Video games will almost inevitably take over from movies, novels and other forms to become the primary narrative platform of the 21st century. That, however, will happen with an entirely different set of mechanisms, not the legacy combat-related systems we are used to from what will soon come to resemble (at most)the “Silent Era” of cinema.
That said, even within the context of existing legacy gaming, having main story narrative in a multiplayer game locked behind minority-interest instanced combat is archaic. For a game that set out to “break the mold” of MMORPG gameplay it’s a particularly bizarre choice, since it appears to hark back to a design ethos that even the games GW2 set out to replace have long abandoned.
If idea really is to provide the relevant narrative by clicking on objects in a completed Raid instance then why not just have a permanent “completed” raid instance that anyone can access at any time, purely for the purpose of clicking on the objects?
Or perhaps someone could come up with a more appropriate way of distributing narrative elements altogether and leave the Raids as pure combat events?
Final boss fight spoiled the relatively good work up to that point. As most above said, room too small, cc too frequent, timer on special skill too short etc etc. Almost every LS chapter ends with a bad boss fight. This wasn’t the worst but the bar is so low. Really can’t see why its so hard to tune these for one person of any class in basic gear. It’s core story content not some kind of challenge.
Story in general was okay. Canach was good. Anise was abominable as she always is. If she doesn’t turn out to be an arch-villain there’s something very wrong with the writing because she’s repellent. Jennah was…odd. Logan was…odd. He has an excuse though. Some interesting developments, some clunky exposition. Acceptable but not amazing.
The new map is also acceptable but not amazing. Kryta is and has always been ugly and this is no exception. Some interesting nooks and crannies but really just another Kryta map, which is not my cup of tea. Gameplay-wise I think you’re at the point of diminishing returns already with this style of map. It plays exactly as I expected and I haven’t bothered with map completion or the achievements whereas with Bloodstone Fen and Ember Bay I pretty much lived there for a month or more. Bitterfrost I lasted a couple of weeks. Doric Lake I may not even bother to finish. Has a real “been there, done that” feel already.
Overall I’d give the chapter a B-. Not bad but not great.
Oh, and although I totally expected it, it was still a big disappointment that there wasn’t a full, open-world assault on Divinity’s Reach like Scarlet’s Attack on LA. Missed a trick there.
(edited by Tiny Doom.4380)
Most players that cop to it say either:
They salvaged ecto to get to max early on
They’ve played ‘regularly’ since launch and still don’t have +200% MF.I hadn’t imagined WvW to be that lucrative.
I’ve been playing since launch. My main account has nearly 6000 hours played and 22kAP, just to give an idea of activity levels. I only hit 200% MF yesterday.
Even so, I’d be glad of an alternative use for the luck motes. If MF makes any difference at all it’s so minimal it has no effect whatsoever on my enjoyment of the game. I’d rather have a few of those random bags to open like you get from Princess any day. Those are fun.
I have three accounts and they are all different as far as dailies are concerned.
Acct #1 HoT and several level 80s.
Acct #2 No Hot, several level 80s.
Acct #3 No HoT, no level 80s.
It is true to say that there are no dailies Acct #1 cannot get but in practice it rarely gets a “World Boss” daily. When that comes up on the other two accounts, #1 almost always gets a HoT “Adventure” instead. That, in my opinion, is a good enough reason not to add HoT to either of those accounts and is indeed the reason why the second HoT account, which I bought in the first half price sale a year or so ago, remains unused.
I would say that for someone who “really only logs in and does those Tyria dailes (I don’t play every day or even every month” as the OP says he does it would be completely pointless to buy HoT. Firstly you will never use it and secondly it will remove from you some of the preferred options you previously had. It is indeed the prime reason I haven’t used my second HoT code yet.
I’d also say that from my perspective the most fun dailies are the ones you get when you don’t have either HoT or a level 80. I enjoy doing the dailies on Acct #3 more than on either of the others. I agree that it’s not a significant enough drawback to require a warning on the “box” when you buy HoT but it is annoying all the same.
Why we can’t go back to having a free choice of any 3 of all the dailies beats me. The very first iteration of dailies was far superior to any of the subsequent versions.
I’m frequently logged in at Citadel on home BL, afk, tabbed out doing many other things, some of which include playing other games or even posting here as I’m doing now. Yes, the game times me out but that makes a noise that I can hear (I have game sound on while tabbed out) so I just tab back over and log in again.
Citadel in WvW is my default “resting” position and and has been for four years. It’s convenient and I can scramble to defend Garri or wherever if I get a ping from the Commander (which I can also hear when tabbed out). Other people idle in LA, I idle in Citadel. Once upon a time I used to have to consider whether I was taking up a spot that someone else could use but since we haven’t had a queue on home BL for well over a year now that’s no longer a consideration.
As for limiting accounts – you are kidding, right? This is a business we’re talking about here. Not to mention that some of us are adults and able to compartmentalize. In the current T3 match my wife and I have accounts playing on all three teams (YB, NSP and EBay) and we won’t even talk to each other about what the other team is doing. What’s more, we don’t even allow our characters to know anything they shouldn’t. If I’m logged in on my EBay account and HoD is on YB’s inner Garri gate and no-one’s spotted us yet not only do I not tell anyone on YB about it, I don’t even swap to my YB account to go and defend because my YB character doesn’t know its happening.
This is an RPG, even in WvW, or it is as far as I’m concerned.
I have never seen a clear statement from anyone in a position to know – namely someone who works for ANet – giving any specific details of how the Outnumbered icon is triggered or what criteria need to be fulfilled for it to happen. If anyone has a link to such a statement or explanation I’d be very interested to see it.
Failing that I am going to continue to work on the principle, derived from observation, that the thing is largely meaningless other than as an early-warning when a blob arrives on a previously dormant map. It does seem to work meaningfully in that scenario if in no other.
I don’t get why people are so hung up on dying in pvp. And your hesitancy winds up wiping the entire group. Then you get picked off after anyhow. Carpe Diem.
I’d have thought the reason was obvious: time.
We have a few commanders who rant about people being “afraid” to die. I don’t follow them. It’s a total misreading of what’s going on and that level of disconnect between what a commander sees and what he or she understands destroys any confidence I might have in him or her.
Every time you die in WvW it wastes a significant proportion of your play session. How much depends on how long your PC/Internet connection takes to load data, how far away you respawn, how far the commander has moved since you died etc etc. For every death you can take 30 seconds to several minutes out of your gaming session. as far as active play is concerned.
If you have an hour to play WvW and you follow a commander who encourages reckless pushes that leave several people dead every time, and if, like most commanders and zergs rightly insist, there is no raising of the fully dead, then you can reduce your active play in that session by 10-20% with surprising ease. Add to that how tedious people find it to have to keep running back to rejoin the zerg and how annoying it is to be ganked on the way and have to do it yet again and you can see why people are “afraid” of dying.
Actually they just value their time more than they value the commander’s appraisal of their bravery.
Please for the love of sanity, destroy DR but DO NOT make us go through another city being rebuilt. Leave it destroyed!
You want one of the playable races without a capital city?
That is insane.Even if it’s getting destroyed (there’s no guarantee of that, DR has been attacked before)
of course they’ll rebuild it. And they should, the devs can’t leave one race without a capital city, it wouldn’t make sense.Not insane at all.
That’s how war works.Never rebuilding what you lost, even when you win, is how war works?
Even if that was true (it isn’t) this isn’t real life. It’s a game.Every race currently has a capital city, and it should stay that way.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against DR getting destroyed (even though I doubt it will happen). I’m just against never rebuilding it, that would be ridiculous.
When the frogloks kicked the trolls out of Grobb in EQ new troll players had to start in the Foreign Quarter of the Dark Elf city. When the trolls got it back new player frogloks had to start in a refugee camp in Rathe Mountains. That whole storyline took several years to play out and throughout there was always at least one playable race with no starting city of its own. Just saying there is precedent in the genre if not in this particular franchise…
Is it confirmed that there will be a new, open world map in Chapter 4? If not, would someone official like to tell us?
Also, do we all have to support Queen Jennah if we want to do this? She’s about the last person I want to assist in staying in power…
The real question here is why guild tags aren’t unique. They should always have been, even in PvE, even before Megaservers. Too late now.
So overcomplicating it. Players zerg because they enjoy it. That’s been self-evident from conversation in the zergs for years. Players who don’t enjoy it either don’t zerg or don’t speak – or they come to a forum outside the game, like this one, and complain.
If you want to look at the mechanics rather than the psychology, GW2 is designed from the ground up to encourage players to gather in very large groups. The entire open-world PvE set-up works like that, from Orr through to Heart of Thorns. WvW is a PvE offshoot that follows the same design principles.
Is it feasible for ANet to just move keeps? I don’t know how zone architecture works.
Other than that I agree something ought to be done with the “Mercenaries” – I’ve never understood what the supposed point of those is. Having a “capture the flag” for Bloodlust is an interesting idea – might be a distraction you could use for cover to stage attacks elsewhere if nothing else.
There are without doubt far more self-declared PvE players playing GW2 than any other kind but at this stage of the life of the game posters on the WvW forum heavily favor WvW as a form of direct PvP even though that’s very clearly not what it was ever designed to be.
What’s more, as is plain from almost all the changes ever made to the mode since launch, there has never been any intention to move the mode in that direction. Almost everything that’s been added pushes in the opposite direction, from the increasing power of siege and the added importance of structures to the creation of EOTM itself.
As has been pointed out on another thread, if a Server is winning heavily and WvW can be played primarily as PvE (Ktraining NPCs and structures and rolling over any opposition at no risk) then almost every server will find it has map queues. Similarly, when we had Tournaments and there were rewards that PvE players coveted, large numbers of PvE players arrived to play WvW.
Those players don’t post on this forum much if at all. Almost certainly don’t even read it. They do, some of them, vote in the polls though, which is why the results of those polls so often go the opposite way posters here would expect and prefer.
On that basis I’d guess most respondents here will veer strongly towards WvW as PvP. Between the two extremes you posit I’d put the pointer very, very slightly back towards PvP from where it is now. The current balance suits me except that i did prefer it when we had to work to upgrade our structures ourselves. I’d drop the auto upgrades but i’d also bring back Siegerazer and upgrade him a bit.
Wherever you pitch it, though, almost no-one will admit to enjoying it. People here go on about how great it was three or four years ago but there were precious few saying that at the time. Everyone was complaining as bitterly as they are now :P
Ya I am on FA and we got stuck in T4. The bags are epic. But the fights are not fun 90% of the time. Most of these people we face get one pushed. Not because of superior numbers either. Would be nice to be back in T2 or T3 were there is at least some competition…..
This is the result of the intentional flattening of Glicko over the last few months to bring more servers in range of each other. If you check
http://wvwmatchups.azurewebsites.net/#Fort%20Aspenwood
you can see that, at time of writing, FA could be anywhere from T2 to T4 next match, although the chance of another T4 outing is small.
With Wild Cards three-quarters of NA worlds are now in range of each other, with most being able to draw a match anywhere from T2-T4. This was the intended outcome although whether this is what people want now they’ve got it is another matter.
Let’s have a 2nd Poll on World Linking, but can we have a Poll to use Server Guesting for WvW?
The Server Guesting link goes to a 404 but assuming guesting is still a thing it’s an interesting idea. Allow players to set a WvW Guest Server once per match on the first WvW log in that week, perhaps? You could exclude Full servers (sorry BG – I know you need more people…).
As a player on both Host and Guest servers on two accounts I quite like linking but it’s clearly not an ideal solution. I’m sure someone could come up with something better.
Also, the Brexit analogy is wrong in so many ways I wouldn’t even begin. Just…no.
moreover anet should focus on" guild "
why this game call guild wars
As I’m sure most people reading these forums are very well aware, the “Guild” in the name “Guild Wars” has absolutely nothing to do with player guilds:
https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/The_Guild_Wars
I often wonder if Anet regret coming up with that name for their MMO. It has caused nothing but confusion ever since the first game was announced.
If the issue you describe was even happening, which as far as I can see it isn’t, it would be one created entirely by players. If players in a particular time zone or language group choose to cluster together on particular servers then that’s a player choice not a function of the mechanics. Ditto the tendency pf players to move from less populated servers to higher populated ones or for guilds to arrange alliances to move en masse to create bandwagon servers.
So long as players are allowed free choice of server and free movement, even at a cost, this will continue to happen. If you reduced the number of servers to three and left free movement in place what do you imagine the result would be? One super-giant server and two also-rans, of course.
The only way to ensure continual, even population balance would be to remove the choice from players completely and have representation assigned by the system. And if that could be achieved the social costs would probably destroy most players’ interest in playing WvW at all. At best you’d be recreating EotM and we’ve seen how popular that has been with the dedicated WvW playerbase…
…gw2 players are not good gammers overall….
The issue is also alot of players that dont want the ktrain model to be changed since they find that rewarding and being good at the game. (i actually found players that belive that, more than i wish for….)
GW2’s USP pre-launch was its casual-friendly, ease-of-access, anyone can play approach. It was sold as the antithesis of hardcore, an MMO for people who didn’t like MMOs.
The addition of EOTM and most of the changes made to WvW over the years strongly suggest that design philosophy was intended to include WvW as well as PvE. Look at the way the game auto-boosts low level characters to level 80 in WvW, a feature that has been in the game since launch, just as an example.
The WvW game mode has always appeared to be intended to encourage all GW2 players to join in regardless of level, skill or gear. The much-maligned zerg, pvd and ktrain styles of play were all simultaneously invented and promulgated by players and fostered and facilitated by the game systems. It’s hardly as though anyone’s going against the grain by playing this way.
Heading into the fifth year of the life of this MMO it seems highly unlikely this direction will be reversed although I guess it’s always possible that an expansion could see the current WvW scrapped and replaced by another version or another large-scale PvPvE mode entirely. Even that seems highly unlikely. Far more likely is that it will be left largely alone with some minor tinkering to the scoring system, matchplay and other relatively easy changes, as we have seen over the past year. The extremely poor reception DBL received would seem to make that even more likely.
Also, as has been pointed out in other threads, the current infrastructure hardly seems capable of handling megaserver-levels of activity. it can barely handle a three-way at SMC even with the smaller zerg sizes we have these days.
As a YB player I’d just like to say how great it’s been to be linked with Anvil Rock not once but twice. You guys may be small in number but you really punch above your weight. Wish we still had you with us now – it feels wrong fighting against you under the DB banner.
It’s been said elsewhere but that’s a problem with the linking system – people you were fighting alongside for months suddenly turn up on the other side. It adds a dimension to play that I personally could do without although for others I’m sure it adds a little extra spice.
Anyway, good luck AR – you’re going to need it holding up DB’s non-SEA time zones all on your own. You’re welcome back on YB any time!
I’ve been playing MMOs since the late 90s and reading and posting on forums since then too. Forums have always been like this and indeed these are very far from the worst I’ve seen when it comes to negativity. Anyway, it makes precious little difference whether the game is successful or failing. Back before WoW, when EverQuest was the most successful western MMO and was still growing month on month, the forums became so toxic they had to be shut down completely for weeks because of the damage they were thought to be doing to the image of the game.
Nowadays forums are an archaic mode of communication. Social media have left them far behind. Developers use reddit, FB, Twitter et al because that’s where the majority of their players communicate – and where the people the developers would like to have as players communicate, more importantly. The surprise is that any developers post here at all, not that they don’t post more often.
Apart from fixing bugs and general improvements to infrastructure I’d leave WvW alone. Constantly fiddling about with the format is the problem not the solution. Settle on a ruleset and a scoring system and then leave it at that. Let the people who enjoy it play and let those who don’t leave.
By all means add another “end game” mode as well as WvW if the resources are there and someone has a concept worth trying – that’s a good option for an expansion – but after four years there is no realistic chance of revamping the existing WvW format into something that will draw in large numbers of players (either former or first-time).
This is an MMORPG. MMOs don’t grow and expand after four years. They contract and shrink. Plan accordingly.
When I read these WvW forums it seems as though 90% think it’s awful, terrible, no fun and sheer misery.
On the other hand, when I log in to WvW day after day and listen to map/team/guild chat it’s maybe 10% complaining and 90% people seeming to be enjoying themselves.
Similarly, according to the forums, no-one plays WvW any more, everyone left and the game mode is dead. Yet when I play, as I do every day, and not even in NA prime either, I find a ton of people out doing stuff, commanders tagged up, zergs clashing, and structures changing hands.
Not saying everything is kittens and rainbows but it’s not all falling to pieces either.
Split regular matches into two leagues: Weekday (4 day) and Weekend (2 day). Use the remaining day (Friday would be preferable) for an ongoing series of one day tournament matches which reset skirmish by skirmish.
Basically, speed the whole thing up while also splitting into into more parts. Increase excitement and variety while at the same time avoiding burnout.
The idea that 2:1:1 promotes 2v1 is fine in theory but is it actually happening in any tier in practice? For all the endless, tedious complaining about “double teaming” it’s always been very hard to maintain any determined 2v1 for more than a few sessions. Mostly what you see is a couple of large guilds co-operating for the duration of their raids. Once they log off it all reverts to a free for all.
The current system makes an organized 2v1 even harder to maintain because, if it were to be successful and the leading server were to be pushed out of first place in successive skirmishes, there would then be an issue over which of the other two servers was benefiting most. The idea of both maintaining a 2v1 and also trading wins so that both those servers gain equal points is laughable. Not going to happen.
In my experience it’s relatively easy to get a lot of people on both servers to co-operate in a loose 2v1 when both servers really hate a third server (being on YB that’s been very common to see, unsurprisingly) but as time goes on, as the scores flatten out and old grudges get forgotten it gets harder to fan the flames of those rivalries. What I see under the current scoring system isn’t a move to rational 2v1 play but a much more ad hoc approach where everyone pretty much goes where the action is regardless of the strategic value. That allows a dominant server to become even more dominant because neither of the other teams really cares about the overall result, which is a foregone conclusion Also, looking only at the NA league, since the scores are now so flattened that wildcards mean almost anyone could be in any tier from 2 to 4 at any time, playing for places becomes even more meaningless.
What will change this is if ANet attach meaningful rewards to placement. If coming 2nd gets you an Ascended Weapon or Armor chest and coming third doesn’t, then you will see behavior change, just to give one example.
None of this accords with my experience. I play on two servers, YB and EB, mainly in EU prime but also pretty often in OCX and SEA (EU morning and afternoon). In fact, the only time zone I never see at all is NA prime.
I play most days and have done since launch. I can remember several periods when there were fewer people around, when zergs were smaller or non-existent and when activity was significantly lower. Equally, I can remember busier periods.
I would say the last six months or so have been average in terms of action in WvW at the times I play. Weekends are very busy. If I log in on Sunday morning EU time I can and do find myself in a full zerg within minutes and end up losing six hours. I actually avoid WvW on weekends because it’s too hectic and I get sucked in and spend more time there than I planned.
Weekday mornings (OCX) on YB is always busy. One Aussie-led guild always runs open raids then and musters 30+, while there are generally a couple of other smaller groups around. SEA can be quiet midweek but by the time I get home from work, early EU prime, a couple of other regular Commanders usually have zergs of 30+ running. And of course if DK is on you can double those numbers.
EBay depends who we’re linked with these days but I never found any shortage of action with HoD or SoS. I forget who we had before that. Zerg sizes there are definitely smaller but still there’s no shortage of people out doing stuff.
I think people have a rose-tinted memory of how busy WvW used to be, or else they were in T1/T2 when there were 9 tiers and base everything on that. YB was in T3-5 in the first two years and numbers now seem fairly similar to that. We rarely had queues outside of EBG back then except at weekends as far as I remember it.
Numbers are down across the board, though, as you would expect in a four year old MMO that hasn’t had a new expansion for over a year. PVE is quieter. What else would you expect? WvW was never anywhere even close to being as popular as PvE in the first place and the removal of almost anything that interests PvE players has made that even more the case. Doesn’t mean there aren’t enough people playing WvW to keep things buzzing. How many people does it need, anyway?
I’d take Desert Borderland over EBG any day. For the first couple of years EBG pretty much had its own sub-game on the server I play on – different commanders, different players, different guilds. I barely ever went there.
Over time that loosened up a little but we still have EBG crews and home BL crews to a significant degree. I’m not and probably never will be an EBG player. When we had three Desert BLs and EBG I spent 90% of my time on the Desert BLs, not because I liked them all that much – I don’t hate DBL but I prefer Alpine – but because I find EBG, as often as not, to be a very bad-tempered environment, full of people who don’t seem to like each other much. Alpine BLs and DBL both seem to encourage a much more friendly, co-operative spirit.
Play for the fights, nothing else. There are no server identities, just guilds.
I don’t give a toss about guilds or guild identity in this or any other MMO. Never have and probably never will. Server identity, however, is crucial. As for fights, they exist to serve matchplay, not as an end in themselves.
That’s my reality. Yours may differ.
I played in all the WvW Tournaments and totally loved them. By far the best periods of WvW play in the entire life of the game for my money. The rewards were irrelevant – I never spent any of my tokens, all of which I still have in the bank. The fun was all in having a very clear, finite competition rather than the infinite Valhalla simulator that runs the rest of the time.
That said, it is true that there was some burnout and people did take breaks afterwards. I can’t see what the problem is with people taking breaks but encouraging players to stay awake for too long or take time off work or school to play is a step too far, I agree.
So, the solution would seem to be to have shorter tournaments! When GW2 launched we had matches that lasted days not a whole week. Presumably the mechanics to do that are still there. Or make it even faster – have tournaments that last one day, where matches reset after each skirmish and everyone plays everyone else in a matter of hours not weeks. There must be countless ways to set up a Tournament that avoid the burnout issue.
This discussion assumes a couple of things that I don’t feel are always, or even often, true: that people act rationally and that servers act coherently.
When there is a very clear objective, for instance back in the Seasons/Tournaments or when a server is being hoisted up the rankings by an organized group of guilds or commanders, then both of the above sometimes pertain.
Mostly, though, what I’ve observed in normal matchplay is that certain Commanders and/or Guilds have vendettas or grudges against certain other Commanders or Guilds on other servers and most of their focus is on pursuing those agendas regardless of the tactical or strategic outcome where the match is concerned. Similarly, a significant proportion of players on certain servers profess to “hate” specific other servers for various historical reasons, either perceived or actual, and those servers will be focused again regardless of matchplay strategy.
Maybe this is different on other servers, which may have a more coherent or pragmatic or results-oriented leadership but I think it’s a bit of a stretch to expect that the majority of servers will start behaving as though they are organized teams competing in a meaningful competition when all the evidence is that they are loose collectives rattling about in a disorganized continuum.
2,1,1 takes out the king maker element. Where first place dictates 2nd place by focusing.
Instead first place will be the target and 3rd place wont have to compete with 2nd for first.
WvW is meant for 2v1s you guys need to quit your complaining. Perhaps learn the game a bit.
I don’t disagree in principle but over the last six months or so it’s become increasingly difficult to find anyone in the matches I’ve been in who even knows what the current score is, far less cares about it enough to change the way they play to affect it. Almost everything now seems to be about finding people to fight. Nothing else matters. Countless times I’ve been with commanders who spent all their time trying to locate the other zerg(s) for an hour or three of pitched battles while ignoring havoc groups that were gradually turning our entire BL another color.
It’s partly down to the prolonged absence of certain PPT/Result oriented Commanders but mostly I think it’s because all matches seem to feel roughly the same whether we win or lose or whatever tier we find ourselves in. The deliberate flattening of the variation between servers is having the effect of making nothing seem to matter as much as it once did. It all feels like a kick-around before the match now, not like the match itself.
The change to scoring for Fortified structures has done something to reverse that trend but not much. My feeling is that any changes in scoring won’t do much to change behavior. When we will see big changes in how people play will be when the new rewards get attached to victory conditions and score. If those rewards are seen as desirable then people will play in whatever way maximizes their chances of getting them and then we really might see a lot of score-focused play.
Rewards would follow as the past 3 WvW seasons:
-1st place, 100 tickets
-2nd place, 50 tickets
-3rd place, 25 tickets
These things were incentives? I still have all of mine in the bank. For me, Seasons were fantastic because of the competition they created, not because of any so-called “reward” they offered. Personally I feel attaching any kind of reward to WvW matches and/or activities within them is the problem, not the solution. If players don’t find the result of the match and of the individual skirmishes within the match sufficient motivation and reward then I can’t see the point of playing WvW at all.
As for Ascended gear, it should be treated like Exotics were in WvW and added to vendors for sale for badges. By all means make it non-equippable outside of The Mists so it can’t be used for PvE.
Good luck finding ten mesmers willing to spend their game time doing something like this. Two or three years ago, when we did golem rushes, we often had four or five mesmers running portals. I haven’t seen more than two in the last year, year and a half. Most times we can’t even get one.
I don’t know why this is all tied to the idea of whether Gliding is or isn’t good for Jumping Puzzles. I don’t care about JPs but I don’t want to use a glider unless I want to use a glider. It should be default OFF and switch it on in options if you want to use it.
I voted for DBL. I prefer Alpine but I also want variety. DBL has its good points – taking defended keeps there, especially the Earth Keep (Garri) makes for some amazing battles.
I’d vote for four entirely different maps if we had the option. Variety over “balance” any day.
OP is a description of one correct use of shield generators. They are a tool. It’s up to the players to decide how to use them.
As a defender, either a sneak attack or a push to disable or destroy gens is one of the fun things to do. If you can’t manage that then you weren’t going to save the tower/keep anyway.
Relinks happen at reset on the last Friday of every even month so the next one should be on December 30.
Don’t think you could replace WvW with this but I’d certainly love to see it as a separate game mode.
Better they add an actual GvG Mode separate from either WvW or sPvP. Half the problem is trying to get a game mode that was designed for one thing (large scale battles over structures and territory) to satisfy several other interests at the same time.
Focus!
Scroll through the OP’s post history. Especially the older posts.
Do you actually need to redo the whole thing, separately, every time? Can you not farm the ingredients in one session and hold stacks of them, then use them as and when you need them? That would make it no different to farming mats for any combine you planned on repeating.
I have a different issue with The Bitter Cold. I’ve done map completion in Bitterfrost on two characters now and just started on a third. The first was the one who’d completed the whole storyline. He’d already gotten the PoI during the story but when he used the tube to get the Mastery point he died instantly on landing even though he had the elixir buff up .
The second character hadn’t touched the story. She had no elixir buff, obviously. She used the tube to get the PoI, landed safely and had plenty of time to turn and run back to get the PoI.
The third character only did the story far enough to get the elixir buff. She then went straight to the tube and used it, intending to get both the Mastery point and the PoI, but she, too, died instantly on landing and got neither.
I’m wondering if you can only survive that landing if you DON’T have the buff on. If not, then why did those two characters die instantly while the unbuffed one had 3 or 4 seconds to run around first?
The way stealth/invisibility works in most MMOs I’ve played is either you can’t be seen but you can’t move at all or you move at heavily reduced speed. Also at least some other classes have a way not just to dispel stealth/invis but to detect it as well.
For whatever reason GW2 didn’t bother with most of these restrictions/counters, relying instead on short durations, which imaginative players and subsequent game changes soon rendered ineffective as limiters.
The stealth disruptor traps were added as a clumsy attempt to redress the inbalance but as many above have pointed out it’s the whole implementation of the stealth mechanic that needs revision. Until that happens the traps at least allow for some action against the worst abusers.
I have all names off and always have had. Even the dots are more clutter than I want to see. If that makes me more vulnerable, big deal. I’d rather have clean visuals any day. If I want to know who someone is or what guild they rep or how high they rank then I’ll target them. Otherwise I’d rather see images than icons or writing hanging in the air.
I also thought it was mainly pathing issues rather than anything intentional. Pathing in GW2 has always been peculiar. Of course, I wasn’t really paying close attention. Mostly I just tend to dodge roll and hit all the AEs until everything dies or stand back and range, class depending. Seems to work as well in Bitterfrost a sit does almost everywhere else. Other than the insane mob density in some areas and the plethora of Veterans mixed in with everything else, which reminds a little of Orr the first time around, Bitterfrost seems fairly standard apart from the weather effects..
I did notice that anything that isn’t a Veteran seems to have the hitpoints of a sickly kitten though, which is handy.
This change seems to weird to me. I personally think someone is pulling the strings behind, causing Braham to obsess with taking down Jormag, “alone”
As I was playing through this episode for the first time I found myself wondering whether Braham was suffering the kind of influence from Jormag that the Sylvari experienced with Mordremoth. Perhaps the growth of the Sons of Svanir cult has more to do with direct draconic influence than mere poor judgment and egotism.
Other than that, the problem with Braham isn’t so much what he does and says in this episode as it is in how abrupt and unheralded his change of attitude is. He’s always been headstrong and hot-tempered but he has no history I can recall of being openly, offensively rude. Especially not to people he would be expected to think of as friends.
His treatment of Rox is particularly off, not least his final, barked command to Garm to follow him. Garm is not his wolf (maybe legally – no idea how Norn inheritance works). Rox found Garm, tended him as has been looking out for him ever since. If Garm is bonding with any new owner it would surely be Rox. It’s mildly surprising that Garm obeys Braham at all.
All this may turn around and be resolved convincingly later but at the moment it jars. If there isn’t a deeper narrative going on here then it’s not very convincing characterization.
“might as well have an underwater map”.
Desert, Alpine, Underwater, EBG. That’d work for me.
How about disabling the troublesome effects instead of the entire thing?
In fact, how about anticipating these problems when you create the tonics in the first place? How about building in “effects disabled in WvW game mode” into the basic design of all tonics and making them function as simple illusions?
I really don’t understand why so much in GW2 has to be so difficult to adjust in a more subtle and timely manner. Is the game really coded or designed so differently from other MMOs that seem to manage it with greater flexibility?
Forums are salty. WvW in game nowhere near as much.
Is WvW dead? No.
Is it dying? No.
Are there fewer people playing WvW than there used to be? I would definitely say so from my experience, and in all four tiers too, but I don’t play NA Prime so can’t speak for that.
Is WvW lacking direction at the moment? It seems so.
Is it still fun? It is for me although it varies match to match.
Will it go on being fun if it stays “as is” long term? Hard to say but with no meaningful scoring system, matchmaking or competitive element it’s hard to see how interest can be sustained over years to come. If it’s just about fighting for the sake of fighting, well, there are other games that do that a lot better.
If you believe these forums WvW is broken, is always broken, always will be broken.
If you go and play you’ll find it’s often fun, occasionally horrible and varies wildly from day to day, week to week, match to match, server to server.
It’s probably not unreasonable to say that for that subset of WvW players who used to mainly enjoy “roaming” either solo or in small groups, finding like-minded opponents and having personal trials of skill, then yes, WvW is a bit more broken than it used to be.
On the other hand, if you like following a Commander with a tag in a large zerg, taking structures and battling other large zergs, then WvW is probably less broken than it used to be.
And if you like being part of a sprawling but always recognizable community, where the same names turn up week in, week out and you know all the guild names, which rarely change, and all of you together make up a fiercely loyal, proud “World” ready to fight other “Worlds”… then yes, it’s broken – although not irretrievably so.
HoT didn’t sell as well as expected. That was confirmed in NCSoft’s financial reports. Following the disappointing returns from HoT the whole direction of the game was shifted away from the increased difficulty that had been tried in HoT back towards the more casual approach the game took before the expansion.
In effect what the OP is asking for was tried a year ago, failed and was reverted. The chances of seeing another ramp up of difficulty either across the board or in the second expansion would therefore seem to be slim. What the HoT experiment suggests is GW2 is not a game ever likely to appeal to hardcore gamers so any attempt to court people with increased levels of difficulty is almost sure to be counterproductive commercially.