Guild Wars 2

DeWolfe.2174:

Also, holding an enemy’s north should never be a thing. It’s always been considered bad form to try and upgrade and enemy’s Garrison. So I question the intentions of those wanting the Treb’s removed.
.

Are we playing the same MMO? Taking and holding the enemy’s structures is the entire game mode of WvW. Taking, holding and upgrading the enemy’s garrison is a significant victory condition. A perfect match would consist of your server taking, holding and upgrading every structure on all four maps for the full week.

It’s no wonder it’s so hard to get agreement on what is or isn’t appropriate behavior when some payers consider an action to be the entire point of playing while others consider it unfair play.

When ANet address the scoring issues in the next round of fixes for WvW they seriously need to make some open and unequivocal clarifications of what is and isn’t intended gameplay in WvW and to reinforce those clarifications with self-evident and inarguable scoring mechanics. There will never be consensus so long as its left to players to interpret.

If we aren’t supposed to upgrade structures after we take them then those structures should not be upgradeable when taken. If they are only supposed to be held for a limited time then they should be forced back to neutral or original ownership after a specific period. If we are supposed to hold them for as long as possible and to upgrade them when we own them then there should be bonuses to the score based on how long they are held and how far they are upgraded. Etc etc.

This isn’t a sandbox or a free-for-all arena. It’s a competitive league with matches and a scoring system. It needs to operate that way and if there is a widespread desire for a more open, player-based, non-score oriented game mode, be it free-for-all or Guild vs Guild or whatever then that needs to be separated off and developed appropriately. These aims and purposes are not compatible and cannot operate effectively in the same gamespace.

It becomes increasingly hard to argue that something’s an exploit when it has been widely known, reported and remains unchanged after nearly four years. At the very least you’d have to say that it isn’t considered an important or significant exploit by the powers that be.

It’s also only really used by servers that losing badly. If you need a Citadel treb to get the northern towers back you are already in deep trouble and it’s hardly going to have any significant impact on the direction of the match.

That said, it’s clearly not intended and ought to be tidied up. I won’t build trebs there or use them if they are placed. It’s just a cheesy tactic that I’d prefer our server didn’t use. You can’t stop individuals building there, though, and once the treb is up people will inevitably use it. Best if the flaw is just removed the way the invulnerable spots that used to plague the camps next to the spawn-in areas were.

It’s bugged. So is the Activity daily. Maybe others too?

My wife reports that the world vs world “Master of Monuments” daily is also bugged. The description now includes both “ruins” and “shrines” but standing on a ruin doesn’t update the daily.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

~snip~ For example the SW guy who babbles about Mordremoth attacking the pale tree. He has one line and repeats it every 30 seconds. ~snip~

Dear heavenly Dwayna — did you time that? Is it really 30 seconds!? I know I have heard more than I need about talking cabbages, but 30 bloomin’ seconds is really, really frequent. Can you let me know if that’s actual timing — I’d appreciate it.

Aren’t some of these conversations triggered by player proximity? I thought that was what was happening with the three I mentioned above from Citadel in Desert Borderlands. The NPCs are all close to the WP and it seems to trigger every time someone arrives – sometimes the sample will stop in the middle and start over as a new person runs past.

“This place…changes you”
“You could say that”
“Liar!”

Thankfully, with the resting of the Desert Borderlands today, those are three conversations I won’t have to hear for a while.

Straegen.2938:

Reverence.6915:

Ok, so OnS, WHOA, kitten, EK, TW, GS, eN etc. moving to YB didn’t count. Gotcha.

They certainly did help lift YB into T1 but most of those guilds haven’t been on YB for a while. Several switched to BG and JQ weeks ago. Some stayed on but mostly YB has been winning recently on the backs of PUGs running behind DK and Chris.

As someone who’s been on YB since beta I’d like to say that WvW on Yak’s Bend is " PUGs running behind DK and Chris". Of course there are some strong, dedicated, organized guilds and there are certainly plenty of other dedicated commanders but all YB’s big adventures and excitements have involved a very healthy dose of " PUGs running behind DK and Chris". That’s what I log in for and mostly it’s what I get. Long may it continue.

As for YB’s ascent to and stay in T1, this is the most accurate and succinct summary of how it happened that I’ve seen:

caljay.8720:

Reverence.6915:

Ok, so OnS, WHOA, fR, EK, TW, GS, eN etc. moving to YB didn’t count. Gotcha.

eN didnt exist when YB pushed to t1, and has been alive much longer on TC than YB (spent 1 month on YB, been on TC since December), so we didnt do anything really to help them ‘dominate T1’.
fR stayed on YB for maybe 2 weeks before going to t3 to die.
EK transferred to YB and died immediately, dont think they even raided.
GS was in t3 when YB went to t1, and im pretty sure they spent more time on JQ than YB since then.
WHOA died not long after transferring to YB.
TW lasted a while longer and then died/transferred.

The only guild that I would say played a part in YB ‘dominating t1’ was OnS, and OnS and TW were (out of those guilds listed) the main contributors to them getting to t1

My knowledge of the detail is sketchy at best, being just one of the PUG pack, but that’s how I understood it as it played out.

I’d usually steer well clear but in all honesty I can’t say I’ve seen more than a couple of clear 1v1 fights in the last year. Used to be more a couple of years back but wherever people duel these days it doesn’t seem to be anywhere I go.

I just wanted to add that the OP’s experience after the linking is by no means limited to players from the lower-tier servers. On Yak’s Bend there have been plenty of rumbles of discontent in map and team chat about the loss of freedom to roam, about the now obligatory and ubiquitous nature of blob v blob combat, and in general about the way the massively increased populations have severely curtailed player choice. It may well have been like this in T1 a year or more back – people say it was. It was not, however, anything like this over the last few months and it’s not unequivocally accepted as an improvement.

ANet used to be famous for an iterative development process, where changes were made continually until an optimum result was reached. World linking looks like it’s at the start of that process, not the end. I hope we can end up with a version that encourages a wide range of play-styles not just the current blobfest.

Terrahero.9358:

Not afraid of raiding, i just find it incredibly boring.

Ditto. The only reason to “fear” raiding is fear of tedium.

The HoT maps are just following the same cycle that the Orr maps did when the base game was launched. The Orr maps were filled with events that required groups and cross-map co-ordination, were very thickly populated with difficult, aggressive mobs and did not play well for casual or solo players. Over time the difficulty in the three Orr maps was adjusted downwards several times but even now, nearly four years later, those maps still require co-ordinated group play to complete the event chains and can still be challenging for casual or solo adventurers.

Having played through both when they were new I would say the Original Orr maps were less accessible and very definitely less entertaining than the HoT ones were, even before the nerfs. The HoT maps as they are now are, I would say, no more difficult for a casual or solo player than Orr, but they are far more rewarding (both visually and because the loot is better).

One of the problems HoT has is that it becomes progressively easier and easier the more Masteries you attain but you have to play through it on its “hardest setting” to get those Masteries. Since getting Masteries is one of the key content drivers of the expansion that’s hard to change – you can hardly just give people the Masteries up front – but players who don’t have them will always perceive the content to be much harder than those who do.

As for there not being enough people on the maps to complete the events efficiently, that hasn’t been my experience. I play EU hours on NA servers so I never see the game in its full prime time and often I’m playing in the server cluster’s “off hours”. Even so I have never had any trouble in six months in finding active, populated instances of any of the four HoT maps. Many – probably most – of the Core Tyria maps are a lot less populated.

It took me about 20 pods to get the drop for Fix-r-Upper last night. I don’t remember it taking anything like that long for the last four or five weapons I did. Don’t know if that’s just bad luck on the rng or whether something changed in the patch.

EBG has always been the dumping ground for WvW. A place to be avoided if possible. The last thing WvW needs is more EBG.

Four different maps would be interesting, though. Forget “balance” and go for “variety”. Probably can’t have both.

Virtute.8251:

ArenaNet,

Everyone else—especially TC, BG, JQ, YB,

If your queues are punishing to the point of being unplayable, then that is how it should be, and you should be moving your guilds to the bottom of the board. Your queues are why we didn’t move into your servers when you were throwing gold at us for the past 3.5 years. Then we did move in when the queues died because the game died. Now the queues are back, and now you’re persona non grata for transfers again.

Get used to it.

You have no concept of loyalty, do you? Carpekitten is not a solution, it’s the problem. Server moves were a mistake from the get-go. If you want to play on another server, buy another account and start over. Without meaningful server loyalty what exactly is the point of “world versus world versus world”?

To begin with I’d like to join with the minority view expressed above. I’d prefer that WvW had no extrinsic rewards. The only reward needed is War Score and being able to look up the history of the server’s record over time. I’d also prefer to have equalized gear like PvP and have all WvW purchases (siege, consumables etc) handled purely within WvW as standard allocations requiring no purchase by players. That’s not going to happen, so on to feedback about what is happening:

1. How do you feel overall about reward tracks?

They’re okay. Not going to make me play WvW either more or less than I already was but it adds a bit of flavor.

2. What are your thoughts on the rate at which you gain participation?

This is the big problem. Why do we even need a continual “participation” mechanic? You just de-coupled fixed attendance periods from reward progress throughout HoT so why would it be a good idea to add it to WvW? Having to wait for the tick to get credit for something you did ten minutes ago is just weird. If you kill a sentry or take a keep you should get the credit there and then. Give credit for discreet actions, not for abstract “participation”. Yes, I know that puts the problem back concerning rewards for non-recorded activity like scouting, siege tagging etc but again I don’t believe these things need any reward beyond the satisfaction of doing them so I leave it to others to work out how that might be handled if there wasn’t “participation” for the Commanders to subdivide.

3. How do you feel about the rate you earn reward track points?

Seems okay. It’s slower than sPvP but then WvW probably encourages longer sessions so that may be necessary. I wouldn’t complain if it was speeded up a bit though.

4. Overall, what are your impressions about the types of reward tracks we have?

Unimaginative is the word that springs to mind. It would be nice if more, or even all, of them were handcrafted for WvW and not just copy/pasted from other modes.

5. Are there any other reward tracks you would really like to see?

The only thing that would really interest me would be Titles. Preferably witty and amusing ones.

For all Scarlet’s faults (and there were plenty), for all the shortcomings of both Season 1 and 2 (and again there were plenty), I’d take another round with Scarlet in a heartbeat rather than months of…nothing.

As has been said, she may have been annoying and badly written and the plotline may have been unbelievable but boy, did she bring the action. I want that game back, the one with the zone invasions and the huge meta-events and I’ll take Scarlet as the price if necessary.

Xenesis.6389:

Last time the Empire did this YB went along for the ride for the most part, and SoS and FA brought out their white handkerchiefs and waved goodbye to YB until they got their kittens out of T2.

As someone who’s been on Yaks Bend since beta I’d like to say that by no means every WvW regular was on board with being hijacked and shoved into T1. Plenty of people expressed concern about it but the consensus was that there wasn’t a whole lot we could do about it so, yes, we would indeed have to go along for the ride whether we liked it or not.

Naturally most people would have been curious to get to T1 just to see what it was like and to say we’d been there, but there wasn’t even a huge server-wide enthusiasm for going to T2 when that happened and I doubt many people on YB were expecting kitten be a lot better.

After three and a half years of WvW on YB I would say by far the most enjoyable period, and the one most people probably remember most fondly apart from the Seasons, was when we were in a six-way in T3/T4, servers going up and down every week and wild cards flying around in all directions. I’d happily see us drop two or three tiers again if it meant we could get back to that degree of volatility and unpredictability.

If it was up to me there would never have been server transfers of any kind. Not at all. Never. You want to play on another server? Buy another account and level up. What happened to YB and is now happening to TC is emblematic of the problem, not of any kind of solution. Without server loyalty WvW is meaningless. Megaservers crippled server loyalty and now cross-server guild alliances are finishing it off.

What is afk, though? I am logged into GW2 as I write this (in Rata Sum as it happens). I just read this thread and several others, which took me about twenty minutes. I tab out of game all the time and if I happen to start reading or watching something interesting I might be gone for an hour. Several days a week I write blog posts that take me up to five hours and I’m generally logged into an MMO, often GW2, for the whole time.

Now, I almost always park my character somewhere out of aggro because I find the sound of her being mauled by wildlife quite distracting but I could perfectly well put my ranger in the situation described. I have sound set to play even when tabbed out so I would hear the ping of a whisper and could tab back in to reply. I would not, however, be actively playing the game but would I strictly be AFK? I am, after all, at the keyboard, I’m just not using it to play GW2.

Obviously I am not going to be bothered with this pointless process of pet-farming. Who would? But it does seem to me that the whole concept of “being AFK” needs to be more clearly defined – or maybe re-named.

I just wanted to say that I think this is clearly the right decision for the longer-term health of the game. The content drought has been ridiculous. Effectively, we’ve had one meaningful content drop in fifteen months: HoT. Other MMOs with far smaller teams and budgets seem to manage to put out both a paid-for expansion and several free content drops of significance in that timescale. The status quo is evidently not sustainable. Something needed to be done – whether scrapping this one project and re-assigning what sounds like quite a small team elsewhere is enough we will have to wait and see.

The issues of trust that are being raised in this thread are important but anyone who’s been playing for a while will recognize that these are the same arguments that have been made following many previous decisions and changes of direction. Such trust in the company as there might have been during the long beta ramp-up and the post-launch honeymoon began to decline around the time of the Karka Invasion, well over three years ago, and has never recovered. It’s too late to worry about losing trust – it was lost long ago.

Naturally, everyone who was invested in the new Legendary system is going to be upset. As has been pointed out numerous times, if the issue is primarily over the time it takes to produce the lengthy scavenger hunts rather than the models themselves, it might be possible to limit the damage by simply adding the new weapons as RNG drops/crafted items in the same manner as the old. If that’s not possible then it’s a question of weighing one set of disgruntled customers against another and deciding which set is more valuable, I guess. You can’t please everyone all the time.

It seems apparent that this game has been drifting rudderless for a long time now. That’s no surprise to many of us playing it, I’m sure. I just hope that the new captain has a clearer idea of how to steer the ship and where he’s planning on sailing it than the last one did. This decision at least indicates he’s got a firm grip of the wheel and that’s got to be an improvement.

I know this isn’t a vote but I just wanted to add yet another voice to the chorus: please, if you do nothing else, bring back the Alpine Borderlands.

The Desert BL is a great map – for PvE and gliding. That’s what it looks like it was intended to be used for and it would be very welcome as a new overland PvE map. It isn’t just that the Desert BL doesn’t work well for WvW, though, although self-evidently it doesn’t. It’s almost as much that many of us really loved the original BLs. We had an emotional investment in Hills and Bay and Garrison that just has not carried over to the new structures.

Air and Fire Keep are structurally amazing but they feel alien and strange. There’s a conversation at the spawn between two NPCs where one asks the other where all these keeps and towers came from and gets the reply that “They were just here” – it’s supposed to make the place feel mysterious but actually it emphasizes how dissociated the new map is from any context that would make us, the players, feel it’s a place we want to defend.

So, yes, fix stability and do something about population – although not at the expense of server loyalty which, like the emotional attachment many of us had to the old BLs, is a lot more powerful than you may imagine – but first and foremost, get us back to our homelands.

“The number of players who can rally off a single kill has been reduced from five to one."

Erm…which one? The one who was downed the most recently? The one downed for the longest? The closest? The one who did the most damage to the killed one? Some other measure? Random?

That’s the change that puzzles me, both in how it is going to work and why it’s apparently so important. I wasn’t aware hard rezzing was an issue although clearly from the responses above it has been for some. Certainly no-one’s been hard-rezzing me in combat over the last three years!

The Dolyak change is excellent. Auto-upgrading was a daft idea to begin with for so many reasons. If we could get rid of the ludicrous “Kill Dinos to Fire A Laser” mini-game that would be great too.

Supply cost for cats is okay although I can’t say I’ve noticed all that many cats in use in the new BLs – mostly we seem to have been flash-building Omegas.

PPK I couldn’t care less about either way. If it makes people happy, fine.

In the end, though, it’s the new BL design that’s the problem. It would make a great PVE zone with flying enabled, something it was clearly designed to be, but there are no tweaks that will ever make it any more than awkwardly manageable for WvW.

Colin says “The reality about FX visibility is it’s consistent feedback we’ve had on every part of Gw2 for years that people can’t always see what’s going on in combat” which is fair enough. On the other hand, the consistent feedback has also been that PvE combat in particular is very easy. In most cases we don’t need to see what’s going on in any great level of detail.

For the open-world PvE gameplay I’ve been enjoying for the last three years the huge explosions and spectacular spell effects have been a major part of the attraction. Take those away and it exposes the threadbare nature of a lot of what lies behind it. Personally I was very happy with a visually spectacular game that was very easy to play. Not at all sure I’d be as interested in the reverse, which is where we appear to be heading.

Bring back the big explosions. If we get a slider for visual noise I’ll be setting mine to “Deafening Roar”.

One of the very first things I do when I begin playing an MMO is turn off every name, icon and number the UI allows me to remove. I want to see the world not a load of floating text. The options to do this vary a lot between games but GW2 has one of then more limited and inflexible systems.

The problem isn’t whether people should be allowed to display the information; it’s the extent to which others are able to filter it to their preference. More filters are a universal good in my opinion. GW2 is poor in that respect. It tends to be all or nothing. Since I want nothing that is manageable from my point of view but it could clearly be improved to suit more people than just the extremes.

sephiroth.4217:

62 days to make a legendary is rather quick considering how long it took to make a legendary after GW2 release.

Some people have played since beta, and still don’t have a legendary.

Some people have played since beta and still don’t want a legendary.

o/

The new maps are great for soloing WvW dailies. You can pretty much guarantee you’ll never be interrupted by a pesky enemy player while you do your five guard kills or claim a sentry point or flip a shrine.

Similarly, you can admire the magnificent scenery and explore the whole map for hours without any danger of running into anyone.

All the facilities – banks, crafting, TP etc – are still a convenient single load screen away from anywhere, same as before.

For actual WvW gameplay though, about as much use as a chocolate frying pan.

No, I’m not tired of looting bags. I like looting bags and I like opening them. I like sorting and selling and salvaging what comes out of them. I don’t have an issue with it. In fact I actively look forward to it.

Gaaroth.2567:

tl;dr;
A game needs progression, HoT gave progression in a meaningful way. Don’t rush it, enjoy it.

I like HoT but I have to take issue with this sweeping statement and the one in your signature. I don’t need either a “game” or “progression”. I can set my own goals. I don’t need to be given them. All the developers need to do is make a convincing world and I’ll do the rest for myself.

Opposite reaction here. I wasn’t expecting much at all from HoT. I thought it looked very bland and uninspiring in the lead-up. When it arrived I found it was much, much more to my taste than I’d expected.

I’ve played almost non-stop since it arrived. Normally I play several other MMOs concurrently with GW2 but since HoT I haven’t logged into anything else.

PvE, at least 8/10. Verging on 9. Best exploring and solo play I’ve had in an MMO for a good while. Events are good too. Mastery system and the acquiring of HPs plays to the kind of slow, long-term gameplay I prefer, meaning something solid and simple to chip away at, here and there, on and off over a year or two until the next expansion.

Personal Story 7/10 of which most is for the gameplay, a vast improvement on the awful, frustrating, annoying combat and gimmickry of LS2, which I detested. Story is ok but dialog options are too limited. If characters don’t have a plot-relevant line they don’t say anything so a lot of the flavor is missing.

WvW changes I give 3/10. The new BL would make a great PvE zone but the old Alpine BL was vastly superior for the purpose of three-way, siege-based team warfare. At the moment WvW players have clearly voted with their feet – hardly anyone is playing. Whether that will change in a few weeks or months we’ll see but unless there are further, significant changes I doubt it.

Fractals, legendaries, not interested, no rating.

Overall 7/10 – Very Good.

I’ve been getting the “Cannot connect to guild server” message frequently this last week. Until last night I hadn’t noticed any actual effects beyond the line of text in chat.

I was getting it on and off all day yesterday. Don’t know if this is related but last night I got the message in text that my wife, who was logged on and playing in another room, had logged out. Guild panel confirmed that. When I went in to see her, however, she was still logged in and playing.

I re-logged but guild continued to show her offline. Only she and I were on from the guild and when I spoke in guild chat I got the “No-one hears you” message. We both carried on playing with no other noticeable problems for a while, maybe ten or fifteen minutes. She then re-logged and when she came back she was in guild again as normal.

Not seen this particular piece of weirdness before.

I wasn’t expecting to find much to enjoy in HoT. I was in two minds for a while whether to buy it at all but after nine months with no new content I figured anything was better than nothing.

To my great surprise it’s turned out to be enormous fun. I’ve played just about every available hour since launch and had a great time. It feels like a proper expansion in that it expands my options within the game for the foreseeable future without invalidating what was already there.

There are plenty of design choices I’d prefer were different and some I hope may yet be changed. It could use a little more smoothing out but that will come in time. On balance and compared with many expansions I’ve played in other MMOs I feel HoT is a solid addition to the game.

Now get cracking on the next one

If you’re going to define “solo” as “do absolutely everything with no help whatsoever” then of course it’s not soloable. No MMO is.

If, however, you have a more reasonable expectation of being able to travel the entire open world, see all the locations, gain all the xp and Mastery points you need and complete the whole of the Personal Story then it’s entirely soloable. You may need to adjust your build and your tactics but that’s a given for new content.

The one aspect that isn’t fully soloable and arguably should be is the Hero Points. It’s very easy to call in /map for more to come and help or you can just wait next to one – someone will soon turn up. This is GW2 after all – there is no competition and two or three people soloing in the same area is effectively a group anyway.

I have a lot of sympathy with the OP’s point of view. While a “Guild” clearly implies more than one member, this is a video game not a real-life trade association. Would it have been a game-killer to scale the process all the way down to single-person guilds? And if it would (server load on myriad large instances perhaps) then could we not have had a much smaller option for small guilds?

That said, it needs to be remembered that you can be in five guilds at once in GW2. If what you want to do is explore the guild hall maps and see them in action you always have the option of joining a larger guild AS WELL as staying in your own small one. You don’t even need to rep any more.

My main guild is 2 and a half people (one only plays once a week and isn’t getting HoT) so we aren’t getting a guild hall but I joined a much larger guild the day before HoT arrived specifically to see what the new guild stuff was like. There are plenty of large guilds recruiting all the time.

It would be better if the barrier to entry was lowered for all guilds regardless of size but until that happens there are workarounds.

What’s being described as “farming” or “grind” here is what I call playing an MMO. One of the best things about HoT (and there are a lot of good things) is the freedom it gives to play how you want. I like to wander and explore and hunt, the way I used to do in MMOs ten or fifteen years ago. HoT encourages and supports this playstyle in a way I haven’t seen for a good while.

Wandering the byeways of the jungle killing everything that moves is immensely relaxing and enjoyable to me, far more so than chasing events, although that’s fun in its own way too. When I come across a place filled with spiders or chakk or tigers or anything else that hasn’t been touched for a while then it’s as exciting as finding a Mastery Point or a vista.

One player’s grind is another player’s content and vice versa. HoT is doing an excellent job of demonstrating that.

It’s clearly never going to be possible to make a fight that is just right for everyone. That’s what difficulty settings are for.

If it was open world or ranked competitive content then of course it would have to be the same for everyone but it’s not. This is the Personal Story. It’s set in an instance. There is no need for it to be one-size-fits-all. Just give it a selectable difficulty setting and let people enjoy it how they prefer.

MMOs don’t use difficulty settings nearly as much as they could. Or should.

Neural.1824:

People keep changing the definition of grind basically daily it seems.

Grind = anything you feel you need to do because of the outcome but for which you get no pleasure or enjoyment from the activity itself. Whether that’s doing the same activity a thousand times or a thousand different activities once each is neither here nor there.

Only the person doing the activities in question can say whether or not its a “grind” to do them because the defining factor is whether or not that person is enjoying doing them or not. Some people are going to have fun completing these massive shopping/scavenger/quest lists and others are going to hate every moment.

Personally I’m having nothing to do with any of it. Exotics have been perfectly good enough for me for three years and I can’t see any sign that that is likely to change in HoT.

Not sure how far down this ginormous thread anyone’s likely to still be paying attention but for what it’s worth I thought I’d say that i enjoyed the Mordrem event.

Yes, it was buggy but after three years of virtually every temporary event being buggy I was ready for that. It got fixed reasonably quickly. I still think GW2 could do with a real Test server for this kind of thing – the evidence is overwhelming that whatever internal testing you do is inadequate. I know there’s a strong desire to keep new stuff secret but in the trade-off between being surprised and getting events that actually work I think the balance is a little off.

The gameplay, which others have heavily criticized, was close to what I prefer and also to what I see as GW2’s USP. I play GW2 at least in part because it features a lot of easy-mode content for very large groups of players. There are few if any other MMOs that do it (Rift being the main one I guess) and none that do it nearly as well.

I am not at all interested in the current drive towards more “challenging” content, nor more organized or structured content such as DT/SW model and HoT is going to focus on. I like running around in a huge gang mowing down things that can’t fight back very effectively. Been doing it for three years and not bored of it yet, not even close.

I also purely LOVE chaos. I loved the events being layered on top of each other. I loved having a Mordrem event at a Toxic event and a centaur warband running through the middle of it all. That is exactly the kind of scenario I always imagined GW2 might provide when you were hyping the Dynamic Event system back in beta.

In those respects I had a fun time, hugely more so than I ever have in DT/SW. That said, it was nowhere near as good as the Scarlet Invasions. The placement of the Spawners was fixed. After a few rounds I knew what would spawn where all the time. The lack of any Bosses or culminating mega-event was weak. It did seem quite thrown-together.

Having been here since the beginning I know why champions didn’t drop champ bags. I have no idea why no loot dropped at all, though. The obvious loot would have been the blooms themselves but surely a little coin and some trash loot wouldn’t have wrecked the economy?

As for no XP or Karma – what was that about? This was to some degree touted as an event for new players. It was in low level maps. Why on earth not give those new players at least the same rewards they get from the rest of the Dynamic Events they now probably can’t do because of all the 80s zerging around?

Rewards, as in skins, potions, minis etc don’t interest me much. I would never do any event I didn’t enjoy just because it had some glitzy item attached. I ran the Mordrem events every evening and all day Sunday because I was having a great time with the gameplay as I said above.

That said, the way those rewards were attached to a 4-day event was reckless. Many people have pointed out that it would require people to go without sleep and play non-stop to get several of the top ones and as game developers, particularly MMO developers, you must know that some people WILL do that. It’s irresponsible.

I would recommend in future that if events are of short duration either there should be no rewards attached that cannot easily be obtained in other ways or that it should be made clear that there will be future opportunities to get the rewards. Personally I’d do events like this for no material rewards other than XP and Karma and regular drops but I appreciate I’d probably be doing them with two or three other people!

Other than that, I just wanted to say that for all the flaws I’d very much like to see more events like this in the future and fewer overly-structured ones like we seem to get nowadays. Don’t let all the negativity put you off – if you tweak events like this, particularly around the timeframe and reward structure, they will find a receptive audience. Many people DO like to zerg despite what the naysayers like to tell you!

I would say that if you really liked GW2 as it was at launch and went on enjoying it until around the end of Living Story One, then gradually found less and less to like as the game moved through LS2 to where it is now, then purchasing HoT is probably a bad idea.

If, on the other hand, you feel that the game only really began to find its way in the last year and you believe Dry Top and Silverwastes were a significant improvement over previous Level 80 maps then HoT should be worth buying.

Obviously we can only comment on what we have seen, which is only a portion of one map, but the intent is clearly to move away from a very casual, light-hearted, solo-friendly MMO to a more gamer-oriented, skill-based, guild-friendly one. To get the most out of HoT you are going to need faster reactions, more practice, more friends and more patience than was ever required for the base game.

The Mastery system is ok. It’s very similar to systems I’ve used in other MMOs, where it has been implemented more interestingly, but it’s a decent platform to expand upon, provided they don’t just forget about it as has happened with a lot of innovations already.

The Elite specs I haven’t tried because rolling new characters in the beta is a pain. They seem to be fairly well received on the whole though.

Gliding I do like. I wish it would be implemented in all the earlier maps as well.

As far as I understand you’ll get the new WvW and sPvP maps even if you don’t buy HoT. Everyone does.

Personally, I have bought HoT for one of my three accounts (it’s cheaper to buy a new account than add character slots and storage) so that I can follow the storyline, explore the maps and have access to any of the Elite specs that might become required for other content I enjoy, particularly WvW. I think the jungle theme will quickly wear out it’s welcome, though. I’d expect to spend maybe a couple of months at most in HoT maps before going back to the Old World for most of my play.

On balance I’d say if you intend to go on playing GW2 regularly you might as well buy the Standard version of HoT or you’ll be locked out of pretty much all new content between now and the next expansion (assuming there is one). It’s probably got just about enough content to justify the base price but what you’re really buying is the key to the next year/two years of Live content.

mercury ranique.2170:

When making an argument and stating these kind of things, you are only holding your own argument down. Who gives you the authority to speak for others and why can’t they speak for themselfes? (snip)

The tome is a lot better then the situation where you have to level up by doing content.

This is the very thing you are complaining of the OP doing. In my opinion the tome is not better. Leveling up is better. That’s why I have all the tomes I have ever received, hundreds of them, and all the xp scrolls and xp boosters too, stored in my vault.

The day may come when I have had enough of leveling but it hasn’t happened after 17 characters, 14 of them at 80. I’ll be leveling my Revenant in the traditional way.

Anyone would think we were all playing on different maps. Personally, I thought the mobs in BW2 were relatively easier than in BW1, which is a good thing in my opinion. Unlike other posters I’d rather have easy fights, which I find more interesting because I feel I’m progressing, whereas I find that the “harder” a fight is the more boring it is.

It’s just a matter of preference though – there is no “sweet spot” that will please everyone. BW1 wasn’t too hard, it was just mildly irritating. BW2 isn’t too easy, just less irritating than the last one.

I also thought that far from there being more mobs there were a lot fewer, which was the best part of the experience. I was playing a zerker staff ele and didn’t have much trouble exploring the full map while staying alive this time. Last time involved a lot of running and dying.

As for mobs not using the AI very well when faced with a large number of players, I don’t see how they can. If they are supposed to ruin away from the person attacking them and 10 people are attacking them from all directions, which way do they run? Whatever clever AI you give them focus fire from a zerg is going to counter it pretty effectively, unless you literally make them harder to kill incrementally as more people damage them – and that would be intensely annoying for everyone.

I largely agree with the OP although I wasn’t surprised to find Verdant Brink almost identical in style and approach to Dry Top/Silverwastes. The comparison with Orr is a good one, too. The plan for high level open world PvE was always clearly to use long event chains requiring large numbers of players and some organization to complete. That was how Orr was supposed to be but it wasn’t popular and had to be revamped and simplified more than once and even then it never really became the endgame destination it was meant to be.

DT/SW were the new, refined version of that concept. They added a cyclical meta-event chain with a timer, tied every event in the zone to it and put an on-screen progress indicator in clear sight all the time. Then they attached a range of progressive reward systems to encourage repetition.

That seemed to work better so they stuck with the format for HoT. Anyone who didn’t enjoy it in DT/SW is not likely to change their minds.

The big difference, I think, is accessibility. Dry Top and Silverwastes have a degree of topographical complexity but they are basically flat and easy to navigate. Verdant Brink isn’t. Even with gliders and mushrooms it’s going to be a lot harder to just see a Commander pin on the map and head straight to it to join in an event.

I think basing a map around both “verticality” and 40-minute event chains is going to become too much like hard work once the novelty wears off but I guess we’ll have to wait 3-4 months after launch to find out.

Just wanted to second the OP’s points about scaling and about long event chains. I get that the intention is for HoT combat to be harder and for groups (or zergs) to be optimal, but realistically, a couple of months after launch many events may not attract a critical mass of players, especially at off hours.

Events should scale down to solo difficulty or, if you don’t want events to be doable by solos/duos/small groups, then those events should probably not spawn at all until a sufficient number of players are in the immediate area. The convoluted topography mitigates strongly against enough people arriving by chance to finish an event that has spawned and stalled in time to do much about it, which might be an issue if long chains rely on specific events concluding.

I was going to post this in its own thread but it fits well enough here so…

The original base game is still for sale. I just checked Amazon and there are plenty of copies. If I buy one and use the code now, post-F2P, what does that do?

More importantly, how long will those codes remain valid? I’d be very interested in stashing a couple away now so that in several years I could use them to have a full-service base game account without having any of the expansions.

I have neither a landline nor a mobile phone. Not in my name. I have never had a phone in my name in my life and I’m in my 50s. I am not about to go and get either one just to play a video game.

If ANEt is concerned about the customer service costs in recovering hacked accounts perhaps they could offer another option at log in: “Confirm You Take Full Responsibility For Account Security”. Clicking that would flag your account as unrecoverable by customer service under any circumstances. That would solve their problem and that of those of us who don’t want to use the extra security they are trying to persuade us to take.

Oenanthe.6549:

The one question I have, and hope someone might be around to answer it, can a single landline number be used for multiple accounts? I have two accounts and my partner has one., our mobile phones are used to make emergency phone calls only. I can’t text my eyesight is too bad to read the letters on the keys and even with a smart phone the text is too small for me to read anyway (at least until someone comes up with the 24" smartphone) or could there be an option for a mobile number with a ‘no text’ option so that it would call us the same as a landline.

My wife and I have 3 accounts each. She has a mobile phone and the landline is in her name. I have no mobile phone and, obviously, no landline. I’ve never had any kind of phone in my own name ever, nor needed one, and have no plans on changing that.

I have used Google Authenticator in the past for other things but even then I had to use my wife’s mobile phone to set it up. When it becomes mandatory for new accounts to have one or other of these in place, won’t that mean that you can’t play GW2 without a phone number? That seems a bit extreme for a video game to say the least – I can get a bank account and a passport without having to give a phone number.

This is all very well but it has no direct effect on those of us whose loyalty is to the Server we chose back in beta. It’s like following a sports team – whether the team is top of the league or fighting relegation makes absolutely no difference to your connection with it. You stick with your team no matter what.

I always thought allowing server transfers of any kind was a mistake but clearly most people aren’t interested in who they play for or support, just whether they win or get good fights or whatever.

CETheLucid.3964:

Crapgame.6519:

What makes you think they will? Companies rarely admit they made on error in their ways.

Right? It’s almost as if different people have differing thoughts and opinions on things, like golem rush events.

Last I checked, WvW is even more populated than usual with folks playing with golems, not less. Certainly nothing that indicates people hate the event.

The Queensdale Champion Train was very popular. ANet put a stop to it because it disrupted normal gameplay for the intended users of that map.

Coil in Frostgorge was very popular. ANet put a stop to it because it disrupted normal gameply for the intended users of that event.

Super Adventure Box was very popular. ANet put a stop to it because…well, I’m not sure why but its extreme popularity certainly didn’t save it.

ANet’s record shows that just because players like to do a certain thing doesn’t mean that thing is considered good for the health of the game. I don’t think there’s much doubt that this event is highly disruptive of the normal gameplay for the intended users of these maps.

My guess is that, since it’s “only” one week they will let it run its course and then we’ll all get back to normal and pretend it never happened.

If that doesn’t happen and this event marks the beginning of a trend not merely a badly-conceived gimmick then we can assume they intend to change the use of WvW maps from competitive large-scale PvP to non-competetive resource/wealth/asset gathering a la Silverwastes, with a small PvP risk factor thrown in for flavor.

Clearly it’s ANet’s prerogative to manage their game for the best commercial return and if they feel the WvW maps can be better employed for a different game mode that’s their decision. It would be only polite for them to make that clear in advance so those of us who prefer to use the maps as they were originally conceived cna make other arrangements and find other games to play instead.

I have read all the Press Releases and ANet blogs on this topic and the threads here and the wiki and so on and I still don’t really understand how it’s going to work.

On my oldest account (not this one) I have characters with 500+ unused skill points. I have not bought all the skills available for some of those characters because I cannot see the point of buying skills I have no intention of ever slotting and using.

When the conversion comes, will ALL of the unused Skill Points be converted to shards? Will the skills I haven’t taken remain untaken even though I had points banked that could have bought them? Assuming I have done all of the existing Skill Points (I probably haven’t since I have never bothered with global map completion but for argument’s sake) and cannot therefore go to the renamed “Hero” challenges to gain more, will those characters then be locked out of ever buying the skills they chose to ignore? You’d think that wouldn’t matter but any game update could see a change that would make one of those skills attractive in a way it previously wasn’t.

If there are going to be more Hero challenges added in the future then I would tend to leave my unspent points as they are and let them convert to shards, relying on picking up more points as needed. If Hero challenges are now effectively a legacy system, however, it would make sense to spend points I have banked before the change and fill out all existing skills.

I’d like to know more detail on exactly how it will work before the game changes around me because as it stands now I don’t feel it’s clear and I’m unwilling to make a decision based on guesswork.

Since launch, whenever a player character fell more than a certain distance, a voice sample would play to suggest exhilaration or fear. It could always be heard on goggle dives and I heard it countless times when jumping from Garrison vista into the water in WvW.

Sometime maybe about a month back that sample ceased to sound. I have three accounts and over a dozen characters and I haven’t heard it on any of them for a long time. It might be a bug or perhaps it’s an undocumented change. If it’s the former, it would be nice if it could be fixed. If the latter, why?

(This was mentioned by another player back in April but replying to that thread gets a warning not to revive it due to age, hence I have started a new thread lest it be forgotten entirely).