if I could dye the metal to match the rest of my Draconic armor. I haven’t noticed anything about this being in the works, so please, make it happen, it would be awesome.

I never really remembered Kormir as being that much of a spotlight stealer, considering for the bulk of the story she wasn’t around, and we managed to break her out of jail, and were ultimately recognized with our name in the inscription on her statue as being her greatest champion. Considering the way the other characters deferred to you, even disagreeing with your choices at points, made it feel much more like you were the leader. Godhood would have been a neat way to end the game, but boy would it have made it weird to keep playing that character.

Anyways, I’m glad they recognize the issues with the story. I don’t think Trahearne was as bad a character as people make him out to be, he was just poorly received due to the plot being so firmly centered on him. If this were something other than a game, many people would probably like him.

perfect imbalance or cyclical imbalance as used in extra credits is a really terrible term for what they were talking about because it gives people the idea that it is somehow the opposite of balance when in reality it’s just a different type of balance. A better term would be Non-transitive Balance which comes from mathematical term Nontransitive game, which is something like Rock Paper Scissors. Which option in Rock Paper Scissors is actually more powerful? None, they are all perfectly balanced. But if you were to solely compare them in pairs, you would be under the impression that one was inferior to the other. This sort of comparative weakness allows for vast metagames to emerge, and many successful games that rely on strategy often have multiple layers of nontransitivity going on. So please, let’s not call it imbalance, it’s confusing and not really accurate.

That being said, nontransitive balance works best in a competitive setting. The reason for this is because players can naturally adapt their strategy to counter what is commonly being used by other players. In a cooperative (or solo) game, if a single profession or whatever can’t be used to overcome all possible obstacles (since the obstacles generally aren’t going to change to counter you) it suddenly becomes useless and nobody wants it, or vice versa if it counters everything by itself. When the balance isn’t done right, you end up with a Hammer that can counter everything. This generally comes up by ignoring the way different stats interact outside of the direct RPS relationship (speed and attack damage being regular culprits).

This sort of balance is really hard to do, as the more complex the system involved, the more difficult to maintain. So if you are going for this sort of balance, you can choose to either keep the system as simple as possible so as to keep it maintainable, or you make it so complicated that it could take forever for someone to find a Hammer.

Removing secondary professions and making the party size top out at 5 makes the system simpler and easier to maintain, but due to being able to boost the different parts of the damage formula with equipment, it causes tremendous imbalances, especially combined with the fact that damage is the only way the game can count your participation. So there are some systemic issues that would need to be solved before this sort of balance could be completely achieved. Even if this sort of balance was really created, it would probably have to be noticeably different between the gameplay modes.

For the record, I HATE MMOs. If games are a hearty stew, MMOs are a watery gruel, only a faint hint of flavor amongst an otherwise plentiful yet unsatisfying experience. That being said, I LOVED Guild Wars 1 tremendously, especially after the advent of heroes. Making builds and tackling HM with them was great. It was nice to know that with a full party of heroes, there was no ambiguity that it was possible, and I just wasn’t doing it right. The fault lied entirely with me, and I was the one to fix it. I would get tired of GW1 for months at a time (as I think people should be allowed to do with a game) but I still felt it was always one of my favorite games ever. Nobody randomly attacking me, nobody stealing my stuff, and I always had the opportunity to do things with other people if I wanted. People can argue about it being a CoRPG instead of an MMO, but it’s rather irrelevant. The first reference to the term I saw was an interview after they had announced they were working on GW2, basically admitting that they failed to make an MMO. But hey, if we want to make genre distinctions, here’s this:

The game we’re playing here is Guild Wars 2, not Guild Wars Online or some other thing to signify a departure from the things that people identify with Guild Wars 1. So if GW1 is a CoRPG, then it would make sense that given its direct sequel status, its genre would remain intact. But this isn’t really important. It may be good by MMO standards, but I would not say it’s a worthy sequel by any means. It’s not just some misplaced nostalgia for the first game either. It was that nostalgia that drove initial sales, but the game is lacking the stuff that kept people coming back to GW1 year after year.

The thing is that the people who are here complaining about playing the game are actually still playing it, despite their complaints. Most people when they don’t like something don’t complain, they just stop. Believe it or not, people don’t generally like to put themselves out there. They’re either more prone to speak up, or feel really strongly about it. My long time GW1 guild has mostly stopped playing GW2 at this point, and you probably haven’t heard from a single one of them on the forum. A few people complaining is many more people leaving. And no amount of living story temporary content is going to make them come back once they’ve decided they’re done.

The complainers need to be listened to. Already I see LA regularly abuzz about the next MMO to be released. A large portion of the player base will just migrate to something else because that’s what they do when an MMO comes out, and quality has nothing to do with it. The complainers are the people who really want to like the game, and are willing to stick with it despite the fact they aren’t enjoying it as much as something else they can still play (you don’t need to remind them of that, they are fully aware already).

If games are supposed to make people feel important within the game world, this one does a poor job of it. I succeed in an event, it will be back in an hour tops. Countless events aren’t even possible by myself. The outcomes of the living story will happen whether or not I had anything to do with them. If the goal was to make a game where people feel like a replaceable cog in society and make all of their accomplishments feel meaningless, then they managed to do so. At least once I completed a quest in GW1, those enemies would disappear. Combine that with the stranglehold the current system puts on the “monetary” rewards, then the whole game turns into a cycle of doing chores for someone’s loose change (Achievement Rewards are a huge step towards alleviating this particular problem though). I could get more into actual mechanical and systemic issues, but if you want to understand why the game doesn’t “feel” very satisfying, that’s a big part of it.

Overall I am happy with many of the changes. Account wide MF that isn’t bound to equipment will save me personally a good deal of grief, though I wonder if this is also meant to cover the XP and gold boosts as well. The bonus champ rewards will really help improve the rewards of group events, which have not been worth the trouble. More skills and traits is always great, I hope they include swapping some weapon skills as well.

I like the idea of high level crafting mats being made from lower level ones, but in the same breath he mentioned more time gated and account bound items. Binding items kills much of the sense of reward that the items could give (i.e. ascended ring drops are just vendor trash). Time gating kills the sense of reward by invalidating the game-time investment you made (i.e. I have enough quartz to make a full set of celestial gear already but it will be months before I can make a full set of gear). The time gating would be fine if it were unbound (the time limited supply would make them valuable and therefore rewarding even if you don’t have a personal use for the item), but most automatically bound items quickly become vendor trash.

More ascended gear is fine, I guess. I was already resigned to the fact that any exotic gear I made at this point would be invalidated eventually anyways. Even if they don’t release any further rarities, they built a loophole into ascended via infusions. There are already 2 different infusion rarities (white and blue) so I would not be shocked if they planned on releasing rarities straight up to legendary in the future with larger stat boosts. So while I’m not expecting them to break their promise of no more rarities, I am expecting them to use this loophole that they built into the item system. I am keeping my fingers crossed that they will provide avenues of acquiring the existing ascended gear that isn’t time gated, but that doesn’t seem likely. The multi-purpose legendary gear sounds awesome, but it is kinda sad that we need to wait to get legendary gear before the game starts to promote experimentation.

So overall, my reaction is Cautious Optimism. Many of these changes will improve my personal gameplay experience, but many of my personal beefs with the game will remain: Excessive amounts of bound items, severe time gating, resistance to experimentation, huge amounts of temp content, etc. So I look forward to seeing much of this implemented, but as of yet I don’t think it will be enough to change my “no spending money in the gemstore” stance. Until the game becomes something I feel I can play on my own terms and schedule, it has not earned more than I spent on CE.

Serdoc.7261:

Some heated words in here it seems

TOO MUCH temporary content, IMO, would be bad in the long run. A combination of temporary content and permanent content would be a solid path forward, not too much of either.

This is more or less it. It’s not the quality of the content being debated, it’s the temporary nature of it (keep that in mind people) And it’s not that the occasional one shot thing to promote a new area opening up or whatever is bad either. I have no problem making time for something like that if it were a tiny thing, and only happened a few times a year. It was really cool to see the mad king burst out of the fountain, and to fend LA against the Karkas (couldn’t really see anything with all the culling, but that’s not the point).

Doing it all the time like this is going to make sure that people who take a break from the game don’t come back.

Well, if all those people CHOOSE to stop playing, It will be punishing Anet, now won’t it? That’s the only logical outcome when everything is gated behind things they don’t want to do.

Agreed! It would be like the festival hat crafter in GW1. I am quickly running out of room for all these things I can’t equip simultaneously anyways.

killeratwar.3759:

I see jealousy towards GW1 players.
GW1 players deserve everything they get regardless.
OP problem is probably that he`s not a veteran in the Guild Wars Universe.
Welcome to Guild Wars …..We were here first.

With the way all this temp content is effecting achievement points scores, we may very well have the new tagline for the game…

I spent more time earning those 500 points than the rest of my currently 7000+ achievement points so far. And if you overly competitive types are laughing at my mere top 10% achievement point figures, then what difference do those extra 500 points make? Considering how many GW1 players have gone back to playing GW1, I doubt there are too many gunning for the top of the list. So everyone chill out about it.

Krosslite.1950:

Shinky.1492:

It’s a game, You WILL miss ALOT of things, you can’t expect people to make things revolve around you, It sucks that you ‘have’ to miss alot of things because of RL but that’s just the way things are, You will have to sacrifice one thing to do the other, just because a certain other game that caters to “30min warriors”, doesn’t mean everyone else will follow suit

Best answer for this thread award +1

I’m sorry, but that’s a bullkitten excuse if ever I’ve heard one. I can count the number of games I’ve played on one hand that I end up permanently missing content because of real world engagements or just not feeling like playing at the moment. And I run the risk of missing out on more content in this game than all the others combined if I don’t play it constantly.

Since my one line is being quoted so regularly, I might just add it to my signature. Here’s a paraphrase of one I heard in a business tweet just the other day:
Few customers complain, most just don’t come back.

So every time you see a complaint about something in the game, that means someone else has stopped playing because of it, and likely won’t return.

I think for the sake of semantics, let’s call campaigns from GW1 expansions, because that is ultimately what they boil down to, the standaloneness of them was rarely exercised by anybody in the player base.

Let’s also make a distinction between temporary and seasonal. People make the idiotic bluster of “We should keep the halloween and wintersday stuff around year round so the lazy kittens can do that too” which isn’t the point. Seasonal stuff comes back every year. If I don’t complete all of the achievements this year, then it’s ok, they’ll be around again (and this better be the case). So on to the discussion of Living Story:

1) It is an IV drip of content. People often manage to complete all of “goals” as they come out in the same day. Sure, making things like a difficult dungeon slow it down, but it’s not exactly a lot of stuff, and making people grind enemy slaying titles for longer doesn’t exactly constitute content or fun for that matter.

2) Fun on someone else’s schedule is not fun, it’s work. I shouldn’t have to plan my life around a game. They got better about this since the first couple months where there was some 1 time event. And it’s not even that an occasional special thing is so bad, but this is continual. If I am not playing on a daily basis, I am missing out on stuff that never comes back. I work a job, have a wife, and would like to play other games and more importantly do other things. A steady stream of permanent content would add up. I could do it at my own pace, and get to enjoy all that content when I would actually enjoy it.

3) Temporary content is throw away content. There is a psychology to people making things, especially when it isn’t intended to be permanent. No matter how much people may pride themselves on their work, if it is temporary, they will be more willing to cut corners and lower standards to make the constant deadlines. Even if it isn’t visible yet, it will start to happen more and more as time goes by. Making things permanent means people will continue to take it seriously. If every player from now to the future does it only once, that’s still a more worthwhile return on investment for the developers than what they get now.

4) At some point, a vast majority of the stuff in the game will be gone and inaccessible. Look at your achievement pane and tell me how many of those are tied to things that cannot be completed anymore. Not most of them, but a new set of achievements is added to that screen every month, so how long until there are more temp achievements than permanent ones?

5) Screw people and their fragile egos that need to bar other people from having something to feel good about themselves. Seriously, why does their own sense of accomplishment rely so heavily on other people’s failure? People should be rewarded for skill, cleverness, and/or persistence, not merely having bought the game earlier than other people. If Anet is using this to justify creating temporary content, they should be ashamed. I didn’t realize when I bought the game I was buying a freaking commitment.

The controls may be no different from other MMOs, but the gameplay of this and other of the new, more actiony MMOs is dramatically different, and I believe poorly suited to the existing control scheme. I am often holding down 2 keys to strafe around enemies while holding down the right mouse button to steer, and somehow stretching with the remaining fingers of my left hand to hit any keys I may need.

This problem doesn’t show up in other games because using skills plants you in place. You move, then act. At least the game generally has the good sense to turn your character to face a target. Others of this new generation of MMO aren’t so kind.

I can’t propose a good solution to this, as it’s kinda built into the mechanics itself. There are just too many buttons that need to be pushed, and you can’t afford to stop moving to do it.

Even the asura solo dance was perfectly timed

You would need some fairly fine grained data before you could predict troop movement (use that term VERY loosely). With what we have currently, you could probably predict which side would win in a hypothetical matchup. Either way it would take collecting the data over a very long time.

I did not realize that, probably because I’ve never switched between 2 armor sets. Still, organizing color sets account wide with some sort of code to send them between players and/or put on websites would be great.

Generally agree about the contrast thing being hard to tell if it’s day or night in many places. That sounds like an interesting addition to WvW gameplay. Though I disagree about the sky needing to be prettier everywhere. It is awfully pretty in Rata Sum at night.

The particulars of the skill aside, I would like to have some more adrenaline skill options. The interplay between the different adrenaline skill behaviors was a major part of playing a warrior (to a less extent paragon), and I would like to have that back.

Well, that would definitely beat out the Arah armor made out of undead body parts in terms of grossest armor in the game.

Creating a data structure that can store a list of colors and give them a name is easy. The time consuming part is adding it to the UI. One of the devs mentioned elsewhere that anything with words has about a 4 week turnaround time just for the localization.

But yes, this would be a great feature to add. If I ever get to the point where I feel like storing multiple sets of armor, I would love to be able to quickly track the dyes I used for each. What would be really cool on top of that would be something similar to the ability to ping builds in GW1 where I could just ping them my current dye scheme if they ask me what it is.

Darn, I was hoping to have found another fan of FPGAs. That screen was a good investment, looks like it will handle a lot of the work for you. Almost feels like cheating…

Cliff, as always you are a credit to your company. This sort of thing goes a long way towards people having reasonable expectations of what is possible and how long it would take to do it.

Definitely the BLCs. Even if I have keys for them, odds are I will get something I can’t sell and does something just useful enough to not trakitten, but not actually useful enough to actually use. So it’s generally a double disappointment.

Also, exotics with the default skin. Orange text shows up so rarely that I do a small celebration every time I see it. Then I see it that default skin. And then I see the current TP price is only slightly above that of a rare. Always a bummer.

Geotherma.2395:

I forgot to add that there is a large amount of people who would enjoy having a test server for updates and a survey option in game. Those two things could be part of the change for the better. We don’t mind being the QA team :P

Correction: Most players will take the chance to be QA if given it, but few like being forced into it unawares.

I think it’s important to talk about what players can do to help foster more direct communication and avoid becoming “background noise” as mentioned above.

1) Be patient: We all want to know if our suggestions will be implemented. The main reason that we don’t hear anything at all is because a “we’ll do that” is interpreted as “It will be ready immediately” which will almost never be the case. From the looks of it, most of the teams are on a monthly development cycle, so unless they happened to be working on your suggestion before you suggested it (unlikely but possible), It will not be out with the next release, and probably not the one immediately after. So if we have some patience and don’t get mad if our many excellent ideas don’t show up immediately, we may start to get better feedback from developers

2) Be reasonable: There are heaps of very obvious bugs in the game, and the devs know that as well as we do. Fixing bugs takes time away from adding new content, and there is a player for every spot in the spectrum of “fix ALL the bugs” to “screw the bugs, just give me new stuff.” And then you get into the question of which bugs to fix and what content to add. The things that should get the first priority are the things that fixing/adding will have the maximum benefit to the general player population, tempered with the difficulty in implementing it. Often enough you can’t judge these things until you start doing them either, so if you recognize at least in part how difficult it is to implement it, and that a time estimate is just a guess, the devs might be willing to share their estimates.

3) Be grateful: Even if you don’t fully agree with a design decision or an aesthetic, you can still appreciate the workmanship that went into it. We all have our personal feelings on what priority things should be taken care of, but we can recognize the effort put into the things that were done. And for heaven’s sake, when you do get something you have been waiting for DO NOT SAY “it’s about time!”

4) Be considerate: Devs are people, but unlike the rest of us here, they have their real names plastered all over the forums with a big red logo next to it. They can’t even post in a thread without that thread turning into a giant glowing beacon for the rest of us to home in on. If what they say gets torn to pieces constantly, they will be much more reluctant to keep posting. Also keep in mind that this is ultimately their job, and no matter how much they may enjoy their work talking about the game still counts as work. If they’re taking the time to actually talk with you about the game, it’s kinda above and beyond what many of them need to fulfill their job description. So treat them nicely.

Yep, you got me, I believe those are more recent than what I was looking at. Blissified can now have his thread back to the topic of cinematics in the game now.

you have changed the question to an absolute one that nobody in any sort of PR position would say, due to said pitchforks. Really, if you’re just concerned about being right and proving me wrong, the burden of proof lies with you.

Pitchforking aside, when asked a yes or no question, he gave a no.

If I would sum up Geotherma’s Posts, in two words it would be MANAGE EXPECTATIONS. Marketing is playing with fire: You absolutely need it, but you can’t let it go out of control. Hype something up too much and it is bound to disappoint, even if what you’re offering is genuinely good. Promise us a fun time, not a dramatic world altering event. If it weren’t for the occasional sonic periscope, I would not have realized the flame and frost stuff even occured.

Having devs and other non-PR folk talk to us helps humanize the entire company. People are a little more sympathetic when they can have a casual conversation about something and not just feel like they’re being fed a carefully constructed line from a faceless corporation. That’s something that has been done well. Getting a dev to give their honest assessment of when something is or isn’t a reasonable request will quell a great deal of stuff. Getting a generic “your suggestion has been noted” is basically the same as being ignored.

I probably seem to complain quite often on the forum. But as someone who has to develop stuff for a living that sometimes I do not agree with from a design perspective, I have the utmost sympathy and appreciation for what the devs do. They do a great job with the limited time they have to implement new features and content and fix bugs. So give them the credit they deserve and make sure the patch notes are thorough. Sloppy patch notes give the impression that the work being done is sloppy, which is unfair to the people doing the work.

There is nothing but rumors going around about what current monetization choices for the game are Anet’s doing or were edicts handed down by NCSoft. Not that it would make much of a difference to the conspiracy theorists, but I think people would genuinely like to know who is ultimately holding the reigns.

Considering most things in the game are being planned out at least a year in advance, not on the table is about the same as not going to happen.

Here’s the thing: Beating something ONCE (maybe a FEW times) is fun. Doing something repeatedly so that you are capable of doing something else is not. I enjoy JPs just enough to not actively avoid them, but I rarely want to do one more than once. In fact, I do them solely so I can check them off my list of things I have done in the game. When in a game you have these typical large, absurdly tedious overarching goal like a Legendary all of the sudden you become very conscious of how much time you put in vs the reward on something. So really, it isn’t that person’s fault that the fun they claimed they had wasn’t enough. When the prize you get is only worth at most a hundredth of a percent of what your ultimate goal is, it will dampen your spirits.

Considering Factions came out about a year after Prophecies, I wouldn’t say this is an outrageous pace, especially considering the number of people working on GW2 is far larger than it was when GW1 had been out this long. Colin more or less said that they have no plans to make another expansion in an interview before.

The Living story stuff is cool, but no replacement for an actual campaign or expansion. It feels a little anemic by comparison to the main story of the campaign. An expansion would get me to actually spend more money. All of these limited time offers, RNG items and worthkitten osts will never see anything from me.

So if you want to see an actual expansion, don’t put any money into the gemstore.

But as far as what the OP was saying, I would like a little bit more in the way of cutscenes. I don’t mind admiring the exquisite detail of the character models and the impeccable lipsyncing the player races have (if you watch the lipsync outside of the cutscenes, it’s much more GW1 creepy marionette style). But it would be nice to have more cinematic cutscenes reminiscent of the really cool preview trailers they made.

Considering how I’m constantly making elementals bleed, I’m not too taken aback by inflammable wood.

Omne.4603:

I actually would like a comment on this, it’s not a totally unreasonable request. If you wish to refund wxp points for arrow carts then why not for this as well? I’ll trade 250 badges for 10 laurels.

I’d probably be more interested in trading laurels for badges (not a regular WvWer), but I get what you’re saying. Honestly, if Laurels were more like zcoins in that they didn’t give anything that could not be attained elsewhere (even if elsewhere is just someone selling it on the TP) people wouldn’t care as much. But since nearly everything in the game of any genuine worth is bound, Laurels are not a bonus but a requirement. I feel kind of chained by the things because of this. I would probably be willing to skip dailies once in a while if we were given some other avenue to get them or the laurel exclusive items. The freedom to choose how I spend my time in game would go a long way to making it a more enjoyable experience.

An enjoyable experience is the goal of the game, right? Some of these design decisions make me wonder.

This would be a really cool way to get people to spread out and populate all those different maps more. It would also make a good solution to the ongoing MF debate: instead of tying it to equipment tie it to the enemies. But it would also have to be significant enough to make it worthwhile. So something like a 500% ceiling, otherwise it wouldn’t be worth the time to go to far corners of the world to find enemies. It would take a single die with some awfully big numbers on it to overcome a whole handful of regular dice.

Now combine it with something that rewards people for teaming up and taking out those non world boss group events and the game will become a much more satisfying experience. Like a genuine party size based loot reward bonus?

I was thinking that too. Something that listed the enemies/NPCs associated with a map and/or event and then gives their stats and skill_ids (to attach to an almost inevitable skill output). Of course, this would be most interesting if we could get it for instanced areas like dungeons and storyline as well. Of course, I think many enemy skills lack proper description information anyways, so this particular bit of information would not be as valuable. The types and stats would still be nice though.

Very cool. Thorough documentation is generally a good thing. Feel free to grab my unofficial Trading Post API guide and stick it on there if you want.

Ok, couple of questions for you:

1) Is this meant to be able to plug into a router and be completely stand-alone without a computer? I’m assuming that it is.
2) What type of language are you programming it in? Assembly? VHDL? Verilog?

Looking forward to seeing what you can come up with.

The idea of some sort of guaranteed (and desirable) reward would make it seem like less of an underhanded way to get people to spend money in the gem store, but I really don’t want any more achievements that effectively require gems.

This would be nice. Right now my laurels are piling up because I am afraid to commit any more of them to a strategy because of the likelihood of it changing. It would also give me a real motivator for spending time in fractals. I constantly hear of people merching ascended rings that I would probably pay some serious coin for if they weren’t bound, so give these people something to do with them.

Heh, I wasn’t expecting my response to the Top 10 video to be displayed so prominently in a youtube video…

I like the idea of a shared MF, especially since MF’s effects on drop rate are fairly abysmal anyways (the massive +200% MF at southsun proved that to me), so a group getting together to pump it up to a collective 1000% would actually start to make a noticeable difference to the drop rate of exotics. Of course, the implementation of bonus chests from world bosses have devalued rares and exotics, so the benefit of MF has gone down with it. I would expect the increased MF from sharing would ironically lower the value of MF further. And ultimately it wouldn’t change anything, it would just make zerging around cursed shore more efficient. The zerkers will still only want other zerkers. The slowdown wouldn’t be worth the increased rate of loot drops to them.

I am never without my MF gear for the most part, because party members aside (I tend to only do dungeons if guildmates feel like it) I am choosing between cheating MYSELF out of better rewards or better stats. Like Cristobal above me said, I don’t know who thought it was a good idea, but I will be using it as long as it exists.

Am I greedy? Well, when almost all my yet to be achievements require inordinate amounts of gold, greed is all pervasive, the veritable background hum in the game. If I am to make the most of my limited time, (which is usually limited to dailies because I need all the freaking laurels I can get to equip all of my characters) I need to feel like I am getting as much coin as I can out of the experience.

Considering there are at least a hundred viable combinations of 1 Major and 2 minor stats without MF (someone else can find the exact number), there are probably some excellent combinations that could replace MF without people’s investment into the gear feeling like a waste. The thing about claiming a game is about skill over stats is that the stats would actually have to be even. Removing MF would help make the game a matter of constructing a better build, and not just me choosing whether I perform suboptimally in combat or in profits.

I always liked the fact that I could revisit story missions in GW1. These living story dungeons are pretty cool, and it seems like a shame for them to be throwaway. I was really hoping for it being a way for them to slowly add new dungeons to the game (kinda like how Fractals was tied to the consortium) so a way to revisit them would be great. All for revisiting my personal story missions too.

Kaaboose, you once again prove yourself a man after my own heart. Their “every professions can take any role” idea looks like it comes pretty directly from the profession design coming from Factions and Nightfall’s specific professions, as well as the playstyle direction that the players themselves were driving the game towards. Rits were central to almost any build because they could buff, heal, protect, damage, etc. about as equally with different builds. There was rarely a build that put characters full tilt into a single role by the end because it was more effective to distribute your ability to heal, damage, or whatever amongst multiple characters. So creating a system where any profession can fill any role is the logical conclusion. Of course, if that means sacrificing the highly engaging customization of the first one, it doesn’t seem worth it.

But I don’t think we have a customization system that is actually worse in GW2. The wide variety of runes and sigils and their myriad effects are a far more interesting system. Traits have a great deal of interesting interactions. If more weapon and utility skills came with time, there would probably be plenty of interesting possibilities to explore. So why does everybody regardless of profession end up just tossing on a set of zerker’s set and trying to deal as much damage as possible?

1) Pure Math: It was pretty obvious to me during the betas that boosting power would be the most efficient way of getting the most from any character, just because it was weapon*power. Of course, I didn’t realize how much of a difference precision made, and the amount of damage people can do is staggering. With ALL SKILLS’ damage attached to the same numbers, what is the downside? Less Healing Power for a heal that you can only use once every 30 seconds at best? Vitality and Toughness aren’t much better, bosses do so much damage per hit you would be just delaying the inevitable if you get hit regularly. Condition damage might be worthwhile, but it’s hard to compare to thousands of damage every hit.

2) Action mechanics: I generally like the boss designs because they have a similar feel to the sort of big bosses you would get in a Zelda, God of War, or even Mario game. The idea of being able to dodge their attacks and land some sort of fatal blow on them is cool. But it also means that most of their attacks are easily dodgable. And when you’re not dodging, you can generally run and gun your way to victory. If you’re one of those people who almost never takes damage in a Zelda game, you wouldn’t think twice about sacrificing all your unnecessary heart containers for the opportunity to one shot every boss.

3) Discouraged Experimentation: One of the things that made GW1 great was the ease with which things could be tried out. Grab your heroes, tweak some settings, try it out. If you failed, only your pride was hurt. If you succeeded, you felt great. If I want to try something out in GW2, I have to acquire an entire equipment set (instead of changes some runes if anything), find a place to store my current gear, pay money to change my traits, buy runes and sigils, hope for a party willing to put up with my experimentation, and then pay for any armor repairs should it fail. sPvP is just a little too different to make that a decent replacement. Not much point in taking any of that risk when the zerker’s has been proven to be more than adequate to power through everything.

All that aside, I find the control skill situation pretty abysmal. I expect KDs to be rare and/or expensive, not something you can just do every 3 seconds. If they weren’t so common, there wouldn’t be so much of a need for defiant. And then later area enemies have a continual stream of KDs so that you will spend half your time knocked down if you don’t have stability, which for some reason IS actually hard to come by for any length of time. So as it stands, I can’t get much use of it, but am constantly subjected to it. At least in SAB we were given some blink time where we were immune to further knockdowns.