Guild Wars 2

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Section 3: What this problem is not.

#3: This is not about punishing players for their investment.
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tl;dr Anet didn’t balance for active defense, and everyone who whines about other players being at fault is wrong and just making the problem worse. The zerk issue hurts everyone. Read the kitten post to know why.

Depending on what happens this isn’t true at all. When ascended armor came out I finally bit the bullet and went with full dps gear. I’ve never had it before, and it costs an arm and a leg of both materials and time, and replacing some of those materials (like cloth) is going to take significantly more time because of the loot tables. In a worst case I scenario I don’t want that investment wasted on something that is potentially unplayable, and I don’t want a “fix” to berserkers that could set me back 6 months.

And Anet did balance for active defense, you can see that in some of the trait lines, primarily for the medium armor classes. And then you have the mob abilities themselves.

Hopefully the changes involve buffing conditions and not nerfing berserkers. Otherwise you should have changed the meta before you had players making all that berserker ascended armor.

I pug dungeons a lot in this game, and for the most part they are enjoyable. You meet new people and learn new tactics. About 90% of them have been positive experiences.

Then you have the jerks. I found a Twilight Arbor run an hour ago, and waited a few minutes for someone to get his lvl 27 alt to Caledon so he could presumably swap in at the last boss. The dungeon goes well, we kill the worm and the spider boss on the up path without incident.

Then, the dungeon run just stops, and the guy with the alt and his guildmate kick a guardian from the group for no reason, and invite a thief from their own server, Sanctum of Rall, instead. Then I watch as they select the other member of the group and kick him too. Seeing where this is going, I add them to my block list so I can remember who they are, tell them what they’re doing is disgusting and leave the group before they can kick me too.

Is there any way to avoid these types of people and still pug dungeons? A list of disreputable players? And does this qualify as LFG system abuse or scamming under Anet’s reporting guidelines? Yes, it is abuse and it is scamming, in that these people claimed to want people to do dungeons with, but really just wanted warm bodies until a guild member or friend could take their place, but I don’t know if that is what Arenanet intended when they set up the category.

Kessex Hills looks amazing now with the tower parts and vines lying around, and I love that some of the bosses fell out of the tower and are crawling around the area. Great stuff.

Moving the feathers to the other shoulder should be a relatively easy fix, assuming it doesn’t cause problems with other animations.

Suggestions for improvement:

1. Play to your strengths, don’t run head on into your weaknesses: If technical issues are causing problems with culling, limit the scale of the encounters or the number of people allowed in them. I also know that before launch, developers stated that the optimal gameplay experience was about than 5-15 players, so I’m not sure why you pack players into zones.

2. Consider making many One Time events more like multiplayer “personal story” events that exist only for that weekend or that day. I don’t know what it will do to your server technology, but if you’re going to need overflows to handle the population anyway, and you already create instances of zones for personal story missions (facsimiles of Lion’s Arch or any other zone for story steps that take place there) just put groups of 20 or so people into their own personal “overflow” mission for the 1 time event, much like you do when you create spvp instances, parcel people out to overflows, put people into the Mad King’s Labyrinth, or put 5 people into a dungeon.

This allows them to be 1 time only events, lets people still complete them at their leisure instead of hunting around for an overflow that still has the event running, and would take care of post-event problems, like trying to get people their loot if they DC from the karka battle. If you DC during a personal story step, you can always try again.

This probably wouldn’t work for events where you’re destroying the lighthouse, but I think the Ancient Karka battle and the “taming the island” on saturday would work great like that, just make sure that the first time you go to that area on the day of the 1 time event puts you into the “one time event” personal story. Even put one of those green personal story stars onto the map if you need to.

3. Bugged NPCs. This also happened during launch, where Dynamic Events bugged because people were just interracting with objects so often or glitching the NPCs meaning that they would be broken for a few days to a week until you reset the servers. This will be a big problem in One Time Events (with the downside being that if they’re bugged, the event themselves will shortly go away) so design accordingly. I think you changed some of the consortium npcs to put them on a timer, and continue to do that or implement some other workaround in the future.

4. I’m not sure if you’re going to continue updating quests by mail, or if you’re doing that to combat some of the DE breaking bugs mentioned above, but it is a little disorienting, because nothing like that existed in the base game.

5. I enjoyed the event. I particularly liked the Arenanet player that went around rezzing people and fighting along with us. Half the time I wasn’t sure if he recognized the same problems I did, or was too busy laughing at how bad we were.