Guild Wars 2

MMOs are always going to be broken somewhere, because there’s always somewhere the developers and designers have as a “blind spot” which they don’t think of when they make the game.

Also, it’s not just MMOs. There’s a long history of games which were broken and still released, even in arcade days. To where if one knew patterns and methods, you could basically go forever as long as your reflexes held out

innocens.1582:

theres no Viconia DeVir in this game 8-) to bad

baldurs gate, i still play that game now and then.

I bought it on Steam Summer Sale only because my original CDs lost CD #1 somewhere.

Also, Minsc would make a great norn.

Valandil Dragonhart.2371:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

And, well, no to the centaurs. I don’t even want to think about them as playable.That sounds like a nightmare of armor design.

They made it work for Zhed Shadowhoof….

I’m sorry, maybe you missed an important detail or two. We didn’t play Zhed Shadowhoof.

Red Queen.7915:

DonQuack, I think we are talking about different definitions of “bodybuilding”. I was assuming the extreme, something that is achieved via very specific exercise and a very specific diet.
That picture of Conan isn’t something I’d file under “bodybuilder”, at least not the stereotypical kind. Also, those are at least B-cups^^

. . . but that is closer to what existed when Mr. Arnold was still in shape.

Fun fact – bodybuilders sculpt their body by pretty much burning away all the fat, while the people who are actually pretty strong look chunkier by comparison. Yet, they’re just as capable of feats of strength. If you watched Game of Thrones, I’d say the guy they had playing the Mountain Who Rides could serve as an example.

Here

Reality is often . . . unrealistic

Besides, what a man has packed onto his chest isn’t that different from what a woman has. Biologically, we start out the same, and that doesn’t change too much. A woman’s breast are a combination of muscle tissue and fat, the latter of which is specific to women, I give you that. But overall, when talking about boobs, we can safely include men. Especially when talking about the very buff ones, who do have more muscle there, thus forming the infamous “kitten”. Those aren’t exclusive to large men. The exact makeup of those manboobs doesn’t really matter, the form is there. Which is what my comments were mostly directed at. If I can’t show my naked chest in public, neither can a man, because he’s got basically the same business going on, it just looks a bit different. Likewise, if a Conan character can run around shirtless, a Conina character can, too.

Slightly wrong, females do have something different biologically. No matter how equal they may look, there is still little detail of mammary glands. Whether or not they’re . . . active.

Also whether a female is accepted to run around topless really does depend on cultural sensibilities. And not the fictional culture, but the writers’ culture.

I had enough frogs in Lower Guk and Old Sebilis to last me forever, thanks. The mursaat do not play well with others. The tengu are busy killing anyone trying to get into their territory, and the Forgotten . . . I think they’re gone after Glint died.

And, well, no to the centaurs. I don’t even want to think about them as playable.That sounds like a nightmare of armor design.

Duke Blackrose.4981:

I have a strange relationship with both the Asura and Norn. I occasionally find them downright hilarious, but they’re usually intolerable, and I find their anatomy to be just plain hideous to look at.

It gets worse if you’ve seen one naked.

. . . no, I’m not going to explain that. Shall we just say if you ever are asked to volunteer for an experiment, you should not just run away. . . you should WP away with all due haste.

Kamui.4038:

Those two characters need to be killed off.

All characters need to be killed off.

Starting with the asura. Snaff already went so we’ll just continue on . . .

. . . what? I don’t . . . what? . . .

Thanatos.2691:

This would be hilarious! 10/10 would implement.

Commander + Trahearne = <3

. . . I will pay money for this to happen and be on YouTube.

Though let’s be honest. We’re all holding out for Logan/Rytlock.

. . . you remind me of about four friends who quit playing Minecraft when Prerelease 1.8 (“The Adventure Update”) happened. And never forgave me for sticking with it (mostly because I had just started).

Okay, how does Megaservers and the unnecessary gear grind spoil additional characters?

Rezzet.3614:

I Demand Crossdressing to be allowed

I am totally okay with this.

If it does, then I need to create a crossdressing charr.

Rachiia.6045:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Rachiia.6045:

I’m trying to do the enchanted map.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Enchanted_Map

I have all the scraps except for scrap 3. According to the wiki, scrap 3 is suppose to come out of Maguuma Jungle chests, but I’ve gotten two map scraps 1s from Maguuma chests. Is this a problem with the wiki or a bug?

Thanks

Which chests?

The basic chests you find in various locations around Tyria. Here’s a list:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_basic_chests

No . . . which chests, which areas, in particular?

If it’s going to be a little off and there might be a bug or an error in loot tables . .. it’s time to document instead of being vague.

I know my map pieces came from the following:

Scrap 1/4: Harathi Hinterlands, Cloven Hoof Pass. Chest in Southforge Camp.
Scrap 2/4: Plains of Ashford, Decimus Stones. Chest at the end of the path.
Scrap 3/4: Caledon Forest, Ruins of the Unseen. Grabbed it the same time as the “Sacred Skritt Shiny”.
Scrap 4/4: Frostgorge Sound, Trionic Lattice. Champion Troll chest.

I’d rebuild it using the “Bender Bender Rodriguez” principle, but then they’d have to reclassify the T rating.

Rachiia.6045:

I’m trying to do the enchanted map.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Enchanted_Map

I have all the scraps except for scrap 3. According to the wiki, scrap 3 is suppose to come out of Maguuma Jungle chests, but I’ve gotten two map scraps 1s from Maguuma chests. Is this a problem with the wiki or a bug?

Thanks

Which chests?

I take it as a sign ANet has given up and is giving players what they keep asking for time and time again.

Which means mounts aren’t far behind.

SkiTz.4590:

Depends on the rewards…no reason to do something that is this time consuming just for pathethic RNG boxes… gw2 has one of the least rewarding systems in MMOs IMO…it’s a “yay everybody is a winner! system”
heres your price box for joining a massive zerg fest and spamming an FGS at teq’s feet, good work soldier"

Funny that line forgets about the people in the turrets who have to be attentive or else things get ugly. Or the people who have to split up and keep mobs off the batteries and turrets . . . or, again, things get bad.

And everyone is not a winner. Been in at least three instances for Tequatl in the last week which haven’t beaten him. Once due to the turrets being mulched by enemies due to everything trying to do exactly what you said . . . and another in which nobody did turrets at all.

Anet’s has data showing ppl don’t really run dungs that much, so they pretty much gave up on dungs after aetherpath since no one runs it…maybe ppl would actually run them if anet could change this god forsaken reward system…instead they choose the easier path of, nah kitten it, we don’t care about dungs at all, since no one freaking runs dungs outside of quick, daily gold runs. Maybe ppl would do dungs if the rewards weren’t so PATHETIC.

And if the rewards were so wonderful you’d see people grumbling about having to do them just to keep up with inflation. How many people ran CoF1 as fast and as often as possible for the profit of it rather than because it was hilariously fun? How many people do Coiled Watch Fail Farms because it’s too lucrative not to do?

That’s in this game. In other games, there’s far worse. And in recent games too! I don’t know how many will understand this but two words: “loot cave”

You have to be careful with reward systems.

Ohoni.6057:

I’ve read those things in the past, but they typically do the same thing you are, overexagerating their case in a way that makes it more ridiculous than pointed. There are certainly places in which there is a disparity between sexualized women and sexualized men, but there are also places where the opposite is true, and too much attention is given lately to places that do things “wrong” than to places that do things right, such as your complaint about the 30% or so of GW2 light armors that are “too sexy” rather than the 70% that are not.

Come now, you know that anything more than 0% is unacceptable and needs to be “fixed”. Regardless of whether people really want it fixed or not. Or, strangely enough, whether it reflects reality or not.

You see, it doesn’t matter what reality is, or what fantasy is. What matters is what certain people perceive to be reality or fantasy. Certain people who have very loud, very opinionated voices about what is acceptable and what is not. And that’d be okay if there weren’t so many different ideas on what’s acceptable and what’s not.

And, naturally, how a whiff of the “inappropriate” masks over anything appropriate, and enacts a sort of tunnel vision about the matter. For instance, as I mentioned . . .

There is absolutely nobody who seems to care about what the charr or sylvari look like. There’s even less people convinced the asura look ‘sexy’ from what I hear.

And I was serious on my post earlier up this thread. If you get skimpy male armor, I want to have beer guts on males and females. And for sheer absolute-equality absurdity, let’s let asura get them too.

I like the idea of playing an overweight engineer asura who cosplays as Lynch’s Baron Harkonnen in his spare time.

She can defend herself, mostly until her Shining Blade handlers swoop in and remove the threat. Or get her out of trouble.

daft inquisitor.1605:

Which, again, is why it would make more sense to just have it in the same instance as the map itself. I personally don’t see a reason to make this magical “high atmosphere” zone just for airships — It would be a big resource burden all on its own, especially if it’s supposed to bridge the entirety of the continent all at the same time. That would be insanity.

Magical high atmosphere?

Just make it the Mists so we can keep any remote PvP experience there rather than on Tyria. Heck, the Mists don’t even have a space limitation since it’s a highly metaphysical realm in the first place.

Torsailr.8456:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

As for exhibit B . . . airships so far have been largely lighter-than-air craft when larger than a fishing boat in size, and have had a relatively sparse size even on the Glory of Tyria from the end of the game. I can’t imagine guild ships would be that much bigger . . .

Zephyr Sanctum.

Which still wasn’t all that much for internal space or even on-deck space for all that it was relatively massive.

daft inquisitor.1605:

Puzzle Pirates specifically, no. However, if we take that type of gameplay and retrofit it to be styled like GW2, I can definitely see it working. It just has to be a minigame of some kind, like how operating and aiming a turret (like in the Zhaitan fight) was sort of like a minigame.

Again: “Press 2 to win GvG”.

I don’t know what it is you’re seeing when you’re describing this sort of transfusion of one game type into another. I could see a lot of ways to do it, but they all fall right back into the slightly snarky bit just above. It sounds like a good idea on paper . . . but once I close my eyes and start drawing it out in my head we get to the problem of how it already worked.

Or in this case, didn’t and became infamous. Almost as infamous as “two blues and a green”.

It wouldn’t be point-and-press, it would be dynamic aiming. I think that would only be fair, and be more realistic too.

That might work if it used the cannons from WvW so you could aim them more or less where you could see.

But the issue of how to make active movement work . . . I don’t think it really could.

phys.7689:

you are ignoring a lot of the problems with your simple answer.
locking every trait is too much for new players, most of them just dont get them or have many missing traits.
Its exactly the same for every charachter, thats boring. I can level up to 80 like 10 different ways, go to different zones, do wvw, do spvp, craft, explore, do it slow with dailies, burn some kill boosters and look for bonus exp Run my favorite chain repeatedly. etc.
the unlock on these traits is either grind gold, or do them again, 65? traits 8 proffessions, thats a lot of monotony.

bandaids can only make it less annoying, it cant actually make it a good system. I dont think a dev should ever aim for a moderately annoying game system

I’m not ignoring a lot of the problems. I just don’t care enough to do the work when:

- It won’t be implemented. There is no way in Grenth’s Blue Hall anyone would let me get close enough to a game design process to actually have impact on what was made.

- Nobody is going to like it. Let’s face it, any idea I come up with is going to be trash because . . . frankly, I’m an idiot.

- Everyone is going to find faults with it. See above. Because I am an idiot, I likely am going to have at least a dozen problems with how things would have to be implemented.

- Even if the above three weren’t a problem, it’d probably break as soon as people got their hands on it.

daft inquisitor.1605:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Sort of like this. One of my big oppositions to mounts any time it comes up (and if anyone decides to start talking about mounts off this, I will find you) is how it could negatively affect performance. I think a couple hundred guild ships parked over Cursed Shore would be just the sort of negative impact on performance I’d be scared of.

From my personal suggestion (and others that have fallen in line), it wouldn’t be “hundreds of ships”. It would be one ship per map instance. Maybe expand it to be two or three. But definitely not free-open, anyone-can-go-there. That would DEFINITELY be a performance bottleneck. It would be heavily regulated by instances, specifically to prevent this type of issue.

But I don’t think a few statically docked (yes, they would not be player-controlled) airships per map would be absolutely fine without causing any extra stress.

I think it could be highly limiting on how many guilds could have ships, then . . . consider how many guilds there are, just on one server. More than enough to dock three ships at every zone in the game. Yes, even including ones nobody goes to, like Brisban Wildlands.

daft inquisitor.1605:

Devata.6589:

Why not. If I’m correct the PS ends with a events where you attack a dragon from a zeppelin (that is an air-ship) and if we would have PvP / WvW air-maps guilds might fight each other. It would require new type of open world events (in the air) but it would be possible.

For clarification, the dragon fight takes place in a dungeon, and it is a heavily scripted encounter. It would be a far cry from an air battle between two guild ships.

I can see the jokes now. “Press 2 to GvG”.

Though, I could see ship battles taking an interesting turn. Have a navigator piloting, turret operators, add in a repair minigame… It could be kind of like Puzzle Pirates where everyone contributes to the fight, and the success or failure of one person can mean the success or failure of the whole fight.

Puzzle Pirates is an interesting case. I don’t think it could translate well to this game, due to the underlying design.

Devata.6589:

. And in Caledon forest there are floating rocks so that might fit after-all. Also we did came across a group of people who did use airships. Story-wise you could easily say that the races from Tyria did look at that and decided they would also start building air-ships..

Interestingly, Caledon Forest / Magus Stones seems to be the only place in Tyria I’ve seen actual floating stones. It’s like Pandora, only without all the blue-skinned natives. Instead we get asura.

Somewhere, something went terribly wrong.

Devata.6589:

You have not followed the whole thread? One of the popular suggestions was guild-halls as air-ships. And those would then be placed in sky-maps high above Tyria.

Oh, I have. I think it’s a terrible idea. Okay, to be fair it’s not entirely terrible, but some of the implications are . . . questionable, in my mind.

You would see Tyria below you (representation of the map) and the information (model and location air-ship_ from a sky-map are being send to normal maps so on the ground so you would see guild-ships high high really high in the sky.

Sort of like this. One of my big oppositions to mounts any time it comes up (and if anyone decides to start talking about mounts off this, I will find you) is how it could negatively affect performance. I think a couple hundred guild ships parked over Cursed Shore would be just the sort of negative impact on performance I’d be scared of.

So the inside of your guild-hall would be instanced and the outside would not

But then what is ‘inside’. If I build it my self I would be able to not build any walls so basically do not have an inside.

And exhibit A on how the players will break any idea within four hours no matter how you intend it to be. (No, that’s not necessarily a shot at you – I think a ‘glade’ type guild hall might be interesting, but it would sorta kinda break the idea of a guild hall as . . . well . . . a hall.)

As for exhibit B . . . airships so far have been largely lighter-than-air craft when larger than a fishing boat in size, and have had a relatively sparse size even on the Glory of Tyria from the end of the game. I can’t imagine guild ships would be that much bigger . . .

And before someone brings up the Breachmaker, remember the interior was largely there as part of a mechanism to keep it running. And there’s no idea exactly how it was designed in the first place. With highly limited mobility, from the implications of its design and only two uses.

Q: what kind of thing would you be ok with static placement?
A: To prevent disastrous errors of building, doors and walls. Let rooms be a static size/structure or be fixed to always line up in a fashion which will work.

Q: What kind of things do you think work fine with grid placement?
A: Large furniture such as tables, or statues, equipment.

Q: What stuff would you want to have free placement?
A: NPCs, smaller furnishings/decorations such as chairs, pedestals, crates, et cetera.

Might as well:

From something relatively basic…

… to a larger structure

… or something with a little more effort

Or to heck with it, go the full nines

Vethaera.6319:

For those of you saying that Anet can’t roll back the changes to the trait system because it sets a bad precedent, I have two words:

New Coke.

I didn’t find it that objectionable when it happened. I also find it weird the more I think about the whole debacle because I understand they went from cane sugar to HFCS . . .

While Pepsi successfully markets the “Throwback” line which uses cane sugar, and one of the most popular drinks around here is “Mexican Coke”, which is . . . yes, Coca-Cola with cane sugar.

Weird.

Come on, ArenaNet, just roll back the change already.

I’d really rather they not, and either fix things broken, unbind some of those Masteries from events which never get done (Gates of Arah, Overgrown Grub…) or hire some interns to draw up a proposal for how to make it possible to keep this system’s basic structure while shaving away the objectionable parts.

Not that I have faith it will go over any better than what exists now, given what I read on the forums daily.

Lobo Dela Noche.5127:

So you are saying rolling back will mess things up further and that fixing all the broken trait unlocks will mess things up further. I don’t see how fixing the broken trait unlocks can mess things up more. If its already broken and its near impossible to unlock with out spending gold and skill points, how much worse can they make it? You have less faith in their abilities than I do at this point.

Well, what can I say, the forum changed my mind away from thinking they ever have good ideas at all.

I’m not sure how they can mess up going back to what it was before except that it would ruin parts of their NPE which is trash also and needs to get flushed as well.

Do not test if they can possibly mess this up even worse. It can, indeed, happen.

Devata.6589:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

(3/4) Fairly simple; you splice the two together. Let there be an exterior Hall Grounds, and an interior Hall Chambers. The Grounds can be public areas for people to visit in, but the interior is instanced and only available via permissions granted. There, now you have both open world and instanced world and can plan accordingly.

I did think of this before but then dismissed it again because if you would build your guild-hall that means you could have garden, your whole guild-hall could be a garden.
So people walking / flying by can look in your guild-hall.

. . . flying by? What? We have flight now?

But you have misunderstood my intent. Have you played Morrowind? For the sake of discussion let me paint the picture of what I mean. There is, in that game, places like fortresses which have an interior ‘cell/instance’ and an exterior which is on the world map. The exterior can be climbed, walked on, and at least one of them has a courtyard where guards mill about. The interior is where most of the merchants and such are.

So that’s more what I was envisioning; there’s a guild hall outside which can be visited with permissions (for instance: Guild > Guild Hall > Allow Access > Exterior > All) but the inside is only available to members (Guild > Guild Hall > Allow Access > Interior > Members). Or in some cases, only officers . . . why stop at letting the permissions be half-done?

But then it would be strange that you never see any people in it.

If it’s like my experiences in WvW, you never see people in it either, said people are usually busy training around capturing paper towers or trying to ninja the keeps.

Lobo Dela Noche.5127:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Lobo Dela Noche.5127:

I’m not sure why you make fun of and then agree with what I wrote. You have me confused.

Just because I agree with an idea does not exclude it from being a really bad idea.

what idea is that, rolling back a bad change or fixing the broken parts of it? Because that is literally all that I asked for.

. . . yes.

Seriously, there do exist ideas which sound simple/useful which . . . once they hit practice . . . fail miserably to do anything but mess things up further. The first warning sign is when I start agreeing with it.

Lobo Dela Noche.5127:

I’m not sure why you make fun of and then agree with what I wrote. You have me confused.

Just because I agree with an idea does not exclude it from being a really bad idea.

Because we all love Kormir and want the opportunity to deface, er, properly venerate her statue.

shadow.6174:

Oh yeah? I tell you that one of the things that got me hooked in this game was more the personal story than the events. If they weren’t meant to be the “main” quest line, what’s the purpose then? What would the game be without story?

Apparently, it would be much better.

Also, what’s the purpose? Surveys say it’s to introduce Trahearne so we can see him killed him off later.

Lobo Dela Noche.5127:

There is many trait unlocks that are still broken and there seems to be very little if any work on the devs part to fix them. Fixing 1 or 2 of the unlocks to be slightly better every 1-2 months is not enough and shows the lack of even trying on the devs part. All of the trait unlocks should have been corrected by now if they were really trying. We have all heard the devs since launch say over and over its coming with tons of things and they have not delivered. People are done waiting and tired of excuses.

Then “people” should storm the offices and demand a revolution. And film it all for Youtube.

The new trait system is broken in many ways. If its going to stay then they need to fix it now, not in 2 years. There has been tons of ways mentioned on how to fix it in this thread. Now its on the devs to actually spend the time and fix it or roll back. When they actually start doing something besides ruining the game with horrible thoughtless changes then people will maybe stop being so harsh on the handful of replies the red names give.

Given statements like this, I suppose you have a point. I guess rolling it all back to release would be the best move. All of it. Remove champion bags, remove ascended, remove Living Story, remove Tequatl/Wurm, and erase Kasmeer/Jory. Start over and try again. It’ll be fun.

Shall we stop and be honest here? I’ll drop the sarcasm for now. Trait Masteries were a mess and terrible from day one. Several didn’t work right, several more were pointless, and most of what was left was so situational it might as well not exist. Worst of all, they were just . . . kind of there. And the worst part was the privilege to pay a nice sum of gold to find out your Grandmaster traits were mostly junk. Which brings me to the next choice:

Delete the whole Trait system and start over.

XApocalypse.8739:

mondello.2940:

I think the whole idea that female characters have skimpier armour than guys is unfair tbh. I think there should be an option where no matter what gender your playing as you can choose between the female look and the more male look for every piece of armour that has a difference between male and females.
For example: the winged armour set on guys looks so boring and drab, but it looks amazing on girls. The same with the pheonix set.

No that is disgusting! No one wants to see hairy legs >.>

Then explain charr.

Illysharia.7286:

The “Communicating With You” thread was supposed to put an end to these problems. What happened to all the effort Chris Whiteside put in hashing it out with the community? I thought he was apologetic and sincere enough that there would be a genuine effort to, you know, communicate.

And very likely he is. But as awesome as Chris is, he’s not able to field every concern, and talk with authority about every part of the game. Neither can Gaile, whose job it is to try to talk with the community . . . whether or not the community wants to hear what she has to say.

So far, there’s also Jon Peters who shows up and discusses design bits here and there, but outside those three you don’t see much general communication. And Chris has the CDI project under his helming so he probably has that taking up a lot of his attention cycles.

Yet, every person who likes them trying even a little is accompanied by two more complaining about it. Some of them just seem to be trying to complain the players aren’t getting told what they want to hear, and aren’t grasping some of the reality here.

As it was stated twice, by red names, this system isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. What they’re looking for is another way of doing Traits & Masteries which is closer to working as we want it to.

At this point, though, I’m really wanting to advocate to them to just cave in on everything in the forums and wash their hands of decision-making. Let the players run the game and when the complaints start, remind them “gee, since you all thought we were doing a crappy job, we figured you should get the chance”.

Astralporing.1957:

Brutaly.6257:

I know Chris Whiteside has mentioned raids and raid content on numerous occasions.

Just remember, when last time thay said something about introducing raids, what we got was tequatl revamp.

And several months later, it’s not nearly as big a thing as it was back then. So long as you have someone able/willing to lead an instance who knows what to do . . . and players who can/will listen . . . it’s highly likely to win.

Also . . . have they said they’re introducing raids or is this just conjecture from seeing a want ad?

Coming back?

They never left.

Ashen.2907:

Here are the results of my own accounting:

26 drops total:

4 Light Armor
4 Medium Armor
4 Heavy Armor

11 Weapons that my ranger can use
3 Weapons that my ranger cannot use

Not that big of a deal in my test.

As I noted – rangers can use 10 out of 19 weapon types. That means there’s a broad selection which would drop if it’s weighted to give you weapons you’re supposed to be able to equip.

I know what happened to mine, every single one even the mule characters who were just there to hold things.

As for my main character . . . I think “heroic death” doesn’t describe it. There was nothing heroic about it.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Actually, I kind of like that they didn’t come to our aid. It’s completely in line with their culture. The Tengu are not the good guys.

They’re really good slow-roasted with some thyme and rosmary.

Damar.5982:

JonPeters.5630:

Torsailr.8456:

Hi Chris,
I have a bit of a tangential question.

How feasible would it be for Anet to develop an editor for players to develop their own guild hall layouts? Is it beyond the scope of things you want to consider?

What you expect to be able to edit?

Hi Jon,

It strikes me than something similar to the original X-COM games base design might work.

Could you allow guilds to design their halls based on a 4×4 grid for example adding combinations of 1×1, 1×2 and 2×2 elements to their guild halls? Each element could also have various options for walls (e.g. dark wood, brick, plastered, painted etc..) and floors (wooden, marble, rugs) etc which could be selectable from a drop down on each element.

These elements could be unlockable to allow larger guilds to have something to work towards. For example an Obsidian floor might cost more in materials, influence (and/or merits) than a less grand floor.

You could also allow another upgrade option for guilds to a 5×5 design or 6×6 design which would come at a cost. Perhaps there could be no upkeep cost for a 4×4 design, an influence only cost for 5×5 and an influence and merit cost for 6×6? Would this allow use to cater guild halls to the needs of guilds of many sizes?

Damar

Something like what I somewhat envisioned, but could be remarkably easy to fill up a 4×4 grid or even a 6×6.

Also, if we can steer away from the idea of needing upkeep . . . that’d be super.

JonPeters.5630:

Torsailr.8456:

Hi Chris,
I have a bit of a tangential question.

How feasible would it be for Anet to develop an editor for players to develop their own guild hall layouts? Is it beyond the scope of things you want to consider?

What you expect to be able to edit?

I would expect to be able to edit decorative elements, such as swapping out statues for other statues, or none at all. Or maybe this statue or suit of standing armor could be replaced with a potted plant?

Let’s be honest – I saw the furnishing systems in Ultima Online and Final Fantasy 14 as fun exercises. Especially UO, where you could find special furnishings in the world if you knew where to look . . . and thus get neat talking statues to stick into your house or in your castle. Then crafters could make furniture – in fact they were the primary source of such! NPC tradesmen were only a secondary source of reselling anything a player sold to them . . . but if you wanted a neat armoire or a heavy stone table, you had to find a player.

And FF14 kicked it up a notch so all furnishings are made through crafts and use their own set of materials you have to find at gathering nodes. As much as I admire it, it got tiring to find so many new places to gather and notice all of it was for furnishings I couldn’t yet make. But for those interested . . . it was spectacular to see a fully decorated hall.

Lastly, I suspect it would be nice to edit the general form of a guild hall, such as to lay out rooms and features by the will of the guild’s interior designers rather than by the developers. But that could be an incredible load to work with.

JonPeters.5630:

I wanted to dig into the instanced vs non-instanced debate a bit. Here are 4 questions I’ll pose:

• What do people see as the benefits of instanced?
• What do you see as the benefits of open world guild halls?
• How could we get the benefits of instanced guild halls in a system of open world guild halls?
• How could we get the benefits of open world guild halls in a system where guild halls are instanced?

Jon

(1) Instanced means you don’t need to have the guild halls loading in the open world, which might save you a load off the server communication. This is, naturally, entirely from a layman’s perspective but this could mean less lag for those loading many guild halls. Also, I played Ultima Online, where structures could be placed in any flat space with sufficient footprint. While you could find some neat places organized out, there was also . . . the “castle eyesore” problem, of someone rushing a castle to a place and taking up a large piece of real estate.

(2) Open World halls could mean a higher chance to show off your guild’s presence, aesthetics, and in general “look at us!”. It can also allow for Dynamic Events to focus around the guild hall which players can partake in, or could be started by the guild officers for public fun times.

(3/4) Fairly simple; you splice the two together. Let there be an exterior Hall Grounds, and an interior Hall Chambers. The Grounds can be public areas for people to visit in, but the interior is instanced and only available via permissions granted. There, now you have both open world and instanced world and can plan accordingly.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Cure, you realize you just said “Dark Soul’s popularity is also attributed partially to the popularity itself” right?

>.>

“The sun’s brightness is attributed partially to the brightness.”

It may be phrased oddly, but there is some basis there. It is possible for a game to become popular less on its own merits and more because it is popular, well-known, and it’s the “in thing”.

. . . look at Minecraft, for instance. Not, strictly, an incredibly awesome game. Yet it sold a blisteringly large amount, over multiple platforms. I’d bank on part of its popularity being because . . . well, it’s popular and people want to see what the fuss is over.

Okay, but if you get skimpy male armor we need to be able to have beer guts.

Paradox.1380:

Doesn’t take away the fact that what they are asking for is already there, maybe not in the exact way they want it, but it is there.

Well, so was the “skill hunting” in the Trait Mastery revamp . . . and then there was the Wallet, the Wardrobe . . .

Never quite how “they” want it but it’s there. About sums up GW2 in a nutshell, and shows what happens when you net a widely differing audience with your game.

Well, we all know engineers and rangers are screwed anyway.

Mesmers uber alles.