Guild Wars 2

Zelanard.5806:

Its not that we are afraid to get killed… its that we don’t want to spend time doing things we don’t like to do while playing a game to have fun…

Yeah but the same applies to WvW players and they are not complaining they need to run through 20 PvE maps. So man up and get the POIs or forget your legendary. The choice is yours.

This debate has been up for a hundred times or more. Not once, even ONCE has Anet ever suggested that they’re considering removing WvW from map completion. Asking them to do it for the 101st time isn’t going to change anything. If they will do it, they will. In the meantime, it’s 99% certain you’ll get the map completion faster by doing the WvW part yourself.

Nate.3927:

why not just add the sentry towers from eotm into wvw?

Or why not make sentries act like the sentry towers. Sure they would be killed quickly by a zerg, but you would still see if there were 2, 10 or 20 attackers.

Would also be a valid tactic to send 1-3 people ahead to kill off the sentry, and more tactics is always good for the game.

Dawdler.8521:

Nick.6972:

Why do I have to play PvE to get 100% map completion if I;’m exclusively WvW player?
Opinion on that OP?

Because map completion is supposed to show you have been everywhere and seen everything in the game. Yes, its a demand for legendary weapons. Why shouldnt full exploration of the game be?

Now answer this question: If you only play a part of the game, have you explored the entire game?

Its not like its hard to do in PvE. It take a couple of hours per map if you’re slow and not 80, less if you are fully geared and ignore everything. Only a few of the maps are really annoying to traverse (straits, uuuugh). In WvW, its the easiest thing ever… if youre the proper color is up or you get lucky with sieges. Meaning, its only a matter of time. Time you wont miss because the only thing you need world completion for will take you alot of time gather mats for if you do it from scratch. Like, 10,000x more time than it took you to finish up your WvW completion.

You didn’t get the point. WvW players are not complaining about having to run 20 PvE maps through to get their map completion. It’s only the PvE players whining having to run through 4 maps.

I suggest we leave PvE out of map completion so WvW only players don’t have to deal with that crap.

Nick.6972:

Low drop rates encourage people to use gem store.
The sales would go down if you could “easily” get better looking weapon/armor skins in game.

You make it sound like it’s a bad thing the company developing the game would earn some money.

Godmoney.2048:

You all still like the TP and real money AH now? Enjoy these pathetic drop rates? I remember when Diablo 3 was like this. You know before they removed the real money AH and raised the drop rates. Now Diablo 3 is a very popular. Huh, what a coincidence.

I’m sure everyone enjoys playing a game for years though and never seeing a single high value drop though right? I know I don’t but hey I must be the weird one.

What real money AH are you talking about? I wasn’t aware I could sell my stuff in GW2 to earn real money. Can you elaborate how do you do it?

Also, getting full exotic gear in GW2 is such a grind, right?

And yeah you’re the weird one expecting to have BiS gear within a month in an MMO.

Maugrim.6793:

Tom Gore.4035:

If it’s red it’s dead. Any other “rules” you bring to the table you better be prepared to enforce yourself.

Well that’s one of the main issues now: “Duelers” believe themselves as exceptions to this matter. Now again: I do not chase them down inside the Arena part of OS but I still ENTER way to many times to see people from ALL THREE separate server “fight” (Which apparently is dueling) right at the ENTRANCE – Then I get the hate for pointing my bow and shooting arrows at them. They should ad a set of rules or something for people to read and AGREE to before entering zones – Not just Obsidian Sanctum but yeah, anything …

As said, if they can enforce a rule, the rule is there. The game rules are same for everyone and if you can kill them, why do you care what they think the rules are?

Bring 10 of like-minded friends and crush their stupid dueling ring. Problem solved.

Players whining to you for interrupting their dueling? Block them. Problem solved.

Rebound.3409:

Here’s one that dramatically improved AION which at it’s peak had huge fights in their version of wvw (abyss)..like really huge…not only horizontally but vertical fights also that included pve elements in them…and the graphics are at the same level but different techniques.

They changed DirectX. After that change my FPS increased dramatically from around 40FPS in fights to 60-70fps….in big fights where everyone was spamming skills inside tight space-keeps while fighting both a huge boss and the enemy players.

Aion’s character models and armors are nowhere as detailed as GW2’s. It also uses a LoD system, dramatically dropping the details from character models not in your immediate vicinity. GW2 can do this too, you just need to select it from the menu.

haresean.3856:

Tom Gore.4035:

Drop your detailed model display count to low or lowest and you’ll see huge improvements in your FPS.

However that increases your framerate, I would never do that because I would hate to see everyone wear the same armour.

Well here we come to the problem. People expect to be able to run a hundred super-detailed, unique character models on the screen with silky smooth 60+ FPS. Again, show me ONE game that can do it today.

So far I’ve only gotten some non-comparable examples of single-player games. Those comparisons just don’t apply, so try again.

Rebound.3409:

Again is your only solution to just leave it like this Tom? Because i don’t see u giving any solutions good or bad. I just see u make up excuses by asking us about other games.

What is your solution? You’re just calling for these magical “optimizations” which you claim can be done because some single player games or 64 player multiplayer games with identical character meshes are running better than GW2.

Are you saying Anet’s client programmers are incompetent or just lazy?

Rebound.3409:

That’s not an excuse for the bad performance Tom. As great as it is, it shouldn’t be so demanding. It’s not at that level at which it should be that demanding specially on good gear.

As long as the game demands nonstop hi-end rigs which just a handful of ppl can afford, those “great graphics” u are talking about will never be achieved by most GW2 palyers as most of them have low or medium at best settings.

By your logic, even if the game performance is crap, because it looks pretty it should not be touched/improved. You might be OK with sub-par quality but me personally will never be.

Quality for me doesn’t mean just a “pretty looking car” but it’s performance is a coma-induced hamster on a broken square-wheel. The car has to have “good performance” also, in balance with the aspect of the car.

Sure optimizations can always be made, but if you read my post above you’ll understand no amount of optimizations can make up for the sheer work required by drawing and calculating dozens of unique characters, which again, are absolutely gorgeous and detailed – every one of them.

Optimization here would mean cutting down on the details (and that option actually already exists in the game options) for character models that are not in your immediate view or further away.

I’m sure they could also optimize the code somewhat, but as I said there is a limit of what can be done. Also, the average computer that is running GW2 is getting more and more powerful all the time, so the problem will also alleviate in the long term – unless of course Anet decides to make the game even more detailed and/or increase population caps of the maps.

zaw.6741:

Tom Gore.4035:

Gazareth.7230:

Yeah, the point is that GW2 doesn’t look good enough to warrant the kind of system it demands to run it smoothly. This means it is poorly optimised, which is something that needs to be fixed.

I can’t think any game that looks as gorgeous as GW2 does, with the same amount of players on the screen.

Can you?

enlighten me, how much more gpu must calculate for player than for npc? i play shadow of mordor that looks 10x better than gw2 (models complexity, huge textures, all the effects), having insane ammount of enemies at screen and..its stable high fps. i know, its mmo, it works differently…but still load on gpu is jsut too huge, when my i5 is just dying of boredom. and as they announced even bigger map, the performance may be terrible as well (dt/sw need more power than sc did. and sc is still much more demanding than vanilla maps)….

A lot more. Mostly because in a single player game the hordes of enemies are mostly identical to each other, whereas in an MMO every single player model has not only an unique mesh but also unique textures (demaning absurd amounts of VRAM to be able to keep from mem swapping). Modern GPUs are quite good at calculating identical or mostly identical objects in masses, like blades of grass, or hordes of identical enemies.

That’s why GW2 runs fine when there are no other players around, but starts to choke when there are more players on the screen. Drop your detailed model display count to low or lowest and you’ll see huge improvements in your FPS.

Again, show me an MMO with 100 players on the screen, looking as good or better as GW2 and running better.

By the way it has now been confirmed that guild halls will be located in the open world, or at least their entrances will be.

Doesn’t sound like it would be plausible to set them in the WvW maps, since you won’t be in the same location every week

Yeah they have not decided yet how they will rotate the maps, but I think it’s pretty safe bet that they won’t be adding more than 4 maps at a time. Population is stretched as it is, although I’m also willing to bet there will be no population problems when the xpac launches (if you don’t count long queues as such).

Yeah if you quit while downed you’re automatically defeated. When you log back in you’ll find yourself taking a dirt nap at the place you first entered WvW from.

McWolfy.5924:

Kai.9182:

coglin.1867:

Map population did change. I would gather you do not actually know what the player caps are on EB or the BLs?

The limits did change. on both damage and buffs. Both based on player feed back. It went front unlimited, to 20, then to 5.

Otherwise, thanks for pointing out the ones I missed.

I disagree with you on the season. I feel the increased map ques and enthusiasm for effort invested, that i see, disagrees with you as well.

I am not saying they have mad perfect changes to WvW. Though I do get tired of the dishonest hyperbole every one loves to fling around.

The player cap is 80 and always has been since release.

Boon share and damage abilities have been limited to 5 since release. Unless you are talking about beta numbers the only skills that are uncapped are CC abilities.

Enthusiasm is great, but it isn’t exactly content. I could hype people up to play the best game of Soccer in their life, but at the end of the day it’s still the same game of Soccer.

I believe all the little things they have fixed have been extremely important for day to day WvW play, but the lack of content has evidently seen the mass exodus of the modern day player.

They changed the cap.
Once it was an absolute limite and it was possible to be outmanned but still full. One side was 20 people the other 30 and the 3rd 190.
I still think the full borders from every sides dont mean equivalent numbers

I don’t think it has ever worked like that and I’ve played since the pre-release. Do you have some proof or are you just pulling that from thin air?

People see what they want to see and they’re really bad at counting. I’ve taken screenshots of some “zergs” because people have claimed absurd numbers. Turns out a zerg of 20 looks like a zerg of 50 to quite many players.

Can you think of a single reason why Anet would have higher cap for one faction than the others?

Gazareth.7230:

Yeah, the point is that GW2 doesn’t look good enough to warrant the kind of system it demands to run it smoothly. This means it is poorly optimised, which is something that needs to be fixed.

I can’t think any game that looks as gorgeous as GW2 does, with the same amount of players on the screen.

Can you?

Shadelang.3012:

Tom Gore.4035:

Shadelang.3012:

Tom Gore.4035:

Lishtenbird.2814:

Tom Gore.4035:

Of course if this was just PvE and WvW I couldn’t care less, but history has shown most of the sigils and runes find their way to sPvP sooner or later.

History has also shown that the entire huge PvE is balanced around a single PvP game mode, which rendered some of the so called “one man army” classes almost useless and frustrating to play (hint: mesmer, necro). Why should my class have been slaughtered in the first place if I, like hundreds of thousands of other players, couldn’t care less about PvP?

Because in PvE there is hardly anything to balance. The mobs don’t whine if you crush them with your OP build. There isn’t even a DPS meter so the jealous other players could see your OP damage and whine about it.

And last time I checked, pet builds are still quite viable for solo PvE. They have never been viable for dungeons or mass open world events, because you’ve got the other players there to handle the pet’s jobs. Necros and Mesmers still have plenty of viable PvE builds.

In any case, from the pet build nerfs it seems Anet agrees with me in that “zoo” builds are not the thing they want to buff.

Pet nerfs huh? Anet hates minion/control builds huh? “looks up SW changes…Looks up Turret changes” hmmm……Seems to me that anet doesnt agree with you. They want to keep these playstyles viable infact and make sure that they have there place in the game. They have also worked VERY hard to make sure that the builds don’t end up truly overpowered.

So there keeping the builds balanced. But making sure that the people that enjoy that playstyle can infact play it effectively. Isn’t that what we want with EVERY build? Now I just hope they fix necro minions pathing issues with HOT.

Where did I say they hate them? I said they are not buffing them and in fact have in the past nerfed them a lot (especially spirit ranger). Hate has nothing to do with it, making them balanced is what it’s about.

I’m also all for active pet gameplay (vs. passive where you just pop out your pets and hide), which I think is also the way Anet wants to take the pet classes to. What I don’t want is more tools that promote passive pet play (for example sigils/runes that give passive boosts to pets).

If thats what you meant then you should be against ALL runes and sigils that give passive benefits…Which happens to be nearly all of them. Nearly all of the runes and sigils do things that the player does not have 100% control over. At most you can shimmy the odds a bit. (pumping up your crit chance right before you engage to try and get both fire and air to proc for a heavy burst) but even then whether they happen or not is completely up to the system itself.

All the above would do is give an option for Pet focused builds that non pet builds already have.

The difference is, you don’t do anything with those passive buffs on your character unless you use your skills, even if it was just spamming autoattack (which also has it’s time and place). Again, popping out your pets and hiding behind a pillar is not what I consider as “playing a game”.

We will be able to run it up to 10v10 on custom arenas according to the interviews. Make sure you give feedback when running it and tell them what you feel is the optimal player count.

IMO I reserve judgement until I get to play the map first. It all depends how many objectives there are at any time and how large the map is. For example, in the current maps I hate 8v8 with a passion, because it’s just a big clusterf…ing gang bang in a too small space, with no emphasis on individual skill. However, the new map could work perfectly with 8v8 or even 10v10 provided there is enough space and reason for the group to split up.

Elegy.2159:

Tom Gore.4035:

He’s looking for a tattoo sleeve. Not a real tattoo.

A tattoo sleeve means a tattoo that surrounds the arm. I’ve never heard the term referring to anything but a real tattoo. Is this a thing? Is there some place where you can customize your own fabric sleeves to wear? Seriously?

Yes, seriously.

http://www.tattoofun.com/custom_sleeve_tattoos.html

But yeah not sure what the OP meant, but I figured he probably wasn’t going to tattoo his whole arm with GW2 art. Could be I’m wrong, of course

EDIT: Ninjaed by OP. Ahwell, it’s your arm

He’s looking for a tattoo sleeve. Not a real tattoo.

McWolfy.5924:

The problem with sieges: its boring. 10 men inside, 5 outside shooting each other and the others just sit.

If that’s how the numbers are in the siege, you’re trying to take the objective with far too little manpower. Defensive structures are meant to give an advantage over larger numbers. If the defenders have more siege and more defenders than the attackers, the siege should fail, or at least be significantly longer. Keep in mind that a sieged tower will eventually run out of supply if the siege lasts long enough, while the sieging army has infinite supplies to draw upon.

Paavotar.3971:

I do fear that the towers in choke points might become too strong. Can you go around them some other, a lot longer route? Because I don’t think we want to take effectiveness out of the roaming parties.

Also if there is an area that can be isolated from other areas by the tower I do hope there is no supply camps. Supply camps should be under constant danger, always. Otherwise the play around supplies and supply routes loses its meaning. A well defended fortification is really hard to take over if you can’t mess up their supply routes. Hills is a great example of this, it’s really really hard to take over if you can’t drain the keep out of supplies and it has a good defensive force inside and nearby.

Yes will be interesting to see. However, it could be the “chokepoint” is quite wide and blocked by a longer wall. If you don’t have time to take the tower, you could just quickly smash down the wall further down and push through. This can be done with 1-2 guild catapults and a small havoc group before the white swords even pop.

It’s also going to be interesting how big areas those walls separate. Are there hiding spots for havoc squads within the walled areas so they can escape lynch mobs given enough skill and will, and keep capping the objectives within even if they’re separated from the spawn by the now-repaired wall. This could also give incentive to the “lynch mobs” to actively hunt down said havoc squads because you know they won’t be back in just 2 minutes after you kill them.

It would give a whole new meaning for being “behind enemy lines”, because those lines would be real. At the moment it’s far too easy to “sneak” into the north camp of the borderlands, even if its right under the nose of the citadel. Havoc squads can be reckless because even if the worst happens and they wipe, they can be back in just a minute or two because there is nothing to stop their roaming.

Tl:dr, towers at chokepoints will not be the death of havoc squads. It’s just the death of bad havoc squads

Well he was talking about FPS which is not affected by SSD/HDD with him having 6 gigs of memory to go around. Sure, it does affect his loading screens – a lot. And he might get a stutter when there are new players coming to the scene, but it still won’t affect his FPS.

I do second though that replacing the HDD with an SSD would be an enormous QoL upgrade, with or without GW2 in the equation.

GT 740 is still a bottleneck if he’s got his graphics settings cranked up, because he’s sitting on a frigging i7 on the CPU side. Nvidia doesn’t even classify GT740 as a gaming GPU, much less the cut down mobile version.

Shadelang.3012:

Tom Gore.4035:

Lishtenbird.2814:

Tom Gore.4035:

Of course if this was just PvE and WvW I couldn’t care less, but history has shown most of the sigils and runes find their way to sPvP sooner or later.

History has also shown that the entire huge PvE is balanced around a single PvP game mode, which rendered some of the so called “one man army” classes almost useless and frustrating to play (hint: mesmer, necro). Why should my class have been slaughtered in the first place if I, like hundreds of thousands of other players, couldn’t care less about PvP?

Because in PvE there is hardly anything to balance. The mobs don’t whine if you crush them with your OP build. There isn’t even a DPS meter so the jealous other players could see your OP damage and whine about it.

And last time I checked, pet builds are still quite viable for solo PvE. They have never been viable for dungeons or mass open world events, because you’ve got the other players there to handle the pet’s jobs. Necros and Mesmers still have plenty of viable PvE builds.

In any case, from the pet build nerfs it seems Anet agrees with me in that “zoo” builds are not the thing they want to buff.

Pet nerfs huh? Anet hates minion/control builds huh? “looks up SW changes…Looks up Turret changes” hmmm……Seems to me that anet doesnt agree with you. They want to keep these playstyles viable infact and make sure that they have there place in the game. They have also worked VERY hard to make sure that the builds don’t end up truly overpowered.

So there keeping the builds balanced. But making sure that the people that enjoy that playstyle can infact play it effectively. Isn’t that what we want with EVERY build? Now I just hope they fix necro minions pathing issues with HOT.

Where did I say they hate them? I said they are not buffing them and in fact have in the past nerfed them a lot (especially spirit ranger). Hate has nothing to do with it, making them balanced is what it’s about.

I’m also all for active pet gameplay (vs. passive where you just pop out your pets and hide), which I think is also the way Anet wants to take the pet classes to. What I don’t want is more tools that promote passive pet play (for example sigils/runes that give passive boosts to pets).

Obi Five Kenobah.8537:

lordkrall.7241:

Keep in mind that even if people do translate it for free, ArenaNet would still need to hire people to make sure the translation is correct.
There is also the issue with the swift release schedule and the fact that it would spoil things quite a bit if the community had access to things before they were added to the game and so on.

We had an internal control system, each controlled translator translations of others and some non-controlled translators only.

To limit the leak of information about updates would be enough to limit a few people (excluding HoT, updates can be managed even by a single person)

Personally I did not know what was said by Tom Gore regarding international IP laws (and thank him for telling us); I still believe that it is possible to find a solution, if it is sought.

You could sell your translation to Anet, but even then the price would have to be of fair market value, or you could sue Anet later for it.

Vayne.8563:

Test.8734:

Chewablesleeptablet.3185:

SO basically what anet wants to do is do free living story all the way up to the climax and then put the end behind a pay wall.

Brilliant.

That’s not really what happened, I think.

The Living Story pretty much failed. ArenaNet focused a lot on the China release but it was worse than expected. The number of players has been falling, they have made changes to their business model (selling Living World chapters) yet profit has not risen; in other words, the future doesn’t look bright for ArenaNet.

They probably decided to make an expansion simply because they have no idea what to do now. This is nearing a desperate move. And it remains to be seen how well planned and how well implemented the promised features for the expansion will be.

Hans Christian Anderson would have rejected this for a fairytale. I’m sure that the expansion was being worked on before Season 2 even launched.

I don’t know how you can think otherwise, since in six weeks they’re going to be doing a live demo of it.

I think he’s implying that the HoT content was originally planned to be released free through Living World updates, and then only subsequently decided to be bunched up and sold as an expansion.

It could be. We don’t really know.

The only change that happened with megaservers was that you are now seeing more players around than before.

You have a nice amount of RAM and a powerful CPU, but your GPU is the bottleneck. I would recommend you tweak with the in-game settings to improve your framerate if you are not willing to purchase a new computer.

Some of the most GPU intensive settings are Antialiasing, Shadows, Reflections and High Res Character Textures (this is mainly capped by your GPU’s VRAM which I suspect is either 1GB or 2GB and could be slow DDR3 type). Try tuning these down first.

Behellagh.1468:

Tom Gore.4035:

Test.8734:

Chewablesleeptablet.3185:

SO basically what anet wants to do is do free living story all the way up to the climax and then put the end behind a pay wall.

Brilliant.

That’s not really what happened, I think.

The Living Story pretty much failed. ArenaNet focused a lot on the China release but it was worse than expected. The number of players has been falling, they have made changes to their business model (selling Living World chapters) yet profit has not risen; in other words, the future doesn’t look bright for ArenaNet.

They probably decided to make an expansion simply because they have no idea what to do now. This is nearing a desperate move. And it remains to be seen how well planned and how well implemented the promised features for the expansion will be.

I’m sorry but the facts presented in the NCsoft earning reports trump your opinions. GW2 is making more money than ever. Yeah, the devs must be really desperate.

Now it remains to be seen of course how well the expansion sells, but from what I’ve seen it seems like a solid package.

Actually he has a point. The Royalties line, which GW2 China would be reported in (as well as any of their games being run by 3rd parties) was down for 3Q from 2Q by roughly $15 million. No idea which games, all games, 3rd party from China, 3rd party from Europe (for AION and Lineage 2), we just don’t know but it’s down a lot, like 40%. Then you have GW2 sales and cash shop from NA/EU. That was down 8% from the previous quarter, roughly $1.7 million.

So it’s impossible to say how well China GW2 is doing, just that 3rd party revenue is sharply down and GW2 in NA/EU income has weakened slightly. Still the last 4 quarters, GW2 had NA/EU income around $95 million.

Good points. Too bad NCsoft does not break down their profits per game, so we can only see that sales for GW2 have dropped a bit from Q2 to Q3, but we have no idea what their cost structure for that period was.

I withdraw my claim that GW2 is making more money than ever. I however don’t think the release of the expansion is desperation as some put it. It was an expected move, and it was widely requested by the players. Apparently many of them would rather get larger chunks of content at a sparse pacing rather than small bits every few weeks.

Also, we don’t know how LS will work after the expansion. I would assume they keep on doing it like they did with S2. Heck, it could even be that we won’t take Mordy down in the expansion, but only in S3 which would start shortly after the expansion launch. Many other MMOs don’t let you to kill the expansion big baddie right from the launch, but instead only after a couple of subsequent content patches. This is to give the developer team more time to polish the content, but also to help gate the content so that the 1% of “pros” don’t finish off the big boss in 24 hours and spoil the rest of the players, sometimes weeks before they can get to the final battle themselves.

Anet is a business, they don’t offer services for just feeling better for themselves. The cost of the translation work must be less than the income they get from the new players. If they decide not to translate the game to another languages, it’s not because they’re being mean or inconsiderate. It’s because by their calculations it would not make sense business-wise. If on the other hand they calculate they will earn money by doing the translation, you can be sure they would do it.

Adding volunteer work to the equation does not work. The international IP laws unfortunately do not make it possible for individuals to completely relinquish their rights to their Intellectual Property even with a written contract, and Anet sure as hell is not going to put anything in their game that some player could then years later claim theirs and ask compensation/removal of it.

Social interaction via online means is great, but it should still not be the only form of social interaction – unless of course you would be greatly limited in the other forms for one reason or another.

Thankfully, our kids still go to school where they will have to learn “real” social interaction, with consequences for acting like a kitten. Some of them carry those rules to online interaction, others… well let’s just say with no consequences some people will happily ignore all social rules altogether.

Lishtenbird.2814:

Tom Gore.4035:

Because in PvE there is hardly anything to balance.

Sure, when 3 classes can efficiently replace the other 5, everything is fine with balance.

That’s not fixable by trying to balance the classes. No matter how long you would fine-tune them, the elitists would still find the “optimal” group and start shunning the others. For these guys, 1% difference is a game-breaker and you can never reach a balance good enough for them.

You can still run any dungeon with any group composition and finish it without breaking a sweat. Maybe 1 minute slower than with an optimal group, but do you think that’s worth spending hundreds of hours balancing the classes again? Knowing that for those guys it doesn’t matter if the difference is one minute or ten seconds, they would still declare from their ivory towers that only classes X with spec Y are worthy of dungeon running?

BrunoBRS.5178:

tigirius.9014:

Because that’s what we need is more achievements to lock the new precursors behind yet another wall. Sorry, don’t need one we already have the requirement for Map Completion that forces PVE players to do WvW.

if you think it’ll be easier to do the precursor crafting than buying one, you have another thing coming…

Well the thing is, the TP cost of the precursors from drops or the forge is directly influenced of how much work these collections will be. It will obviously reach some sort of a balance. If the precursos prices would keep rising all the time (which they would if people would be buying them instead of doing the collections), at some point doing the collections would become the lesser chore.

Conversely, if the collections are easy to do, the prices of the precursors on the TP will fall lower and lower (and along with it, the prices of lvl 80 rares and exos) until they again reach a balance where it’s about the same work to do the collection or get the money.

All I can say I’m absolutely stunned by people’s stinginess when it comes to a hobby that they love. We’re probably talking 40 bucks or less.

Seriously? If that’s too much for you, don’t buy it. Whining here won’t change a thing. If you want to vote nay, you’ll have to do it with your wallet.

We don’t know. There has been no talk of additional localization. Keep in mind there’s text to fill several thick books in GW2 and translating all that would take enormous amounts of both time and money. Italian for example is not very widely spoken worldwide, so it could be that they would never recover the costs. Russian might be viable, but I have no idea how popular GW2 in in Russia and to my knowledge Russians are pretty accustomed of playing their games in English.

Germans, French and Spanish people are accustomed to getting everything translated into their own language. They dub almost all American TV-shows too.

Personally I don’t care either way, although it irritates me somewhat when people start talking in their native language in sPvP matches, for example. I think it’s rude towards the other players.

Zebulous.2934:

huh, years ago, when I bought the game it was sixty dollars for the disk, it is only ten dollars to download the game now? Well if they aren’t charging sixty anymore I guess they have to make up the difference some how. At least they are still avoiding charging a monthly subscription fee.

Well a sub wouldn’t work anymore. I can’t think of any MMOs that started as F2P or B2P and then moved to a sub.

That said, I don’t play sub games anymore anyway. I just don’t feel like I should be paying just for the “priviledge” of accessing their servers. I’d rather spend my money on what I want, when I want.

Test.8734:

Chewablesleeptablet.3185:

SO basically what anet wants to do is do free living story all the way up to the climax and then put the end behind a pay wall.

Brilliant.

That’s not really what happened, I think.

The Living Story pretty much failed. ArenaNet focused a lot on the China release but it was worse than expected. The number of players has been falling, they have made changes to their business model (selling Living World chapters) yet profit has not risen; in other words, the future doesn’t look bright for ArenaNet.

They probably decided to make an expansion simply because they have no idea what to do now. This is nearing a desperate move. And it remains to be seen how well planned and how well implemented the promised features for the expansion will be.

I’m sorry but the facts presented in the NCsoft earning reports trump your opinions. GW2 is making more money than ever. Yeah, the devs must be really desperate.

Now it remains to be seen of course how well the expansion sells, but from what I’ve seen it seems like a solid package.

Tonic wardrobe should definitely be implemented. Here’s hoping

Lishtenbird.2814:

Tom Gore.4035:

Of course if this was just PvE and WvW I couldn’t care less, but history has shown most of the sigils and runes find their way to sPvP sooner or later.

History has also shown that the entire huge PvE is balanced around a single PvP game mode, which rendered some of the so called “one man army” classes almost useless and frustrating to play (hint: mesmer, necro). Why should my class have been slaughtered in the first place if I, like hundreds of thousands of other players, couldn’t care less about PvP?

Because in PvE there is hardly anything to balance. The mobs don’t whine if you crush them with your OP build. There isn’t even a DPS meter so the jealous other players could see your OP damage and whine about it.

And last time I checked, pet builds are still quite viable for solo PvE. They have never been viable for dungeons or mass open world events, because you’ve got the other players there to handle the pet’s jobs. Necros and Mesmers still have plenty of viable PvE builds.

In any case, from the pet build nerfs it seems Anet agrees with me in that “zoo” builds are not the thing they want to buff.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Tom Gore.4035:

Let’s be honest. If I were disabled and could not work, I would be playing MMOs all day long, too.

I’m afraid I would not.

I have about six other things I would rather be doing, one of which could possibly earn me money again if I really bore down and practiced polishing my writing. The thing I’d be doing most would probably be going back to designing my tabletop RPG setting . . .

. . . either that or trying to make the Ars Magica rules make sense to people I play with

Yeah well depending on the type of disability, I’d probably also revive my miniature gaming and tabletop RPG hobby, too.

My MMO playing would probably also change in form a lot. I would probably run a guild or get a lot more involved in the RPG/WvW scene.

No. Anything that further promotes NPC gameplay should NOT be implemented. We have enough stupid “one man armies” in PvP already.

Of course if this was just PvE and WvW I couldn’t care less, but history has shown most of the sigils and runes find their way to sPvP sooner or later.

Let’s be honest. If I were disabled and could not work, I would be playing MMOs all day long, too.

As stated above, you can remove EotM from your lists. Ascended mats no longer drop from the objective chests. Bloodstone still drops from champ bags, obviously.

SW chest farm by far the best way at the moment. As an added bonus you get loads and loads of bloodstone and dragonite, too, so all your ascended mats in one package.

I could add that SW chest farm is at the moment so ridiculously lucrative, that it will get nerf batted anytime soon, mark my words.

Again, don’t be surprised if the time/commitment for finishing a precursor collection might equal or be even greater than getting the gold to currently purchase one off the TP.

But in any case I would still find finishing such collection much more rewarding and interesting than just saving up loads of gold (which is boring as hell – gold is meant to be spent, not hoarded).

Shake it off is a WARRIOR skill you heretic!

Paavotar.3971:

The borderlands we have atm feel like PvD because nobody thinks anything else about the enemy borders than that they are Raiding maps. You go there with people and pillage, raid and break everything you can, then you warp back home/eb if some of your places get targeted.

If people would consentrate more on defending their side keeps it would be that much more. How many times have you seen someone upgrade Hills or Bay on enemy border? Few times, but those few times the objectives become a nuisance for the Home team.

If people would defend and upgrade those spawn keeps and towers it would make the BL a bit more interesting in the same way as EB is. But most people think that homeborder should be totally controlled by the home team, if not every single objective is bonus towards the enemy holding it.

That about sums it up. I can’t wait to see the new maps with towers in actual chokepoints and defensible locations. No more ninjaing keeps because you have to go through the tower first.

They still haven’t decided how many instances of the new map we get into the rotation (1 or 3). Personally, they should, at least in the beginning, replace all old BL maps with the new one and then maybe rotate them around later. Otherwise we will have the new map with 24/7 queue and the old BLs as empty as ever.

style.6173:

Wait, they still think people enjoy siege v siege? I’m scared.

I do. Some of the most exciting battles ever. Open world battles are usually over so quickly it’s barely a battle at all.

Microsoft Xp.9438:

anyone know what the team sizes will be like for stronghold? 5v5 8v8 15v5?

It’s not decided yet. They’ve been testing it with 5v5 at the moment, but we’ll be able to beta test it in about 6-7 weeks from now. They’ll make the final decision based on the feedback.

You’ll be able to run it up to 10v10 on custom arenas.

shadowpass.4236:

And yeah, go ahead and record yourself. You’ll probably just get footage of you dying to the easiest things to avoid.

No one would ever publish that footage so we wouldn’t know.

Zarenda Mal.1364:

If they really want to resolve the problems in WvW, they will need to address the issues of population and coverage. Having said that, they could still do a number of things to improve the overall game play:

1. Add a system that rewards for events that works more like the current Silverwastes. In detail, they should reward with champ bags, etc.

2. To make it more interesting, they should also reward toward the PPT values whenever an objective is taken, but it should be on a sliding scale. For example, if you flip a T1 objective, you should get X points, a T2 should give 2X and a T3 should give 3X.

3. The points awarded should also take into account how long it takes to flip something. The faster it flips, the less you get (penalize the blob trains). So to the value in 2, apply a modifier based on the speed something flips.

4. Grant bonuses for being sneaky. If you managed to sneak a mesmer into an objective, so that you don’t have to fight anything but the lord, give a bonus for not killing the external guards before killing the internal ones (needs some refinement with timers, etc.). This will help offset the modifier from 3 for a quick flip.

The items mentioned in points 2, 3, and 4 above should not just grant PPT points, but should also affect the chest rewards mentioned in 1 in a similar way. Apply the same to EotM and you can still rescue that map to some degree.

The biggest difference between the EotM map and the new BL map is that defending the new one matters. It is worth remembering that the EotM map was intended to give a WvW-like experience when you can’t get into WvW because of queues. It can’t also be used for PPT because server size imbalances would be magnified there.

The last thing we need is more PvE rewards on a WvW map. That’s what made EotM the sorry mess it is today in the first place.